The 3 Skills You Need To Thrive As An Entrepreneur in 2021
In our last post, we talked about the tools every entrepreneur needs to thrive in 2021. In this post, we move to the skills. This list is by no means exhaustive. However, the three “soft” skills highlighted here will get you off to quite a good start.
1. Note-taking
Ideas can be annoying: here one moment, gone the next. They come in those moments when you can’t focus as intensively on them as you need to. This is why it helps to have something on hand to capture those ideas in whatever form is best at the time they come. The skill/habit of note-taking can come in handy at such times. You can write down your thoughts briefly and come back to them at a later time.
Some people say a notepad is an entrepreneur’s best friend, and that is quite true. A notepad, physical or digital, is a go-to idea dump for an entrepreneur. There you can record your questions and your answers, your insights and your decisions. You can even expand your notetaking by taking pictures, recording videos or even recording short audio. The beauty of note-taking is that it ensures that your ideas are preserved and that you can always go back to brainstorm with your past selves.
2. Empathy.
This skill is much-talked-about but very underrated. At the root of all the fancy definitions of this word is this: feel the pain people feel, even if they don’t know they feel it, and design something to take away that pain. As we come out of the pandemic and begin to adjust to the new normal, any venture that makes the transition as seamless as possible by taking away the growing pains will receive a massive boost in the form of a huge inflow of customers.
In addition, empathy is a formidable skill when it comes to negotiations and relationship building. Because empathy involves active listening, any entrepreneur who approaches relationships and negotiations with the primary aim of understanding the other party immediately gains an advantage, ensuring that mutual progress can be made.
3. Grit
Imagine liquid passion, self-control and persistent resilience all coalescing into one skill. That is what Angela Duckworth calls GRIT. In her words, it is “passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal.”
Ask any entrepreneur who has gone before you. They will tell you that the journey could get difficult sometimes. This does not mean that yours must be hard. However, if you must go on this entrepreneurial journey, you need a certain level of grit to stay on track. Not to romanticise failure, but even Jeff Bezos lost hundreds of millions of dollars on three ideas that should have worked: Amazon Auctions, zShops (both of which formed the basis of Amazon Marketplace) and the Amazon Fire Phone.
However, the beauty of grit is that as you move on the journey, your resilience, self-control, and passion will grow stronger. This is why Jeff Bezos could bounce back stronger from these three losses.
Note-taking, empathy, grit. Definitely not a lot but enough to get you started on your journey as an entrepreneur. Combining these with the three tools mentioned in our previous post will set you up for some serious entrepreneurial awesomeness.
In our next post, we will be examining a case study on sourcing for capital as an African startup.
