10 Survival Skills You Need to Make It as an Entrepreneur [2024]

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Do you want to get better results and faster?

As an entrepreneur, you earn money by using your brain. Or maybe you have a job working for someone else. You still need the same skills to get ahead.

There are some necessary skills you have to master.

Those skills fall into 4 areas:

• Getting input,
• processing the information,
• generating output, and
• leading others.

When you improve your skills, then you will get the same results in less time than your competitors. Then you have the luxury to choose what you do with that time. You can get even better or spend that time with your friends and family.

For example, if you improve your writing speed, then you can cut hours from your workday.

1. Learn to Be Really Fast on the Computer

Tech skills seem like something so blindingly obvious that it shouldn’t be on this list. Something akin to saying you have to know the alphabet. But this is the foundation of most activities of today’s entrepreneur.

Learn all the keyboard shortcuts, master the browser, and Google search. Use the right-click on your mouse. Even if you are using an Apple device. It’s really painful to see people stumbling through their computer’s user interface, wasting valuable time on mundane operations.

Pro tip: Connect your phone screen to your computer so you can use a mouse and keyboard when working with your phone on Instagram or other mobile apps.

2. Reading More and Faster

The faster you read, the more information you can process.

Of course, there’s a limit on how much you can absorb, but reading is the fastest way to take in information. When you ask people, most of them say that they would prefer video to get information. But when you just have to get the most information into your system in the shortest time possible, nothing beats reading. Learn to read faster.

Most of us think we can read. Reading is one of my weak spots. I process information slowly. I read slowly; I listen to audiobooks slowly. I need to improve my reading speed.

Great Willpower Books, Motivation, and How We Think: These books have a foundation in science. Check them out to help you strengthen your willpower, build habits, and motivation.

3. Listening Without Criticizing

Listening involves truly concentrating on what your conversation partner has to say.

Commit to focus on the other person and fight the urge to think about what you will say next. Try to understand the content, feel the emotion, and see the point of view of the other side. Read more about how to truly listen to someone.

One tool that helps you to shut off the chatter in your head is meditation. Meditation will make you calmer and more attentive and helps to listen to what others have to say. The speakers will notice that and consider you more likable.

We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say. ~ Zeno of Citium

4. Writing Every Day

Writing is a superpower! You will get:

• clarity of thought,
• better ideas, and
• deeper understanding of the ideas you are working with.

The people who write regularly run circles around those who don’t in expressing themselves and being persuasive.

Writing is the primary form of output for some time to come.

Writing on a basic level means that you know how to construct sentences and have a general grasp of grammar. I still struggle with that. My English is self-thought, and I have never seen a single grammar rule for this language.

If you read a lot, you will get better at writing, too. Reading brilliant authors will influence your use of the language and make you a better writer.

If you can handle that, move on to writing material that makes sense and influences the reader. Think about the flow of the content you are writing. Is the structure making sense and lead the reader from one concept to another while making them see your point?

Want to be a better writer?

Write a lot — every day.

Writing is difficult all the time; the thing is to learn something every day. ~ Richie Benaud

What’s the future of writing?

Yes, the voice recognition is getting better by leaps and bounds, but writing still has some special aspects to it. It slows you down and you will think deeper about the subject. Deeper thinking leads to better results.

5. Typing Speed

Typing is a foundational skill for writing.

Learn to touch type.

Try to get your typing speed to at least 300 characters per minute (CPM). You will not be typing at that speed all the time, but this is a good milestone to measure yourself against.

When typing, you also have to think about what you are writing. The thinking part brings your average writing speed down, even if the bursts of writing exceed 300CPM. Typing, like any skill, will fade away. In the next 10 years or so, voice recognition software will get good enough that you can use it to dictate and edit the content you are creating. Use this free software to learn touch typing.

Speed is the reason I suggest you do most of your writing on a physical keyboard. On-screen keyboards are just so much slower.

As I mentioned in earlier, the typing may become less important, but there’s more to writing than just speed.

6. Public speaking

Speaking in front of others is the essential skill of influencing people.

If it’s a sales meeting with only a few people or a conference keynote with the audience in the hundreds, speaking clearly and confidently is the key to master interpersonal communications. Public speaking is one of the most potent tools in your arsenal when you are leading people or want others to see your way.

Fear of public speaking is up there with the fear of death. The frightening part of public speaking is the fear of rejection. People are afraid that nobody will like them. Even if you are the best performer in the world, there will be some who don’t like you!

What to do to conquer that fear of public speaking?

Just do it!

Every time an opportunity presents itself, stand up, and volunteer to speak. Seek out opportunities to speak in front of an audience.

There is no other way to get better and more confident.

7. Presentation of your messaga

Presentation skills are to speaking a little as typing is to writing.

There is a saying about presentations.

Death by Powerpoint.

Don’t copy and paste your Word document onto slides. Make something emotionally engaging.

Presentation is the technique, the slide design, and other technical aspects of public speaking. What people see as supporting elements of your message may often influence them more than the words. Use big fonts, emotional images, lots of colors, make it stand out.

As an example, check out my 30-day challenges presentation to get an idea of how to create slides (keep in mind that there’s too much text on the slides as they were specially made for reading not presenting).

Here’s what Guy Kawasaki has to say about presenting:

Put yourself out there. Raise your hand every time the opportunity presents itself.

Pro tip: If your work involves slide presentations. Learn presentation design and make your slides yourself. Creating your slide deck will take at least 10 times the time you present your material. All this time is learning time. You will know your stuff inside out. Presentation checklist:

• Large images
• Large type
• No tables
• No pasting your Word doc onto Powerpoint and calling it a presentation
• Put your slides on the screen and go to the back of the room. What do you see? Fix that!

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. ~ Mark Twain

8. Leadership

Whatever the challenge. Stand up or raise your hand.

Volunteer for everything.

When people see anything that slightly resembles leadership and direction, they will usually follow. Just like public speaking, leadership needs practice. Use every opportunity to take the lead.

Another part of leadership is standing up for your team. If someone screws up and you have to take the heat, you will. You can later discuss what happened with the person responsible in private. You will get the reputation that people can depend you on and deal with the problem instead of looking for scapegoats.

The hard part is thinking and deciding. When your group is making decisions, take the lead, come up with ideas, and go first. As long as you continue to make sense, people will follow. Whenever possible, people try to avoid thinking, and they are delighted if someone else will do the thinking for them.

When you put yourself in these situations, you will get more visibility. Visibility will lead to more responsibility. Standing out may seem like a risky thing, but it’s the only way to grow as a leader.

Fake It Till You Make It [Self Improvement 29] Act as if you know what you are doing. Read about how to force your body to change and make your mind follow suit.

9. Time management

All your efforts will fall apart if you can’t meet the deadlines.

If you don’t get things done when expected, you soon find that no one will trust you with anything.

Always be on time.

In rare cases, when your planning doesn’t work out, communicate that early and frequently. Start finding solutions to the problems before they happen. Always plan buffers for your activities and add them at the end of the project, not each sub-task. This way, you will gain the buffer time if the sub-task is completed on time and will be able to use that on a task that has serious problems.

Better three hours too soon, than one minute too late. ~ William Shakespeare

When you are working on larger projects, always keep in mind that the task will take twice as much time as you originally planned. The reason is usually friction, misunderstandings, and red tape.

However, also keep in mind that deadlines are arbitrary.

When you miss a deadline, the sky will not fall. Trust and expectations get damaged, but this is something you can work out beforehand. Only on very rare occasions are there any real problems related to missing deadlines.

Give yourself flexible deadlines to deliver the best result you can.

Impossible deadlines will demoralize you. Impossible deadlines also reduce the quality of your work. There’s a huge difference if you complete something in 24 hours or in 24 hours over three days.

Give yourself deadlines you can meet. However, don’t make them too easy or you will not grow.

Pro tip: Make promises to people who will hold you accountable. Public deadlines work better than self-imposed ones.

10. Problem-solving

Take these skills and solve interesting problems.

Concentrate on reality and circumstances. Stay calm and driven in all situations. Build yourself a reputation of a person who gets things done and delivers what’s promised.

And then… deliver more. This way, you ensure that you will never run out of exciting work and things to do.

Besides the skills above, be curious, ask all the questions, always try to find out more, and expand your horizon. Caring about what you do helps you stay motivated. Develop a bias for action. Break the rules and disregard tradition as you can’t often solve new problems with old tools.

Next step in building your problem-solving skills is to train yourself to come up with ideas. Take 15 minutes at the beginning of the day and write down 10 ideas. The ideas can be about anything:

• a problem you need to solve at work
• list of gift ideas for your partner
• how to spend time on the weekend

Whatever you like!

The ideas don’t even have to be good. The exercise will build your idea muscle, and in a few months, you will be able to come up with tons of ideas on cue.

The idea-exercise also has an added benefit of building your willpower reserves. Be persistent keep going long after others would have given up. Finish what you started or as Steve Jobs said, “Real artists ship!”

A problem well put is half solved. ~ John Dewey

11. Preparation and practice

You can practice all the skills above in the safety of your home.

1. Whenever you use your computer, find ways to do it faster. Keyboard’s usually faster than the mouse, and shortcuts beat pointing and clicking.
2. Take 30 minutes every day to read using speed reading techniques, you’ll become a faster reader.
3. Practice listening. Do it with your spouse, friends, or co-workers. Do it as a 30-day challenge to get going.
4. Get feedback on your writing, create a personal blog, or start writing content for your business.
5. Exercise your typing speed. Get a full-sized keyboard.
6. Give a 15-minute speech in front of a mirror and record yourself with your phone.
7. Create slides for the presentation in front of the mirror.
8. From now on, take initiative in all situations. Maybe not every situation, but start from small things and move up from there.
9. Do a reality check with your to-do list every week. Do you allow enough time for all the tasks? Do you need to do all the tasks?
10. Write down 10 ideas every day.

You are not born with these abilities. You have to practice.

Start doing it today!

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Image: Lighting Department stenographers, 1935 by Seattle Municipal Archives
Cover image by kaboompics

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