Three ways to tell if you are excelling in the right area

Passion is Everything | Kodai
Passion is Everything | Kodai (Photo credit: rAmmoRRison)

I was looking at an interview in a leadership magazine about Whitey Basson and saw his answer to a question about advice to leaders. He is the managing director and chief executive of Shoprite Holdings Ltd, the largest food retailer in Africa.

If you want to become a leader or entrepreneur, you must evaluate yourself “genetically” to establish if a certain field is one in which you can excel, he says. You need to evaluate yourself first and secondly it needs to be all about passion. Apart from this, hard work and much commitment, including the support of your family, co-starters and people with whom you work, is important.

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Have you identified your key drivers?

English: Mavericks Surf Contest 2010. Français...
English: Mavericks Surf Contest 2010. Français : Édition 2010 du concours de surf de Mavericks. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have a friend who’s always been interested in sports. He’s played golf with a close to scratch handicap, was the club champion in tennis and was a provincial surfer. In his middle years he developed a large mid-drift and it looked as though he was going to be carrying these couple of extra kilograms around with him for the rest of his life.

But over the past year he has started a brand-new sport – running. From small beginnings, running a few kilometres each morning, he has developed his running, his determination, passion, careful exercise and diet to a level where he now can run up to 16 km at one stretch. It’s amazing to look at how his weight has peeled away and in its place is a healthier, vigourous looking body. His face shines with a new glow and he now possesses the energy to do what he wants with his life. Continue reading “Have you identified your key drivers?”

Does starting a business make you an entrepreneur?

Limonadedmg
Limonadedmg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The other day I saw this article that add the following headline “Starting a business doesn’t make you an entrepreneur: study”. The piece made this claim as a summary to a study by two Swedish academics from an industrial economics research institute but quite frankly got the whole thing wrong.

What these two Swedish academics were really saying was that when the rate of self-employment in the country is high, the rate of billionaire entrepreneurs is lower. When they compared for correlation between the presence of billionaire entrepreneurs and the rate of self-employment in a country, they came to a surprising conclusion: countries with many successful entrepreneurs had lower rates of self-employment.
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