Are you an effective CEO of your life?
Entrepreneurs come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, so their mindsets entail a smorgasbord of characteristics. Chief among them is the belief that the world can be different, and that they are the ones to make it that way. This kind of thinking shouldn’t be limited to business world. It’s invaluable any time you go up against the unknown.
This style of thinking is inherently useful outside the office. It can apply to your relationships with friends, family, and significant others. It can apply to fitness and weight loss goals. It can apply to any change you want but don’t have just yet. That’s why there is endless value in developing an entrepreneurial mindset.
Cultivating this mindset will see you obsessively find the smartest way forward in business and life, turning perceived setbacks into wins. The path through a complicated issue at work or home is rarely straight, so I’m sharing these business guidelines that have served me well in my daily life.
What if you ran your life the way Bill Gates runs his?
It’s okay to fail, even repeatedly.
Success in entrepreneurship calls for high risk tolerance — the more risk you can manage, the higher you stand to fly. But when their businesses go sideways and flop beyond repair, robust entrepreneurs don’t see it as a setback, just information: something went wrong for a reason.
Solving the problem and returning to business as usual counts as successfully managing that risk. But if the problem proves insurmountable, an entrepreneur’s mindset has them regroup and go to work on something else. They think terms of maximizing their wins. When their effort in one direction is in vain, then channel it somewhere else until they find traction.
Famous business leaders might have a greatest hit or two, but they only got there by making lots of mistakes, learning from them, and trying again. They understand that the popular conception of “failure” is really just the universe telling you that your plan isn’t strong enough.
So make a new one.
Don’t wait around for someone to tell you what to do next.
Entrepreneurs are highly self-motivated. Other people can’t meet your goals for you, so it’s on you to identify what needs to be done, then go do it.
Whether at home or the office, self-motivated people meet their goals before lazy people do. By staying busy and independently productive, they make themselves more adaptable and resilient, able to take tasks farther than others. They’re also easier, cheerier people to spend time with — those who actively look for work to finish will maintain optimism in the face of work and life struggles.
But just as there is work to do, there are also ideas to create.
Stay open-minded.
Entrepreneurs are in the habit of seeing possibilities where others see roadblocks. An improv comedy “yes-and” approach goes a long way here. Your best conversations and brainstorms will often involve not only agreeing with someone, but adding your own flavor and ideas to the topic at hand. This approach leads to some of the highest-level human interfacing possible.
Open-mindedness is not only about accepting other people’s ideas as valid, but about staying hungry for knowledge in general. Sharp entrepreneurs surround themselves with books and people who inspire them, using these resources to empower themselves and learn everything they can. So be radically open-minded!
Trust your gut.
Some decisions can’t be understood in simple terms of profit and loss. That’s why your gut feelings are important for navigating the thorny middle ground. Should you fire an employee? Should you stay in your relationship? You’d miss a lot of essential human detail if you tried to answer these questions in numbers.
That’s why you have to trust your gut. It’s there to give you information when you have no other information. Instead of interacting with a problem in terms of numbers, your gut helps you understand an issue in terms of how it makes you feel.
Sharp entrepreneurs test lots of ideas, iterating quickly and moving on from failures. They aren’t waiting for someone to prompt them as they carry out their mission. They’re in the habit of nonjudgmentally learning as much as possible. And they trust their feelings when they lack hard data.
CEOs use these tactics to build billion-dollar businesses. Imagine what they could for your personal life.