Some people just seem to be born to succeed. They appear to have an innate ability to grab the world with both hands and get what they want when they want it. They are called lucky, born with a silver spoon, or fortunate. They are publicly admired and secretly envied. They live life on their own terms and in their own time and they are no different than you or I.

Do you find that hard to believe? Well, you shouldn’t. Successful people have simply learned to look at the world in a different way. What’s more, this ability to look at the world differently is completely opposite than the way unsuccessful people look at the world. Those people who are successful have adopted what is often called a “growth mindset”.

The outlook of less successful people is called a “fixed mindset”. The difference between these two approaches is the difference between getting what you want out of life or going without. Therefore, if you truly want to reach your goals, then you need to learn how to adopt a growth mindset.

A person with a growth mindset truly believes that intelligence can be developed throughout a lifetime. In this sense, a person with a growth mindset is always open to learning new things. A person with a fixed mindset, on the other hand, believes that intelligence is static and can never change. This causes a person with a fixed mindset to shy away from learning new things because they don’t want to appear foolish or less intelligent than they are. These two differences make all the difference when it comes to success or the lack thereof. Continue reading →

In business, as in life, it’s all about balance. You need to be able to walk the fine line between too much and not enough in order to achieve success. The trick is not only knowing that you need to balance competing interests in your business, but also realizing when that point of balance has been reached. This is important because when things are in balance, running a profitable shop is a breeze. However, when things are even slightly out of balance, the dangers of losing that profitability start to increase.

What’s more, imbalance tends to breed even more imbalance. This results in the risks of loss increasing exponentially each time things get a little more out of whack. Luckily, it is fairly easy to develop a natural sense of balance when it comes to your business. Let’s take a look at how.

A perfect example of balanced, yet opposing interests are the concepts of risk and responsibility. When you think about it, no two concepts could be more dissimilar. Yet, despite being polar opposites, both risk and responsibility are necessary components of any successful business. In fact, they are so important that both are also necessary components of a successful business mindset. Continue reading →