Robert Reffkin’s 8 Principles of Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is the practice of creating, developing, and running a new business. Launching a business venture often involves great financial risk, so entrepreneurship necessarily involves weighing the risk of losing money with the potential rewards that can be gained by a successful business model.

By strict definition, an entrepreneur is anyone who creates and runs their own business. Yet the modern understanding of entrepreneurs encompasses a broader scope of ambition and responsibility. Entrepreneurs are often perceived as risk-taking innovators whose pursuit of opportunity can fundamentally change the world by introducing new products or ideas.

If entrepreneurship is the practice of creating, developing, and running your own business, then an entrepreneurial mindset is the mode of thinking that helps you achieve those goals. Successful entrepreneurs embrace challenges, mistakes, and failure as opportunities to develop new skill sets to help them succeed in the future.

When it comes to running a successful business, the right mindset can be just as important as hitting sales objectives or producing sustainable business models. It’s okay if you don’t feel up to the task. Having doubts makes you human. Knowing how to nip them in the bud can make you a great entrepreneur.

Robert Reffkin offers some wisdom for the self-starters who want to make a difference

1. 1. Dream big. The only limit to your potential is ambition; don’t build a low ceiling for yourself. Dreams give your life and work meaning and generate the energy and creativity to actually achieve them.
2. 2. Move fast. Time, as the old adage goes, is of the essence. Entrepreneurs can’t afford to operate lethargically. Deals fall apart, opportunities slip away. Above all else, though, you need to be a fast learner. It’s about growing as you go.
3. 3. Learn from reality. Study what’s worked before, observe what’s working now, and get a beat on the future by listening to customers. Ask what they want, then test new ideas to get honest feedback. Innovate selectively without making every aspect of your entrepreneurial endeavor an unnecessary struggle.
4. 4. Be solutions-driven. Treat every challenge as an opportunity. Be thoughtful and clear-eyed, but use your imagination to envision how something will succeed rather than reflexively finding reasons why something won’t work. Surround yourself with people whose instinct is to look for solutions.
5. 5. Collaborate without ego. No one succeeds alone. High-functioning teams deliver the best results, which means you need to be a quality collaborator, not a ruthless tyrant. Regardless of your accomplishments, be humble, reliable, responsive, and curious. Recognize others. Seek blunt feedback and listen attentively when you get it.
6. 6. Obsess about opportunity. It’s hard to earn a customer’s trust and easy to lose it. It takes continuous effort to understand people and satisfy them. Anytime you see something that might matter to your customer, it should be incredibly important to you. Caring is a competitive advantage. If you’re not preoccupied with the possibilities, you’re not doing your job.
7. 7. Maximize your strengths. You aren’t great at everything. Focus on what you do well and become even better at it. Hedge your shortcomings by surrounding yourself with people whose strengths complement your own (and actually delegate to them). When everyone is set up to succeed, they’re less likely to feel discouraged. The entire team will accomplish more.
8. 8. Bounce back with passion. Character is revealed in tough times. Resilience and grit aren’t changeable qualities. If one dream falls apart, the solution is to come up with another, then use everything you’ve learned from defeat and failure to make it come true.

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