IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED

The qualities needed to succeed in business are myriad. There are some core ones that run through all sectors and professions like a spine. The ability to communicate effectively with others. The ability to listen, absorb and impart information from and to others. Likewise, the capacity to delegate and be delegated to.

This bedrock of skills is built on by academic qualifications and inputs, and the final tempering of professional experience.

But outside of the core skills that are deployed on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis, what are some of the skills we can develop that exist outside of our basic remit? The ones that allow ordinary people to become excellent, in whatever field they work in?

Some of these skills might be ones that we might think do not ordinarily cross our path, but ones that circumstances force our hand to, for us to be able to overcome the barriers in our way.

Take the example of Sir James Dyson. An engineer by training. Apparently frustrated by the suction power of his Hoover, he looked to apply the concept of using a cyclonic affect in a household cleaner which required no internal bag. After five years and thousands of prototypes, he had a viable product So far, so good.

This should have easily laid the path to a fortune, But the world wouldn’t listen, and Dyson got short shrift from the domestic appliance manufacturers.

Dyson, more engineer than entrepreneur by inclination, had to go it alone. It was here he took the tenacity and resilience learnt while tinkering with thousands of prototypes and applied it to pushing his product. The journey to success began in Japan.

We’re not all destined to become billionaire inventors, but the lesson we can draw from Dyson, is that none of us can see the entire journey ahead. But the better equipped we are to be pulled from our comfort zone and are able to call on previously unused skills, the easier it will be.