The Recipe for Business Success: Why Patience, Determination and Willingness to Learn are Paramount

The pyramids weren’t built in one day and they certainly weren’t completed with people throwing tantrums, giving up or refusing to look at innovative ways to create a masterpiece. In a way, constructing one of the greatest structures ever created is the same as building a business. Nobody goes into business with failure as a goal. Every entrepreneur – from the fledgling young marketer selling lemonade on a makeshift stand to the newbie franchise owner to the home-based entrepreneur – has high hopes and dreams for his efforts. It is said that every business begins with one dream. What you do with that dream will mean the difference between success and failure. Here is a three-point recipe for business success that any entrepreneur should learn to recognize and use:

Patience
Warren Buffett, the consummate investor, was a very patient man. When he started investing in 1956, he was not driving and fighting for stocks on Wall Street. Instead, he performed trading from Omaha, Nebraska. Strangely enough, when technology stocks became the rage, Buffett didn’t jump on the bandwagon. And yet, he still became one of the richest men of his generation.

How did he do it? By being patient.

In well calculated steps, Buffett purchased undervalued stocks at low prices. He then waited until their value increased and then sold them at prices that were considerably higher than their original price, earning nice, fat profits in the process.

Buffett's success is proof that patience is a key component of the recipe for business success. Patience is a multi-faceted aspect and although it is often a characteristic, it is also a skill that can be learned. Consider, for example, how people start their businesses and then expect immediate return on investment. What they forget is that most businesses very often do not automatically yield profit. They actually go through a period of gestation where very little happens.

If you do not have the patience to see your business through, it will ultimately fail. By having patience, you become meticulous, attentive to important details and think logically. Impatient people are much more impulsive, jumping to conclusions, making hasty decisions that ultimately cost their business. A patient mindset has a tendency to use more common sense, a very essential component of business success. A patient businessman is also more likely to be prepared, have goals in place, understand his strengths and weaknesses, establish his resources and needs and know how to manage them.

Determination
Another important recipe for business success is determination. It doesn’t only refer to a pit bull tenacity of believing in your dreams and hanging on to them, it also entails well-calculated strategies of following through. Consider the most successful businessmen of the last 100 years and you will see that their business success could be attributed to their determination to complete their goals. These people simply never gave up, regardless of the seemingly impossible or even embarrassing situation they were in at the moment.

Determination is not about being blindsided. Instead, it refers to a person's ability to find a place for his goals and dreams to grow. He can look at a given situation, assess it, compare his skills and resources against it and then go for it.

Determination is an essential ingredient in the recipe for business success. According to Jerry Gonsiewski, Coldwell Banker Residential's managing broker, it's important for businessmen, especially new ones, to have a good plan, follow it and then persevere. The results, according to Gonsiewski, allow determined entrepreneurs to enjoy substantial rewards.

Willingness to learn
Business is about change. This is why businessmen pay premium for research just to get a hold of information pertaining to trends and forecasts. As an entrepreneur, you must have the willingness to learn everything there is to know about your industry, the nature of your business and how it can thrive in the environment it is in. Any businessman who refuses to acknowledge the effect of the market, the business environment and the consequences of trends may find that doing business is like swimming upstream. It has worked for some but for most people, it meant the end of the line.

To achieve business success, every entrepreneur must be willing to learn his trade, find out about progress in related subjects and see whether or not these changes will affect his business. It keeps him on his toes, lets him think and act proactively and allow him to be prepped and ready for anything that might occur, whether it's good or bad.