Entrepreneurial Spirit

Are you an entrepreneurial spirit?

Are you someone who is restless, imaginative, easily bored, full of life and wants to make a difference in the world?

Are you full of ideas, always on the go, but never seem to manage to fix on one thing for long enough to make it bear fruit, so you have a trail of serial start-ups but not too many happy endings?

Gifts, Talents and ….Failure?

There are many talented and gifted individuals whose abilities are undoubted, but they are not successful in terms of having a sustainable business which provides them with a good standard of living. They watch in frustration as others execute their ideas and projects and reap the rewards. They sometimes assume that success happens overnight and that they are unlucky or don't have the 'right' connections, so that 's why they don't get the results they want to much. They are frustrated entrepreneurs, flitting from idea to idea, from seminar to seminar, buying into the latest technique or gizmo or software which they believe will transform their fortunes.

The Price of Success

What they don't know is that success comes at a price. That price is a personal cost, a cost of persistence, focus, reflection, contemplation – and practise. In his recent book 'Outliers' multi-million selling author Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hour rule. Here's an extract from a conversation I had with him when he was in the UK a while ago.

Consistent Action, Right Mindset

Gladwell discusses here the necessary components of success and creativity, and explores what it takes to create individual and group success. He uses the example of the band Fleetwood Mac to demonstrate the qualities and conditions that give rise to success, emphasizing that it is a long term process and it can take many years to acquire the expertise and create the circumstances that give rise to what appears to be overnight success. He has discovered that underlying success there are often, if not always, consistent, sustained actions over time, and a mindset which facilitates the individual to achieve great things.

“The path from beginning to greatness was far longer than you could imagine. It took Fleetwood Mac ten years; they were not an overnight success.

This is a critical factor, because so often when it comes to thinking about success, or creative breakthroughs or innovation, we do this thing where we truncate, where we think it comes up from nowhere and magically happens, and we overlook the fact that invariably behind any kind of great creative breakthrough there is an extended period of hard work and persistence.

The 10,000 Hour Rule

It’s called the ‘10,000 hour rule’ and it is the notion that when you look at anyone performing any kind of cognitively complex task, invariably you will find it took them around 10,000 hours of practice before they achieved any kind of expertise. It is astounding how many different fields we have looked at and found this rule to be in effect. 10,000 hours is translated roughly into four hours a day for ten years, so it’s the ten year rule. Can you find an expert who became an expert before putting in the ten years? The answer is you can’t.

For example, if you look at International Chess Grandmasters, there has only been one person who has achieved the standard of International Chess Grandmaster who has not been playing for ten years, and that person was Bobby Fischer, the greatest chess player of all time, and it took him nine years."

Do you need help 'grounding' your creative impulses, establishing a firm foundation from which they turn into ventures that can be launched and pay dividends?

What if you could concentrate for longer, follow a simple, effective plan and easily complete what's required to achieve your dreams?