9 Simple Beliefs of the Successful Entrepreneur

What’s up, all you beautiful people? I want to share with you today nine simple beliefs that successful entrepreneurs have more often than not. So, if you want to get ahead in this game of business, this game of entrepreneurship, which is a very difficult game, but it’s a fun one to play, then these are nine beliefs you should actively instill. You should be actively reinforcing in your own life. Number one, reality is malleable. So what I found is that successful entrepreneurs recognize that it’s our beliefs which limit us far more than reality. They understand something that I wrote many years ago, which is that your beliefs are the chisel, your actions are the hammer, and reality is the stone. And you can carve from that reality whatever it is that you want. But it all starts with your beliefs and your actions.

Your beliefs drive your actions in a very real way. But just recognize that you ultimately have control. You can make reality whatever you want to. Now, I know that sounds a little bit delusional. There’s some, maybe some limits to that. But generally speaking, our expectations limit us far more than reality. So that’s, number one, reality is malleable. Number two, there’s only two types of beliefs.

There’s the beliefs that move you forward in life towards your goals, which we call empowering beliefs. And there are beliefs that move us away from our goals. Those are limiting beliefs. Now, here’s the thing. Any belief held with enough conviction can be made true. So if you have a limiting belief that says, I’m not good enough, I’m not that type of person, that’s not for me, that’s for other people, that will become your truth. But if you believe that you can do anything, that you set your mind to, that the world is your oyster, that you have the ability to go learn to grow and to improve, and that there’s no obstacle you cannot overcome, that will also become true. So whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right.

And so just be really careful which you choose to believe. Number three, I can’t afford not to. This is one of the most interesting beliefs. I can’t afford not to do this thing. I can’t afford not to. The best entrepreneurs are scrappy. They’re very resourceful. They have to figure out in the beginning how to stretch every single dollar to its limit.

But there will come a point in your journey when you have to start weighing some costs. And there’s two costs in particular. You have to weigh the cost of capital and the cost of missed opportunity. The cost of capital is easier to quantify. It’s easy to put on a spreadsheet and be able to look at and say, oh, if I hire right now, if I go buy that machine, if I invest in that program for my own development, it’s going to cost me x dollars. It’s very easy to see that on a spreadsheet. The harder one to quantify is the cost of opportunity. There’s not a number that you can put on the spreadsheet and say, okay, well, if I don’t take that class, what’s the downstream effect? What’s that costing me over the next five years in terms of my ignorance task? If I don’t buy that machine, what is that costing me? In terms of what I could be producing? If I’m not hiring that person, what is that ultimately costing me? It’s very hard to quantify the cost of missed opportunity.

But in my experience, the cost of missed opportunity is almost always greater, the cost of capital. Which is why the most successful entrepreneurs don’t say, I can’t afford this. Instead, they say, I can’t afford not to do this. It’s a different mindset entirely. All right, number four is to question everything. Everything Orson Scott Card said, we question all of our beliefs except those we truly believe and those we never think to question at all. That’s from his book, speaker for the Dead, which is like my second favorite science fiction book of all time. Second, maybe only to Ender’s game, which is, you know, the all time best selling science fiction book.

So, very, very good stuff. But beliefs, especially of the limiting variety, they’re sneaky. They hide in plain sight, as common sense as tradition. But the chained man doesn’t realize he’s chained until he starts to move. My experience, the most successful entrepreneurs, they’re the ones that never stop moving. They never stop questioning their assumptions. They never stop questioning their beliefs, and they look very deeply to say, what are those beliefs? That. That I’m not even thinking to question right now because they just feel so obvious to me.
Those are the ones that you need to spend the most time with, because if you don’t question those, you will continue moving forward in life, potentially with some beliefs that are fundamentally misguided in terms of where you’re trying to go, that they’re limiting you, but you never even realized it because you never even thought to look at them. All right, number five, only imposters fake it until they make it. The strongest beliefs, they’re not formed through faith. They’re not formed through delusion. They’re formed through evidence, confidence, the self belief that you have in yourself. It comes from confidence, it comes from experience, it comes from the belief that you have that you can do the thing. And the strongest belief for why you can do a thing is because you have done the thing before. So we stack proof, not affirmations.
Number six, act despite how you feel. This is the most important, I think belief is that you don’t have to feel a certain way to do a thing, because the universe, it doesn’t care how you feel. It doesn’t care what you’ve planned, it doesn’t even care what you think. It only cares what you do. And you don’t have to feel a certain way to do that thing. You just have to show up and do it. You don’t have to love it, do it anyways. And that, for me, was a hard lesson to learn.

I always waited till I was in the moon, until I felt the right level of motivation or the right energy. And as a result, things just never got done. And when I stopped waiting for the right moment, when I stopped waiting to feel ready and just started taking action, doing the things that I knew I needed to do, regardless of how I felt, that’s when things started changing in my life. Number seven, you will never feel as though you belong. Now, I’ve read this one before, but this is one of my favorite tweets that I’ve ever written. It goes like, if you don’t ever feel like an imposter, it’s probably because you’ve stopped growing. You stopped reaching for goals beyond your current capacity, stopped stepping into rooms with people operating beyond your level. You stopped growing.

If you never want to feel like an imposter, then stop striving. But if the cure for imposter syndrome sounds worse than the disease, just accept that you will never feel as though you belong and keep moving forward regardless. Alright? Number eight, I’m not special. The most pervasive belief holding young entrepreneurs back is that nobody can do this as well as me. And when I say young, I’m not talking about age. I’m talking about your maturity, your experience level as you grow through the different levels of entrepreneurship. And this one is very pervasive. Nobody can do this as well as me.

And this is the justification we use to not hire people or to hire b level talent because we just accept it. Nobody will ever do this as well as me or to guard our ego, because we’re afraid if I hire that person who is truly exceptional at this thing, they’re going to do it better than me, and that’s going to turn my entire world upside down. I don’t know if my ego can take that right. This, however, is a one way street to burnout. And this is no type of way to build a business. This is how you build a job. So you build a job for a crazy person that you hate working for, aka, so don’t do that. Number nine, you are the problem.

You will unlock unlimited growth the day you master the theory of constraint, which is just to say that a system will never grow beyond its biggest constraint, aka it’s bottleneck. The chain is only as strong as the weakest link. Until you identify what that constraint is and then focus all your time and energy on removing it, your business will not grow. But what’s going to happen is when you do that, it’s going to reveal a new constraint, a new problem, a new weakest link. And growing your business is just the process of systematically identifying what is the weakest link, what is cutting off the flow, removing that, and then figuring out where’s the next bottleneck. And in most cases that I found is that you, as the entrepreneur, are actually the problem. You are the constraint. You are the bottleneck.

The skills that you have that you lack, that’s the big issue. Figuring out how to remove your constraints, your weaknesses, your. Your inabilities. To hire, to train, to do whatever it is to communicate an idea effectively, the ability to identify in yourself what those constraints are and then remove them, that takes self awareness, but that is also the secret to unlocking unlimited growth inside of your business. So those are nine beliefs that I found in successful entrepreneurs time and time again. And if you want to grow, if you want to maximize your return on life, and to build an amazing business and an even more amazing life, I think these are nine beliefs that will serve you well. So let me know which of these is the most impactful to you. Which one do you struggle with the most? Or do you find the most powerful? Let me know in the comments.

Shoot me a DM, shoot me a email. I’d love to hear from you guys. But until then, stay hyper folks, my friends.