By Rosemary Egbo
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1. Develop a solid plan
“He who fails to plan plans to fail.” These wise words by Emily Giffin highlight the fact that planning is a precursor to success. Before launching a business, you have to do your due diligence by laying down your plans.
A plan can either be immediate, short-term or long-term. Either way, it has to be properly spelled out. The plan should be simple, yet comprehensive enough to capture the essence of your vision. It must also be strategic; taking a step at a time is the keyword.
You need to consider the resources at your disposal and align your plans accordingly. The beauty of having a plan is that even if you fail, you can easily identify what went wrong by going back to the plan. But if there’s no plan in the first place, there’s nothing to learn from the failure and you risk making the same mistakes over and over again.
2. Hone your skills
To survive as an entrepreneur, a great amount of effort has to go into a skill set development. Your skillset is your arsenal and it’s what makes you go far as an entrepreneur.
Apart from acquiring new skills, it’s also great to update the existing ones so you can contend with the ever-increasing challenges of the business you’re running.
Robert Kiyosaki recommends in his book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, that every entrepreneur should learn the art of sales. Let’s face it, a business is as good as dead if it’s not pulling in a reasonable amount of sales. Therefore, getting attuned to different sales strategies is a good place to start.
3. Invest in education
As an aspiring entrepreneur, education is crucial to your success. This should not be confused with getting more academic degrees. Education here should be viewed from the holistic view of being aware of new business trends and gathering useful information that would help your business long-term.
A lot of time and money investment should go into educating yourself before starting a business and while business is running. But of more importance is taking knowledge from the right sources so you don’t end up being confused than you were initially.
It could be a premium course from thought leaders in your industry, useful books on personal development, free information from a reputable YouTube channel or a podcast. Just make sure you choose whom you learn from wisely.
4. Challenge Yourself
There’s no doubt that challenging yourself helps you to achieve your goals quickly. By taking up new challenges, you get to unlock your hidden potentials and increase your problem-solving capacity. Ultimately, self-challenge helps you become the best version of yourself since you’d now be more comfortable doing the things that you could only dream of in the past.
In setting those challenges, you must be wary of complacency since it’s capable of taking you farther away from achieving your goals and delaying your success. That’s why accountability comes to play. Being accountable to yourself helps you to keep track of your progress and ensures that you don’t lose sight of your objectives.
Therefore, once you’ve achieved your initial goals, it’s time to set new ones. But in doing that, you should remember that you’re not in competition with anyone but yourself and there’s a limit to how hard you can stretch yourself.
5. Add value to people
As you focus on improving yourself through education and skills acquisition, it’s important that you also add value to other people. Why? Because we achieve monumental growth by adding value to others and the more the value you’re able to give out, the better it is for your business.
The amazing thing about adding value to people is that you’re always the first person to feel the impact of the value. As you impart knowledge to others, you also get to learn new things and everyone becomes better for it.
Picture yourself giving a speech to a group of professionals and industry experts. You’d want to get your facts ready before mounting the podium, right? You’d spend lots of hours making sure that your presentation is accurate and highly impactful. The fact is that doing this requires adequate research and if you keep at it, it’d get to a point where you’d be seen as an authority.
Now that you’ve learned 5 of the best personal development tips, you must begin to constantly seek new opportunities to improve yourself. Goes without saying that learning these strategies by heart alone won’t make you successful, backing it up with actions is what does the magic.
Source: The Good Men Project
