Entrepreneurship is about creating and growing a business, but don’t let that concept consume you. If you want to be an effective entrepreneur, boss, leader, teammate, and visionary, you can’t be content to only make changes and spark growth in your business—you have to make changes and spark growth in yourself as well.
Your personal growth is what’s going to equip you to carve a path to success:
- You’ll gain knowledge to make better decisions.
- You’ll develop skills to expand to new areas.
- You’ll earn experience to apply different perspectives and engage your creativity.
- You’ll transcend your business, so that when your business is sold (or when you depart some other way), you’ll be able to do even more in your next venture.
That being said, you can’t just say you’re going to grow—you have to work to achieve that growth, and it isn’t always easy or straightforward. When you’re ready, you’ll need to adhere to the following five principles—at a minimum—to be successful:
- Meet as many people as possible. As people, we are fundamentally limited in how much we can learn and how much we can develop by the people around us. If you spend time, personally or professionally, with the same three people over the course of a decade, eventually your personalities, beliefs, thought patterns, and abilities will all meld together and become indistinguishable. You’ll teach each other everything you have to teach, and you’ll reach a plateau where you’re unable to draw any new information or experiences from one another. By contrast, every new person you meet—whether it’s a new hire or a stranger on the street—is going to be better than you at something, and is going to have different ideas than you do. I guarantee it. The more people you meet, the more you’ll stand to learn, and the more you’ll grow as a person.
- Listen to advice and feedback. Listening is an oft-neglected, but fundamental skill. Too many people focus on what they’re saying rather than what everyone around them is saying—but you can turn this around. Go out of your way to earn advice and feedback from the people around you, including people above you (like investors and mentors) and people below you (like employees and people outside the industry). You don’t have to necessarily take or incorporate all this advice, or any of it, but you have to hear it, understand it, and consider it. It’ll open you to new perspectives.
- Always have a book. Yes, book-reading is a bit old fashioned in this advanced digital age, but it’s still one of the best ways to gain—and more importantly, retain—information. Depending on what you read, you’ll learn new skills, gain new insights, learn new strategies, and sharpen your linguistic skills and vocabulary, all of which are positive steps. You should always have a book you’re currently reading, so whenever you finish one, you’re onto the next. The minute you stop reading, you stop learning, so keep a full queue of books to read and delve into them whenever you have spare time.
- Question everything, including yourself. It’s dangerous to become a slave to your assumptions, and many people do without ever realizing it. If you want to grow, you’ll need to challenge those assumptions. Try not to treat anything as sacred—even if there’s a news source you like, don’t trust everything it publishes. Just because you’ve held a belief for years doesn’t mean it’s absolutely and objectively true. When you operate under the assumption that everything is flawed and there’s no such thing as perfect or objective reasoning, you’ll open the doors to more information, and the ability to learn and adapt.
- Never be satisfied. If you want to achieve positive personal growth, you have to want to grow. This seems obvious, but there’s an important principle you have to accept before you can truly desire that growth; you have to avoid the temptation of satisfaction. When you become content with yourself, or satisfied with the level of growth you’ve achieved, you’ll have no reason to continue moving forward, and you’ll become stagnant. Resist that eventuality by refusing to be too satisfied with yourself. Continually work on improving yourself, improving the content you publish, and improving the way you promote yourself (and your content, such as through a strategic link building campaign).
With these five principles in the back of your mind at all times, you’ll be well-equipped to advance yourself as much as you advance your business. When you’re the best entrepreneur, and the best professional you can be, you’ll make better decisions, open your mind to more ideas, and achieve a broader and more developed set of skills and experience to harness. Encourage all your partners and teammates to adopt the same mentality, and you’ll have an entire team of self-advancers who remain on an upward trajectory.