Entrepreneurship is far more a personal journey than it is a business journey. The extent to which you are willing to grow as a person, has a direct impact on your business because in the early stages so much of your business is about you. I believe that true success comes from operating from an authentic space and being true to your own goals and aspirations. If you try to behave like someone else, you deviate from that authentic space where your real power lies. Understanding of self, what truly motivates you, what your strengths and weaknesses are, building self-awareness are critical qualities. This is a skill available to anyone who seeks it – it’s about reflecting, reading, listening to yourself, exploring your hunches or ideas, even if they don’t seem like much.

The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.

Perhaps the most important thing that I learned as an entrepreneur was to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things that I did wrong or might do wrong.

Start with the limited capital you have, never give up, seek knowledge on ideas before and after initiating, diversity in skills within an entrepreneurial team is an important factor for success, networking is an important thing in the business world and passion for a business is good but not enough, commitment and determination sustain it.

The number one requirement to be a successful entrepreneur is having an unreasonable amount of determination.

Be stubborn on goals, and persistent in finding ways around anything that might stop you getting there.

The most important skill of an entrepreneur is the ability to make decisions based on incomplete, inconclusive, and frequently contradictory information.

You will need a lot of perseverance to keep going. No matter how prepared or smart you are, the real test is the ability to keep going. As an entrepreneur, you will give and give and give so much of yourself, and after that… give some more. If you don’t know why you are doing it (which comes back to understanding of self), you will battle to make the kind of long-term commitment that will see you through the challenges.

Entrepreneurs are often driven by vision and they embody that vision for those who choose to join and follow them. I spend some time in my book observing entrepreneurs “pitching” their companies to venture capitalists, and I note how often venture capitalists view the personal characteristics of the entrepreneur as about the most certain feature of an investable project. Technologies may change; markets may change; but the energies, vision, and commitment of the entrepreneur can be as durable, and as pertinent, as anything else in the scene.

I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don't blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life. If you've got a family and you're in the early days of a company, I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure its been done but its rough. Its pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there.

Entrepreneurship for me is a personal journey rather than a business journey, which is why perseverance and humility go a long way. Entrepreneurship, especially at a young age, is an incredibly steep learning curve and learning every day is a very humbling experience because you have to acknowledge how little you know and perhaps how-not-so-smart you are, and still keep going regardless.

As an entrepreneur, let passion be your driving force on your entrepreneurial journey. Constantly look for ways to learn, re-relearn and unlearn so you will stay relevant in your industry.

the biggest little thing for entrepreneurs is the lifelong commitment to education.

Entrepreneurship is about acquiring skills, beliefs, and character traits. To advance, I find that we must determine which skills, beliefs, and character traits we lack. Most times, we simply need to improve.

The most important prerequisite for becoming an entrepreneur is the ownership of capital.