Top Ten Lessons for an Entrepreneur

Naveen Jain

Founder and CEO,
Intelius

* Trust your ‘gut instinct’ more than any spreadsheet. There are too many variables in the real world that you simply can’t put into a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets spit out results from your inexact assumptions and give you a false sense of security. In most cases, your heart and gut are still your best guide. The human brain works as a binary computer and can only analyze the exact information-based zeros and ones (or black and white). Our heart is more like a chemical computer that uses fuzzy logic to analyze information that can’t be easily defined in zeros and ones. We’ve all had experiences in business where our heart told us something was wrong while our brain was still trying to use logic to figure it all out. Sometimes a faint voice of instinct resonates far more strongly than overpowering logic.

* Every entrepreneur has to be agile in order to perform, so ‘be flexible but persistent’. You have to continually learn and adapt as new information becomes available. At the same time you have to remain persistent to the cause and mission of your enterprise. That’s where that faint voice becomes so important, especially when it is giving you early warning signals that things are going off-track. Successful entrepreneurs find the balance between listening to that voice and staying persistent in driving for success ? because sometimes success is waiting right across from the transitional bump that’s disguised as failure.

* It’s a simple fact that no individual can be good at everything, so ‘rely on your team’. Everyone needs people around them who have complimentary sets of skills. Entrepreneurs are an optimistic bunch of people and it’s very hard for them to believe that they are not good at certain things. It takes a lot of soul-searching to find your own core skills and strengths. After that, find the smartest people you can, who compliment your strengths. It’s easy to get attracted to people who are like you; the trick is to find people who are not like you but who are good at what they do and what you can’t do.

* Unless you are the smartest person on earth (and who is) it’s likely that many others have thought about doing the same thing you’re trying to do. Success doesn’t necessarily come from breakthrough innovation but from flawless ‘execution’ ? execution, execution, and execution. A great strategy alone won’t win a game or a battle; the win comes from basic blocking and tackling. All of us have seen entrepreneurs who waste too much time writing business plans and preparing power points. I believe that a business plan is too long if it’s more than one page. Besides, things never turn out exactly the way you envisioned them. No matter how much time you spend perfecting the plan, you still have to adapt according to the ground realities. You’re going to learn a lot more useful information from taking action rather than hypothesizing. Remember this ? stay flexible and adapt as new information becomes available.

* I can’t imagine anyone ever achieving long term success without having ‘honesty and integrity’. These two qualities need to be at the core of everything we do. Everybody has a conscience ? but too many people stop listening to it. There is always that faint voice that warns you when you are not being completely honest or even slightly off track from the path of integrity. Be sure to listen to that voice.

* Success is a long journey and much more rewarding if you ‘give back’. By the time you get to success, lots of people will have helped you along the way. You’ll learn, as I have, that you rarely get a chance to help the people who helped you because in most cases, you don’t even know who they were. The only way to pay back the debts we owe is to help people we can help ? and hope they will go on to help more people. We draw so much from the community and society that we live in that when we are successful we should think in terms of how we can help others in return. Sometimes it’s just a matter of being kind to people. At other times, offering a sympathetic ear or a kind word is all that’s needed. It’s our responsibility to do ‘good’ with the resources we have at our disposal.

Measuring Success
Hopefully, you have internalized the secrets of becoming a successful entrepreneur. The next question you are likely to ask yourself is: How do we measure success? Success, of course, is very personal; there is no universal way of measuring success. What do successful people like Bill Gates and Mother Teresa have in common? On the surface it’s hard to find anything they share - and yet both are successful. I personally believe the real metric of success isn’t the size of your bank account. It’s the number of lives where you might be able to make a positive difference. This is the measure of success we need to apply while we are on our journey to success.

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