With all the turbulence having shaken entrepreneurs in 2020, it’s fair to say bidding the year goodbye topped our resolution lists. If only the past year’s challenges could drop down into oblivion with the ball on Times Square!

But for that to happen, as entrepreneurs we need to overpower our struggles with something greater.

To find out that superpower, at the close of the most challenging year in recent history I asked over 100 small business owners to name the kinds of skills that helped them survive 2020 and the ones they’re embracing for the year ahead.

Here are the most popular answers, ranked. …

A financial model to a small business is what engineering is to a rocketship. Based on incoming data, it doesn’t just ensure smooth flight but predicts how a business will react in complicated situations.

A financial model also helps add “fuel” when necessary, so you don’t ever get stuck in the middle of nowhere. And it’s a business owner’s best radar for avoiding financial meteors.

In 2020, small business has already been bombarded with its share of trouble. The businesses that had the upper hand are the lucky ones who had a solid backup plan.

Ahead of 2021, everyone needs a good plan. …

Have you ever met those charming 80-something couples that have been happily married for 50+ years? The ones that when asked about their compatibility, briskly laugh it off, “Us, compatible? We can’t even agree on how to cook our eggs!”. Which makes us wonder, how on earth do some people stay together for so long, being seeming opposites?

I don’t believe in instant compatibility, just like I don’t believe in instant coffee, instant relationships, and instant life hacks. I’ve learned to appreciate the value of slowness in understanding people. …

We live in a perfectionist culture. More precisely, we live in a perfectionist cult. Words like “dream”, “passion”, “vision” constitute our second nature, while “minimalism” (Insta-perfect designer minimalism, to be exact), is the subconscious lifestyle ideal embedded into our minds.

But life isn’t minimalist. There’s a lot of clutter to it. Most times, it takes a heap of willpower to get up and take out that trash knowing full well that some tooth-fairy-turned-Marie-Condo won’t swish her wand and make the mess vanish.

Work is like that too.

It’s not always the inspiring “passion” that’s supposed to get you out of bed at 5 am and off to pre-breakfast yoga before settling into your minimalist home office with a cappuccino. Nope. Sometimes, it feels like your life is the messiest heap around. (Be quite sure that’s a trick your mind is playing on you. All lives are messy and none are as straightforward as “#Instamotivation” quotes.) …

In her reminiscences, great twentieth-century poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) wrote of her close friend, actress Sophia Holliday, that Sophia would often be traumatized in relationships by a curious emotional trigger, something she called “love him longer, love him stronger”. This mechanism kicked in whenever Sophia was in danger of falling out of love or in love with the “wrong” kind of person and played on her emotions every little trick to prolong the point of separation.

Known by one or another name, “love them longer, love them stronger” is a scheme many of us had recourse to when faced with emotional unavailability or indecisiveness in a partner. Leading one to emotionally invest more than they receive, it is an attempt to catch that warm gust of air from another’s valley of emotional coldness and chill. …

Have you ever wondered why our ancestors took their Greek and Latin seriously? Well, in addition to the intriguing prospect of speaking the language of Plato and Aristotle and Virgil, there’s a curious study called etymology, or the science of word roots (aka the “birth of words”). Etymology is fascinating since word roots aren’t just linguistics. They’re psychological clues guiding us along the paths of how our minds changed over centuries and the subconscious stigmas language carries through our psyche. Word roots can lead to deep insights regarding concepts we considered second nature. …

Several times a week, with predictable regularity, my mind launches on an eerie escapade to five thousand miles away. An NJ town where soared by the twelve years of my childhood and teenage years opens up the doors of its dwellings to my wandering, sleepy psyche. Eyes shut to the real world, I keep circling the rooms of my childhood, meeting its inhabitants all over again as if stepping into a weird parallel dimension where life goes to sleep when I wake, and wakes when I fall asleep.

In this unconscious realm that shapeshifts between past and present, I reenact not the most exciting environments and people I had known, but those that in waking life I remember as the deepest shade of monotonous. In fact, I now believe their monotony had been a safeguard against forgetfulness, a means of self-preservation through repetitiveness. If so, the trick has worked. In the spaces I return to night after night, the details have been preserved meticulously. …

To dream of love is to dream big.

In the experience of love, we thirst after big emotions, big experiences, big hearts. The very thought of love is the thought of looking into distant heavens and quenching our dry hearts in the immensity of the universe.

It’s not the thought of stooping down to the ground and, on all fours, paying heed to some microscopic happenings of life. When in love, we want to jump out of ourselves and exist only in the immense space-time. …