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Entrepreneurs succeed in proportion to the number of problems they solve. So if you’re an entrepreneur, or think you’re destined for entrepreneurial greatness, you’re pretty much a professional problem solver.
“But I’m not part of Mensa!” you might say, as your frontal lobe quivers with the thought of full-time problem solving. It’s a reasonable knee-jerk reaction. But entrepreneurship doesn’t require you to have a higher IQ than 95 percent of people. You just need more tenacity than 95 percent of people. And tenacity is a skill you can learn.
Albert Einstein famously said that there was nothing so remarkable about him except for his curiosity, which is another word for tenacity: The man stayed up for days at a time solving his mind-bending equations. Nothing could stop him. Ditto for Edison — his thousands of failed experiments before lighting the first bulb is the definition of tenacity. Fast-forward to modern times and we have JK Rowling, who was rejected by at least a dozen publishers before Harry Potter became a bestseller.
Tenacity is the thread that binds all innovators, entrepreneurs and problem solvers to one another. And if you want to join their ranks, this is the one eight-letter trait you’ve simply got to master. Here’s how the most successful entrepreneurs do it.
Love what you’re doing.
There is no room for lukewarm entrepreneurs because there are far too many people who are so inspired by what they do that they’re willing to endure failure after failure after failure in order to solve their problems and see their dreams come to fruition. Doesn’t matter how skilled or qualified you are: Love comes first.
That’s what Melissa Ben-Ishay will tell you. Before she founded her famously successful cupcake company, Baked By Melissa, the eponymous owner was fired from her job as a media planner. Her own words: “Clearly they saw that I wasn’t passionate about the job.”
But, within a month of being canned, she was selling thousands and thousands of cupcakes…
