4 Things You Must Do To Increase Your Probability of Success
Entrepreneurs fail a lot.
According to The Entrepreneurs Guide to Finance and Business, the average entrepreneur fails at least 3.8 times before succeeding.
Many entrepreneurs, however, never realize success. They give up too soon because the road to success takes too long, they’re afraid of failing and looking stupid again, and they’re tired of spending money and exerting effort with little to nothing to show for it.
Are you unhappy with where you are on your entrepreneurial journey?
Success does not come easy but it isn’t out of your reach. Success depends on your commitment and determination to have it. And that’s good news because you control that. Success also depends on what you DO — by taking meaningful action.
Maybe you know this but some mental or physical force keeps getting in the way of your success.
You’re tired of losing.
You’re tired of the odds being against you.
You’re starting to doubt your ability to become successful in your space but you want it so bad!
Well, if you commit to doing these four things, you can increase your probability of success and finally become the entrepreneur you’ve wanted to be.
Here they are:
1. Manage Your Mindset About Failure
“Show me a man who has never made a mistake, and I’ll show you a man that has never tried anything.” — Albert Einstein.
Many aspiring entrepreneurs start a business with the mindset that if they have a good idea, they won’t fail. Their products will be a hit the first time, customers will be waiting at the door with cash in hand, and the money will immediately start flooding in.
I believe many entrepreneurs, especially millennial entrepreneurs, begin with this mindset because of the way they were introduced to entrepreneurship.
As MJ DeMarco says in his best-selling book, The Millionaire Fastlane, “many aspiring entrepreneurs are sold the event and not the process” to entrepreneurship ( More on this in #2.). They are moved by clickbait ads and headlines such as “My webinar made me $100,000 in 24 hours!” or “I made a million dollars in one week by using this secret funnel,” and immediately buy the guru’s program or product, believing that these events will quickly happen for them too.
What is hidden from the guru’s ads and headlines are the months or years of failures that preceded these coveted events. The ads and headlines also do not show the relationships that were built and nurtured between the guru and his affiliates, yet were crucial to the guru’s early success and perhaps the visibility of those very ads!
Because failure is often hidden from a person’s introduction to entrepreneurship, failure is an elusive thought to many aspiring entrepreneurs.
Don’t let it elude you.
Your mindset must be that entrepreneurs fail and you are no exception. (If you become the exception, celebrate then). And you must be okay that you may fail again and again and again.
You will also have moments where you look stupid and have weeks or months that yield little to no results, and you must be okay with that too.
If you adopt this mindset, you’ll have the mental endurance to keep going in the face of failure while others give up because of their mismanaged mindset.
How you manage your mindset about failure can be accomplished by spending time learning quotes about overcoming failure or reading short stories about entrepreneurs who have failed but overcame.
Bob Proctor, a multimillionaire and the best-selling author of “You Were Born Rich,” recommends that you do this too. In fact, Mr. Proctor has formed the habit of reading a few lines of Think and Grow Rich every day to manage his mindset about failure and strengthen his will to confront challenges in his businesses.
Spending a few minutes doing this exercise or a similar one will help you remember that failure isn’t a personal shortcoming but an obstacle that you need to overcome.
Also, failure is feedback and an opportunity for you to learn from your mistakes.
If you learn to treat failure for what it is, you’ll increase your probability of success.
“Failure is an opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” — Henry Ford.
2. Commit to the process, not the event.
As mentioned above, unfortunately, many people embark on the road of entrepreneurship because they were sold an event and not the process.
Take the following scenario as an example:
Susan watches a couple of YouTube videos, “Is Blogging Dead in 2020,” and “Blogging 101,” and afterward, visits Amazon.com and purchases a book on blogging. Almost immediately after watching the YouTube videos, Susan is required to watch a GoDaddy commercial on how to pick the perfect domain name before she can watch her cat videos. The next day, Susan is inundated by ads about blogging on her Facebook feed. One, in particular, catches her eye — “Get 1000 subscribers in 90 days!”
Sold! She immediately clicks the ad, watches the free webinar, and buys the course. Unknowingly, her subconscious has also bought into the belief that in just 90 days, her email list will be 1000 people strong.
Susan follows the course step by step, uses the templates, and has her lead magnet and subscriber button front and center on her website. One month goes by. Then two. By the third month, Susan has only managed to obtain about 10 followers, seven of which include her mom and her closest friends. Frustrated that she hasn’t obtained 1000 subscribers, she abandons the course in the hunt for a better, faster strategy. Unfortunately, buy, try, and abandon ultimately becomes the sum of her entrepreneurial journey and she never achieves the success that she seeks.
Does this sound familiar to you?
Unfortunately, it does for many other aspiring entrepreneurs. Statistics show that the average completion of online courses is a measly 15%. While there are many reasons why people don’t complete courses, expert and founder of SellingCoursesOnline.com, Baidhurya Mani, highlights two reasons that are relevant here:
- Students lack motivation and don’t see much value in going through the entire program.
- They had unrealistic expectations about the course or even the work involved.
Indeed, when students are sold events and subconsciously buy into the belief that an event will happen by a certain deadline or have a certain outcome, and it doesn’t happen for them, they lose motivation to continue and thus, never obtain the success they seek.
To prevent this from happening to you, you must be committed to the process just as, or even more than, you are committed to the event. Your process shouldn’t be a plug-a-play-system but a lifelong problem-solving journey, where you are setting goals, taking action, solving problems as they come up, finding solutions, and taking action again.
You can do several things to help you stay committed to the process. You can listen to podcasts, read books, read articles, or watch documentaries about the entrepreneurs you aspire to become and have achieved the success you want to achieve.
Whichever channel you choose, the content should be the same. The content should be focused on the entrepreneur’s process to success.
Any entrepreneur willing to share his or her process is one worth listening to. You’ll pick up gems that you can immediately apply to your business strategy and gain insight on how to improve your process. More importantly, they’ll give you a realistic picture of how much work, time, failed attempts, setbacks, troubleshooting, and experiments were done before they became an “overnight success.” Being reminded of their process will help you become patient with yours.
It’s important to make clear that while you study their process, don’t accept their timeline, their setbacks, and their wins for yours. This exercise is not intended for you to put a limit on what you can do. You should always aim to 10x whatever your goals are and allow the chips to fall where they may.
What this exercise is intended to do, however, is to help you stay committed to the process and manage your expectations about failure.
Second, know what entrepreneurship is and what it isn’t. Entrepreneurship isn’t something you try out. Entrepreneurship should be your life. If you see it that way, a few roadblocks or a few hurdles won’t stop you from sticking to the process.
Furthermore, that is why knowing your WHY and being connected to your WHY are so key to staying committed to the process and ultimately achieving entrepreneurial success.
Knowing your why will help you stay motivated and keep you going when things get tough or uncertain.
If your why hasn’t been giving you the push that you need, then I’d encourage you to revisit and perhaps revise your why.
3. Confront Your Problems Head On
“If you choose to not deal with an issue, then you give up your right of control over the issue and it will select the path of least resistance.”― Susan Del Gatto
Learn to solve your own problems and resist obtaining blueprints, hacks, and “secret formulas” from gurus and marketers as your first resort. While these aids are not all bad and can help you break through a problem more efficiently, your business’s foundation should not be built from hacks, blueprints, and the secret formulas of others, or you will always remain reliant on them.
Gurus and marketers are often showing you a piece of the puzzle when they present their blueprints, hacks, and secret formulas, and not all the pieces that contributed to their success. As such, what works for them may not necessarily work for you, and the impact that “hack” has on your business may be minute and not phenomenal.
Furthermore, hacks, blueprints, and secret formulas encourage you to skip the process. Instead of thinking through your own problem and coming to understand how one solution over another one works for your business, you’ll be led to follow a formula — which the gurus hope you’ll follow exactly — hoping that its “the one!”
This business practice, however, is the equivalent to cheating on a calculus test by looking at genius Steve’s answers. You may get an “A” on the calculus test but it doesn’t make you a better calculus student.
Why?
Because you don’t know how or why those answers are the right answers. To become a genius like Steve, you must study and learn to solve your own calculus problems.
Similarly, if you aspire to become a great entrepreneur, you must become a problem-solver.
Problems will pop up daily — if not weekly — if you are truly taking action in your business. The only way to keep the needle moving in your business and increase your probability of success is by solving your problems as they come up.
The most effective way to do this is by adopting a problem-solving strategy.
I’ll walk you through what this looks like:
Each week, ask yourself “What problem am I facing in my business this week?”
Several problems may pop up in your mind all at once. If so, write them down in a journal. But aim to find one problem that you are going to focus on.
Tackling your problems one at a time will help you work more efficiently and avoid overwhelm.
Once you’ve identified your problem, brainstorm or mind-map how you’re going to resolve that specific problem. This step may involve doing some research if your specific problem involves something with which you have no previous experience.
I emphasize “specific” because many entrepreneurs — especially in the very early days of their entrepreneurial journey — will spend an inordinate amount of time reading and consuming content about becoming a successful entrepreneur, like this article, because they subconsciously believe that if they only find the right article or book with the “success secrets,” everything will dramatically change for them.
However, nothing changes.
10 books later they find themselves in the same spot they were before because they took no meaningful action to resolve their specific problem.
To avoid wasting time, find a book or an article that will specifically teach you how to resolve your problem.
Indeed, when MJ DeMarco was asked on a podcast what book he recommends to people wanting to become a successful entrepreneur, he replied, “the next book you should read is the book that will get you to the next step.”
Once you figure out what steps you need to take to resolve the problem, write them down, set milestone or checkpoint deadlines, and then take massive action until your problem is resolved.
If you wake up each day committed to resolving the problem in front of you, you’ll become:
- extremely productive
- strengthen your problem-solving skills, and
- build self-confidence that “you can do it” because “you did it.”
4. Reflect and Analyze Your Work Performance
“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.” — Margaret J. Wheatley
To increase your probability of success, you must also reflect and analyze your work performance each week/month.
Many people skip this step because it’s boring or it takes too much time. However, if you find yourself making the same mistakes over and over again, skipping this step could retard your business’s growth or keep you from moving forward on your entrepreneurial goals.
Perhaps no other group of entrepreneurs understand this better than YouTube Creators and Instagram Influencers.
For YouTube Creators, how many views, likes, comments, shares, and time users spend watching a Creator’s YouTube video can impact how YouTube ranks the video on its search engine, how often YouTube suggests the video to other people, and how much the Creator ultimately earns on that video. Therefore, for many successful YouTube Creators, studying YouTube Analytics and reflecting on their work performance are an important part of their content creation process.
Here is a great self-reflection exercise you can implement this week to improve your process and output:
First, think about the goals you’ve set and the assignments you worked on during the previous week.
Then go through each goal and ask yourself, “Did I achieve this goal?”
If you did, congratulate yourself and mark this as a win!
If you didn’t achieve your goal, ask yourself “why not?”
Is it because you started your harder project later in the day?
Are you juggling too many platforms and struggling to get content out?
Do you need to edit your sales copy and present your product differently?
Once you figure out why you didn’t achieve your goal, think about what you can do next week to improve.
Finally, schedule or calendar a time when you are going to work on the task (ideally a time when you have the most energy to work without distraction) and set a date for when you’d like to accomplish this goal.
Going through this self-reflection exercise each week will help you figure out what is working for you, what you should continue doing, and what strategies you should drop altogether.
Conclusion
So remember, to increase your probability of success:
- Manage your mindset about failure
- Commit to the process, and not the event
- Become a problem-solver, and
- Reflect/Analyze Your Work Performance
Are you doing these 4 things?
How committed are you to becoming a successful entrepreneur?
Success is yours if you want it.
