Are you wondering whether you’ll make a good entrepreneur? Or, if you already are an entrepreneur, are you giving some thought to what personal characteristics you should develop in order to help your business thrive? In either case, you’ll find this list immensely helpful. Here are eight traits of successful entrepreneurs.

They enjoy what they do.

One reason a lot of people choose to become entrepreneurs in the first place is in hope of finding a more enjoyable job. Even if that’s not the primary reason you want to become – or have become – an entrepreneur, it’s incredibly important for success. If you enjoy your work, you will be more passionate, more committed, and more willing to put in extra hours. All of those things are huge factors in determining whether you will ultimately be successful in your endeavor.

They are independent.

In fact, this is one of the traits that came up as being most important in a Gallup poll that studied 1,000 successful entrepreneurs. It makes sense that entrepreneurs would be independent – they’ve struck out on their own to do things outside the traditional office environment. Usually, people that even want to become entrepreneurs in the first – whether or not they ultimately make successful entrepreneurs are independent. A good entrepreneur needs to be able to work without taking direction and without relying on others for decision-making.

They take their work seriously.

If you are running a home business, it is easy to lose focus or to consider it “not a real job.” You can’t allow yourself to fall into that mentality if you want to be successful. That sort of mentality will allow you to be easily distracted and to allow other things to take priority when you should be working. It will allow you to be swayed by other people who don’t consider your job a real job just because you don’t have set hours or an office. It will allow you to engage in many behaviors that will sabotage your ability to succeed as an entrepreneur.

They are tenacious.

As an entrepreneur, you will encounter a lot of naysayers. You can’t listen to them, though. You will also encounter a lot of failure – all great entrepreneurs have had some pretty significant failures on their journey toward success. Ultimately, though, the reason that they succeeded is because they didn’t give up. They were tenacious.

They are risk takers.

Success often involves a lot of failure. As Jimmy Carter once said, “Go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.” In other words, you have to take risks in order to achieve success. When you work in a company, you may not feel that on a personal level the way that you will as an entrepreneur. In a company, when the company takes a risk, if you fail you will all fail together; as an entrepreneur, it’s just you. Knowing that can make it harder to take risks, because you know you’ll be the only one picking up the pieces if things go wrong. Nonetheless, successful entrepreneurs are still able to take risks – and to move on and get past it if they fail.

They manage money wisely.

Even if you don’t know a lot about money management going into it, once you become an entrepreneur you will have to get good fast if you want to succeed. A positive cash flow is what keeps any company alive and is a huge part of how we define what makes a company successful. So, in order to be successful as an entrepreneur you have to have a good understanding of the finances of your operation. As an entrepreneur, there won’t be someone else to leave it to – you’ll have to deal with all this yourself. You’ll need to properly allot for expenses, understand how to price your product or service for maximal returns, and understand what you really need and what you don’t. This may all seem obvious, but in fact when people make the decision to become an entrepreneur the lack or presence of money managing skills is not often a deciding factor.

Strong people skills.

Even though many entrepreneurs work from home, they usually still need to have strong people skills. People skills are good for networking, for securing funding, and basic customer service. Even if you sell an online product and never meet your customers face-to-face, you will probably still have to answer questions and possibly deal with issuing refunds to unhappy customers – and both those things require people skills whether you’re doing them online or on the phone. If you handle these things badly, you may end up with a myriad of negative online reviews or Better Business Bureau complaints – outcomes which would undoubtedly have a negative impact on your business. So, even in the scenarios that involve the least significant amount of human interaction, you will still need people skills.

They are creative.

There are all sorts of different kinds of creativity. So, even if you’re not an inventor and don’t think of yourself as the person who will introduce a new product to the world, you may still have other kinds of creativity that will help you succeed as an entrepreneur. You might think of different ways to market your product or service or you may have a creative twist on something that already exists. Whatever the case, entrepreneurship presents tons of problems that creativity helps solve in novel ways that can go a long way towards achieving success.

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Although the Olympics are only half-over at this point, there are still some pretty amazing and inspirational stories that have emerged from the events. Athletes are often a good source of stories about defeating the odds, staying motivated, and working hard – and so it’s no surprise that there are some solid business lessons everyone can learn from Sochi:

You’re never too old.

Evgeny Plushenko, a Russian figure skater, competed in Sochi at the age of 31. For a singles competitor in figure skating, that’s ancient. He’s the only male to have won four medals in four Olympics. In 2002 he won the Silver in Salt Lake; in 2006 he won the gold in Turin; in 2010 he won the silver in Vancouver; and in 2014 he won a gold in the new team figure skating event. Although he ultimately withdrew from Sochi, he’s still talking about sticking around for the 2018 Olympics. If you apply this sort of belief that you’re never too old to your business or career, you might give yourself the courage to reinvent your career at any age.

Be prepared.

#SochiProblems became a famous – or infamous hashtag due to the fact that Sochi was embarrassingly underprepared for the games. Some of the hotel rooms weren’t finished, stray dogs wandered the streets, and the streets weren’t even done being paved by the time the Olympics started. Of course, because it was the Olympics, it’s not as if Sochi has to worry about losing business to a competitor; there isn’t an alternate Olympics in Moscow. If any business were this miserably unprepared, it would fold pretty quickly. Instead, Sochi had just gotten a lot of negative press.

Where there’s a will there’s a way.

As a result of the miserable preparations mentioned above, the doors in some of the hotel rooms didn’t function properly. In one notorious case, American bobsledder Johnny Quinn got locked inside the bathroom of his hotel room. Amazingly, he kicked through the door and immediately posted images of his “Sochi jail break” online. A lesser person may have just given up, but Quinn wasn’t about to miss out on the chance of a lifetime, so he kicked his way out.

Success is all in how you view it.

Technically, this isn’t “new” Olympics news; this is based on a mid-1990’s psychology paper published by the American Psychological Association. In it, Victoria Husted Medvec, Scott Madey, and Thomas Gilovich determined that bronze medalists were often significantly happier than silver medalists. Why? Because bronze medalists viewed their alternate outcome as not medaling at all, whereas silver medalists viewed their alternate outcome as winning first. Thus, although the silver medalists clearly placed higher, they were less satisfied with the results.

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I’ve never been in prison, but like everybody else these days, I’ve seen plenty about it on TV. Ever since Orange is the New Black became a Netflix sensation, prison-related shows and books have been all the rage – and of course there are the old standby prison documentaries on MSNBC. As fascinating as it is to learn about the bizarre and terrifying world of prison, there are actually some very useful business lessons that can be gleaned from the world behind bars.

Know who you’re talking to.

In Orange is the New Black the main character, Piper, comments on how bad the prison food is – in front of the cook. As a result, the inmates who work in the kitchen conspire to starve her for a week. We’ve probably all, at one time or another, accidentally said something embarrassing or put our foot in our mouth because we didn’t know who we were talking to. Although the immediate consequences of that can be more dramatic in prison, in the business world, the consequences of such a faux-pas can be just as real.

Roll with the punches.

The inmates who are capable of being the least miserable in prison – Alex, Nicky, even Piper at times – are all flexible and able to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. However, Pennsatucky – who is pretty much the epitome of inflexible – is always unhappy, always scheming, and nearly gets killed at one point.

Persistence pays.

Piper suspects that Alex is the one who testified against her and thus landed her in prison. Nonetheless, Alex tries again and again to get Piper to speak to her – and eventually the persistence pays off. Partway through the first season, Piper and Alex begin speaking again – and eventually they end up sleeping together again. Although obviously you shouldn’t be trying to sleep with anyone at work, persistence still pays when it comes to promotions and new assignments.

Don’t let you anger get the better of you.

Piper completely flips out at one of the guards while she’s in solitary – and later comes to regret it when she realizes that he’s the one who will determine how long she stays there. Another time she goes ballistic on Pennsatucky, beating her senseless. We don’t know what the consequences of that are by the end of the first season, but it’s a pretty good bet that that’s an action that will come back to haunt her. When one of Piper’s cellmates is having a bad day, she tries to strangle a guard. As a result, she gets sent “up the hill” to the maximum security part of the facility, where she’ll have to do the remainder of her sentence. Point is, there are always consequences for giving in to your anger.

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The NBA is never just a business. It’s always business. It’s always personal. All good businesses are personal. The best businesses are very personal. – Mark Cuban

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