Are you a successful entrepreneur?

View from the sidelines by Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy

Most often, entrepreneurs find themselves asking the question, Am I successful? The answer to this question depends upon what you define success as. Your own benchmarks define if you have succeeded or haven’t. If you think giving your investor multiple times returns is success and if you have achieved it, it is success. If you have created value for your customer, and you can call it success. At best, success is subjective and varies from person to person.

What society views as successful people are the ones who achieve something beyond normal. Most successful entrepreneurs do not start with stating I will become successful. They aspire to be successful but it is their everyday effort and strategizing and also a bit of opportunistic favors that enabled their success. Some persist and don’t give up, if they sight the opportunity to be successful. If you would have asked Mr. Narayana Murthy way back in 1981 or so when he started, he would have little imagined that he would go on to build a $40 billion enterprise called Infosys with six of his friends and would become world famous and one of the towering icons of Indian business.

What I have observed from the little that I have seen is successful entrepreneurs, especially highly successful ones, started with small successes and built upon it. This could be executing the first project brilliantly that the word of mouth got them more business and eventual high degree of success. Once they scaled, they learnt what it takes to stay at that level. They worked hard to raise their personal capacity to deserve their success. And kept on going up further. This is one type of success.

Some people stopped at a point and kept going at the same level, for going beyond would have meant compromising on other stuff they valued in life like family time or personal time for other activities. Some people did weird things that caught other people’s attention but in realistic terms did not succeed very highly.

What you define as success or measure yourself as a success depends upon your own self, the inner self. Success is accomplishing what you have set out to do and doing it well. It could be a very small accomplishment that others wouldn’t think great but it is no doubt an achievement. Success could not be then measured in monetary terms; becoming wealthy means success but the means to wealth also counts. Ethical success gives peaceful nights and your legacy lives longer.

So don’t measure success by what others think; measure your own success by setting your own goals and achieving them.