1. Lance Armstrong: Be disciplined. No business will succeed without a lot of hard work and discipline. Commit to it. Stick with it. Eventually, you’ll reach your destination.
2. Paula Deen: Be yourself (and be bold about it). You will naturally succeed if you build a base of followers who are naturally attracted to your personality. Don’t worry about being liked by everybody. Just let your own unique personality shine through.
3. Mr. Rogers: Be positive. I can’t imagine making it in business without a whole lot of optimism.
4. Ellen Degeneres: Have fun. The daily grind, even when you work for yourself, can be dull at times. Doing something you love, surrounding yourself with clients and connections that energize you, and taking time to appreciate the good things in life make it all worthwhile, and who doesn’t enjoy a good laugh every once in a while?
5. Bill Cosby: Keep learning. I used to be so intimidated by what I didn’t know. But I’ve come to realize that such a list is endless, so I just continue to work at it, and I learn more and more each day about how to build a successful business.
6. Carol Burnett: Be creative. Sometimes you have to improvise. You figure it out, and you come to enjoy the journey.
7. Oprah: Build a platform. To succeed in business, you have to have a group of people who believe in you, who want to hear what you have to say, and who want to support you in everything you do.
8. Jim Carrey & Steve Carell: Don’t take it all so seriously. You’re going to mess up, and you will look silly on occasion. Learn to be OK with that.
9. Maya Angelou: Be resilient. Things will not always be easy, but if you refuse to give up and keep bouncing back, they manage to work themselves out.

Just like certain words bring to mind certain products or companies, certain celebrities make me think of lessons or traits I hope to apply within my business.

Do any lessons or traits come to mind when you think of certain celebrities?

Image from Flickr by j a r r o d

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1. Be goal-oriented, accountable and disciplined. Knowing where you’re going is the first step to achieving your dreams, and a clear vision and plan will help you reach them. Even as conditions change in and around your business, always have a target that directs your daily actions and take consistent and regular steps toward actually reaching it. Have people and tools in place to keep you on track, whether that’s regular check-ins with an accountability partner or weekly reviews to see where you stand, and remember that, at the end of the day, the buck stops with you. No matter what your schedule or approach, you must be disciplined and steadily move in the direction of your goals.
2. Be adaptable, resilient and determined. Change is inevitable, and there will be plenty of times when you’ll need to correct course and modify your plans so that your business isn’t left behind. Be ready and willing to accommodate changes in the marketplace and be careful not be so rigid that you miss opportunities for growth and improvement. In addition to being adaptable, it’s important to be OK with failure. “Fall seven times, get up eight,” as the proverb goes. Mistakes and failure come with the territory of being a successful entrepreneur, and if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not putting yourself out there enough. Being in business for yourself will push you to the breaking point sometimes, so you’ll have to be determined and remind yourself how far you’ve come. Find support through other entrepreneurs and small business owners who can help you through difficult times and challenges. It takes a great deal of commitment and dedication to see a business to success, but if you stick with it, you will eventually get there.
3. Be creative and open-minded. Solving problems, promoting your businesses, and expanding into new markets will require a good dose of creativity and imagination. Without it, every setback and obstacle will seem insurmountable. Look for possibility everywhere. Think of how other industries deal with issues you are facing and find ways to adapt those solutions to work for your business. Stay flexible, make room for a variety of possibilities, and believe that there’s always a way.
4. Be confident and optimistic. You’ll come across plenty of naysayers along your way to success, so it’s important to become very selective with your hearing and about whose advice you seek. Find mentors and other big thinkers who you can call on for inspiration and advice, and most importantly, believe in yourself and your abilities.
5. Be persistent. There will be plenty of times when you just have to stick with an idea long enough for it to take hold. It takes patience and a whole lot of the same thing over and over to finally make progress.
6. Be an avid learner. So much can be learned from the experience of others, and fortunately, there are thousands of books out there from entrepreneurs who have achieved success, many available for free at your local library or inexpensively through book-trading sites like PaperBackSwap. One new book every two weeks is over two dozen by the end of a year!
7. Be ambitious and driven. Without motivation, it will take a lot to justify the hard work and time required to get a business off the ground. No one should care more about your success than you, and if you’re not driven to achieve your goals, every obstacle will provide the perfect opportunity to quit.
8. Be a self-starter. Neither your mom, your teacher, nor your boss will be there to make sure you show up and do the work for your business, so you have to be self-starting, making sure that you have regular, dedicated time to move the big rocks each day.
9. Be passionate. Above all, you should be passionate about your work. It’s a choice to go into business, so why not choose something you love to do? There’s no reason to dread starting a new day, so find something you’re passionate about and build your business and life around it.

What other qualities do you think successful entrepreneurs must possess in order to build a thriving business? How are you learning to encompass those traits?

Image from Flickr by Hamed Saber

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You knew this was going to be first up, and it’s probably the single biggest factor in remote working success. Discipline isn’t just about staying focused when it’s a nice day outside and no one really knows what you’re doing. It’s also about keeping reasonable and appropriate working hours, and keeping commitments outside of work as well as within. Generally, I think of discipline as the thing that lets you hold up your end of the deal you made with your employer, as well as the one you made with yourself.

I tend to think of my time as being fairly compartmentalized: When it’s work time, I do work, and that’s pretty much all I do and think about. And though I do sometimes think about work outside designated hours, I never actually look at work-related stuff in my downtime. It’s a sort of knack I’ve developed. Being able to become absorbed by work can be very handy for the remote worker — so long as you can snap out of it at knock-off time.

2. Passion

You have to care about something to work remotely. You probably need to be passionate about what you do, or the temptation to slack off my soon prove too great. But if you don’t harbor a wild enthusiasm for your job, you’ll have to have a vivid appreciation of what remote working gives you: perhaps it’s more time in your day to do other things, perhaps it’s simply a life without partitions.

I’m fortunate in that I have both a passion for what I do, and for the things working remotely affords me. It’s not all roses, and there are things I miss about working in an office, but overall, I love doing what I do, and doing it remotely.

3. Drive

Motivation really is crucial for remote workers, but especially so for those who aren’t on a salary. We all know how hard it can be to get out of bed on Monday morning; it’s even harder when bed is five meters from work. And you need serious, world-class drive to get up and going.

I get around the big motivation issues by making them non-negotiable. I always start my workday at the same time — that way, I don’t have to make decisions about whether or not to spend another half hour watching TV before I begin work, or how much time to take for lunch. If I have decisions to make, it’s all too tempting to take the “easy” option rather than just sitting down and getting on with it.

4. Support

Perhaps you have a great boss and some cool colleagues who make it very easy to work remotely. Maybe you have a sterling family, who respect your work time and space and give you lots of latitude. Possibly you have a geeky neighbor who helped you set up your network and now acts as your tech support in return for occasional lawn mowing.

The point is, remote working is impossible without support at some point in the process. When I sat down and thought about it, I realized that I had all these supports — and more — helping me to make the most of the remote working experience. And I thank them for that on a regular basis!

What are the characteristics that make you a successful remote worker? Which do you think is most important?

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