How to become a successful business man?

Pick up any newspaper or business publication anywhere in the world today, such as the Financial Times,  the New York Times, Singapore’s Straits Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, or the Economist, and you are likely to find an article in which a politician or an economist is stating how important entrepreneurship is to the nation and that we need more entrepreneurs to ensure economic growth and prosperity. In these same publications, you will also find other stories about entrepreneurs themselves. Most of us will ignore the economist’s or politician’s pontificating and focus our attention on those compelling stories about the valiant entrepreneurs and their uphill battles to create successful ventures. These myths and stories usually come in two forms. One story type is a tale of somebody who had an idea that very few understood or believed in, but who with determination and perhaps sheer luck was in the right spot at the right time and voilà! What a wonderful success story, with 2 Fundamentals for Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur, some drama thrown in for good measure! Quite often, it is a story of a successful entrepreneur who has traveled from rags to riches through hard work and an ability to make the right decisions at the right time. Even Sigmund Freud would admit that both dreams and words can have various meanings. As with all words and dreams, they come with both good and bad connotations. The word “dream” is most likely related to the Germanic,  (meaning deception, illusion, or phantom) or the Norse (ghost, apparition), or even the Sanskrit DRH (seek to harm or injure). Have you ever wondered whether your entrepreneurial dream could become one of these stories? Elias Howe (1819–1867) was reported to have said that the inspiration for his invention of the sewing machine came from a dream about being attacked by cannibals bearing spears that looked like the needle he then designed for his machine. Similarly, Nikola Tesla is said to have been able to imagine a device in his  What Is This Thing Called Entrepreneurship? 3 mind’s eye and then build it without ever having to write anything down, certainly an interesting form of “daydreaming.” Biographies of entrepreneurs who became self-made billionaires are frequently bestsellers much for the same reason. How many of you are familiar with famous entrepreneurs from around the world, who you most likely don’t know that you know? Consider Sweden’s Invar Kamprad (retail), or the Netherlands’ Gerard Adrian Heineken (brewing), or Chile’s Don Melchior de Santiago Concha y TORRO and his wife Emiliano Subercaseaux (wineries), or Japan’s Takashi Mithra (electronics). In all these men and women one sees a picture of the entrepreneur as a person who is visionary, hardworking, risk taking, ambitious, having exceptional leadership skill, one who never gives up, and a great source of inspiration. We like to describe them as having an entrepreneurial mindset (Brownback and Carsrud, 2009). What all these men and women have done is to show that these qualities, in combination with a brilliant idea and the ability to market, results in a great company that ultimately made the entrepreneur very wealthy. However, is wealth the only definition of success? For many of these people, success was changing an industry or creating something that was sustainable and enduring as a business over generations.