Quite a lot of young people take business as their major at the university in the hope that they will become successful businessmen and women. The truth is there are other ways to study business. Some who may be struggling with money and cannot really afford formal education may choose to directly work and learn some business lessons from their superordinates. Some others who may be lucky enough to have their own business venture at a young age can get unforgettable business lessons from their own hands-on experiences. While lessons from each learning option is as invaluable, the easiest alternative is to get business lessons from the world’s top business moguls.
Here are the main five business lessons that have been commonly shared by today’s successful CEO’s and business owners. You can learn from them who started at the bottom and worked their way to the very top.
The first lesson is that you need both skills and passion to create business success. This comes up from the personal experiences of two acclaimed business founders, Arianna Huffington and Mark Cuban. While Arianna finds passion and skills have helped her believe in the quality of her products and perseverance when unsupportive responses poured down, Mark Cuban believes that passion is the thing that pushes us to sharpen the skills needed to excel and be the best in the business field. Quite similarly, the CEO of Crossfit, Greg Glassman confirms that money comes when there is excellence in your business products.
The second lesson is to prepare positive mindset and attitude. Among those who have faced hard times and rejections when establishing their businesses are Danae Riglemann, founder of Indiegogo, and Sophia Amoruso, the owner of Nasty Gal. The two of them share the same idea that we need to be persistent and not to feel down when people turn us down because there will eventually be an opportunity if we keep trying and stay positive. Danae herself had at least been turned down by 90 funding agents before she finally found one that was willing to help her with the funding. After all, even J. K. Rowling and her mega best selling Harry Potter’s world had to face twelve rejections from various book publishers in England before someone actually thought that the story was good enough for publication.The idea that 80% success comes from psychology and 20% from mechanics has also been reaffirmed by businessman Tony Robbins.
The third and most decisive lesson is to start today! No excuses, like ‘I need more time to perfect the product/service’ or ‘I have not got enough experiences, knowledge and funding’, should matter anymore. According to Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, at the starting point, your business should simply be a humble version of your big business plan. He even says that you can start by having merely 1% out of the grand design. Should you be waiting for the (almost) perfect picture of your dream business, you need to wake up and realize that what you are expecting should be at the finish line, not at the starting line. CEO Ankur Nagpal nods along with the idea. He advises those aspiring to be entrepreneurs to simply launch their imperfect products or services, get people to experience using them and listen to their responses because only in that way, the products and services can be made better.
The fourth lesson is to set measurable and sensible short term goals. Once you get started, it seems easy to lull yourself into thinking about how your business is gonna be in five or ten years’ time. While it is not wrong to dream about long distant future, it is actually better to set focused step-by-step goal. Tony Stabblebine , CEO of Coach.me, shares this view and gives this one example: when your business is newly established and currently has no clients, then the goal should be to get one customer. Another entrepreneur that has quite similar idea is Navid Moazzez. He suggests that new entrepreneurs focus on one project at a time instead of juggling several at once. As he further explains, when you try to do several things at the same time, you tend to be mediocre at all those things. On the contrary, to succeed you need to stand out and be the best.
Fifth, always try to build good rapport with customers, employees, other fellow entrepreneurs and even business competitors. By not limiting yourself to certain groups, the possibilities to be able to see from different perspectives, learn more about business secrets and get help from the right person are getting higher. Just like what Silas Moser, co-founder of blog Chasing Foxes, has said, you can never guess what you can learn from someone so treat other people nicely and be genuinely humble.
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The best way to succeed online is to grasp every kind of knowledge one can get from the Internet. These tips are given by the most successful CEOs so they are best tips anybody can wish to have.