Hey, it’s Matt
Ever wonder if you have what it takes to become an entrepreneur?
Do you want to know what skills you need to develop to become the best in your industry?
Taking the time to discover and develop your strengths is a crucial decision point in every entrepreneurs journey.
I’ve listened to hundreds of podcast interviews with some of the most successful entrepreneurs and some of the similarities they share in common include:
- Ruthlessness when it comes to [opportunity management] and time management;
- Optimizing their lifestyle and completing the most challenging work at a time of the day that suits them best; and
- A resilience and drive for success.
The differences between them are the skills they use and the core strengths they cultivate to achieve success.
However, they’ve all identified and improved their strengths over time, to compensate for what they lacked in other skills, talents and character traits.
The Importance of Discovering your Strengths and Leveraging Them
The deciding factors determining how successful you will be as an entrepreneur comes down to:
- Quickly and effectively identifying your strengths
- Building them into a valuable asset for your business; and
- Focusing relentlessly on only doing activities and getting into business ideas where you use your strengths.
In 2014, Gallup studied more than 1,000 entrepreneurs and uncovered two interesting findings:
- There are 10 qualities of highly successful entrepreneurs; and
- Success is most often achieved by focusing and ultilizing your core strengths and talents.
Sometimes its inevitable that you’ll need to do things that you’re not good at. By limiting your exposure to these things you can focus on using your strengths to drive business growth.
7 Steps to Discover your Strengths as an Entrepreneur
What are you good at?
I’ve created a Skill Assessment Guide to help you make a clear distinction between your soft and hard skills, which you can combine to make up your entrepreneurial strengths.
Soft skills are the personal attributes that enable you to interact effectively with other people. Hard skills are specific and teachable abilities that can be defined and measured.
Here is an overview of the 7 steps:
- Determine your soft skills: Identify which soft skills are your strongest asset, understand how you interact with others and what traits you should look for in a business partner.
- What comes naturally to you: Review your work & life experiences. Identify what has come naturally to you and the soft skills you used the most.
- Run through a real life example: Create a hypothetical example and identify what role you would take when working in a team.
- What are your strongest soft skills: Review the first three steps and find the recurring soft skills that come up. These are the ones that represent you most.
- Determine your hard skills: Hard skills can be learned over time. Understanding and using your hard skills will help maximise your success as an entrepreneur.
- What do you love to do?: Identify what you would spend your time doing if you didn’t have to work every day, and your level of experience at that those things.
- What are you strongest hard skills?: Review your hard skills and see whether you are engaging them with the things you love to do. This will help you narrow down your core strengths as an entrepreneur.
The Power of Knowing your Strengths as an Entrepreneur
Now that you’ve identified your core hard and soft skills, what will you do with this knowledge?
If you have a day job, are you happy to stay content with what you’re doing instead of starting a side hustle based on your strengths and interests?
You might need to pick up some more skills but starting a side hustle where you’re using your strengths and interests provides you with motivation to push forward.
On the other hand, if you’re an early stage or established entrepreneur, you might have discovered some strengths that you want to develop.
Working with a coach or mentor who can give you advice, share their own experience and be your support system through the entrepreneurial journey can help drive your business success.
Either way, I’m here to help. Hit reply and I’ll be happy to chat through next steps.
Additional Resources
- Check out Entrepreneur Revolution by Daniel Priestley. Once you’ve identified your strengths, this book provides you with a framework for building a business around them and developing and entrepreneurial mindset.
- Optimizing Efficiency and Work Life Balance with Jason Fried. Great podcast episode covering all aspects work life balance of what it means to work hard.
- Why you should have a folder on your computer called “Possible Futures”.
- Using a razor to simplify decision making.
See you next week
“When people tell you that you have a skill, take note. Label the skill, and seek out opportunities to use it. These golden seed moments are important; they are the first hint of what might be your calling.”
- From High Performance : Lessons from the Best on Becoming your Best by Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes. Resurfaced using Readwise.
Matt