Your Inner CEO: Confidence, man! Confidence!

There’s something inherently heroic about being in business for yourself. It’s the romance of risk taking and the refusal to compromise your dreams for the sake of security. There are also some less purely philosophical rewards for entrepreneurship. As your own boss you can set your own hours. You can take a day off or even a vacation whenever you want. And whatever profits the business makes belong to you alone.

That’s the upside. The not-so-upside is the huge amount of work it takes in order to achieve success. Research shows that most entrepreneurs put in far more than the standard forty hour week. And just as you get the credit (and the profits) for everything that goes right, you also get the blame (and the loss) for whatever goes wrong. So entrepreneurship is definitely not for sissies. The vast majority of entrepreneurs fail before they succeed. There will be lots of false starts before you cross the finish line.

Reserve energy is essential. It’s the ability to keep trying even when you’ve tried and failed. It’s also the power to see when the time has come to let go and try something else. Both those qualities are rare, but the second may be even more unusual than the first.

Not everyone is cut out to play in the National Basketball Association -- especially guys who are five foot nine. Lots of people sing in the shower, but only a few will sing for the Metropolitan Opera. Thinking about this, you will enter a murky area in which inner and outer reality ram into each other. It can be hard to exchange an impractical dream for a more feasible one, doing that is not the same thing as surrender. It may mean learning from your mistakes. It may or may not mean giving up on a certain undertaking, but it means never giving up on yourself.

Having said that, when you do make a promise from the heart -- especially to yourself – many, many worthy goals are achievable regardless of the evidence of the moment. 

It may not happen immediately. In fact, it probably won’t. You’ll make mistakes in your business, in your relationships, and in all other areas of your life. Setbacks are going to happen in. Some of them will be your responsibility. Other times someone else may be at fault. But blame and a victim mentality just waste time and energy. 

Confidence is knowing that you will succeed. If it doesn’t happen today, it will happen tomorrow.  If it doesn't come with this project, it will come with the next one. Confidence is knowing that you can acquire whatever skills and knowledge you do not yet possess.  It is knowing that you are capable of working hard and are tenacious enough to go the distance, however far that may be. It is knowing that as much as you appreciate the cheerleaders in your life, that you would keep going even if nobody believed in you, And sometimes nobody will believe in you. You can be confident of that.

Your Inner CEO: Are you the life of the party?

Do you enjoy being in the company of people you work with? That can be a good way of knowing whether they enjoy being with you.

Marlon Brando was once asked if he considered himself the best actor in Hollywood. That was a very treacherous question, but Brando managed to answer it in a creative way. He said, “It doesn’t matter whether I’m the best actor. I’m the best positioned actor. People know me, and they want me around. I make life interesting for the people around me. It’s fun for me and it’s fun for them. I’m not always a nice guy, but I’m never the same guy twice. That’s why studios want to put me in movies, and that why the public wants to see me there.”

Are you like Brando in this respect? Do you get together with people in your industry even when you don’t have to? If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track, If the answer is no, ask yourself who would you rather be with? Then think about how you can make a career move in that direction.

If you have a difference of opinion with someone, do you feel you always need to win? If so, choose your words carefully. How you express yourself will be remembered long after what you said is forgotten. And remember the key phrase” “Let’s keep talking.”

If someone is the target of another person’s anger, do you instinctively take one person’s side? Don’t rush to judgment. There are two sides to any dispute -- and there’s also the very wise option of not getting involved if you don’t have to.

I’m not saying you should hang around the water cooler. I’m saying you should take a genuine interest in other people – and genuine is the key word. Don’t fake it. Train yourself to actually become interested in other people’s lives. You yourself are of course totally fascinating -- but that doesn’t mean you’re the only one who’s totally fascinating. Show people you understand that!

Your Inner CEO: Who's laughing now?

What's the the single greatest accomplishment of your career? It can be something you did for your company, or something you did for yourself, or maybe even something you did to outfox the competition.

To understand "greatest career accomplishment," let's pretend you're our old friend Bill Gates. Take a stroll through your 48,000 square foot home near Seattle, and ponder the question:what’s the best thing you’ve done in your work and career. 

In terms of business decision making, certainly one of your highlights was licensing your computer operating system to IBM for almost no money -- provided you could retain the right to license the system to other computer manufacturers as well. IBM was happy to agree -- because nobody would possibly want to compete with the most powerful company in the world, right? 

With that one decision, your system and your company became the dominant throughout the world, and you, Bill Gates, were on your way to a net worth of more than sixty billion dollars.

Now let's pretend you're another of our old friends, the late Steve Jobs. As if it were the mirror image of Bill Gates' strategic ploy, your decision early on not to allow the licensing of your operating system was for many years regarded as one of the stupidest acts in the whole history of human commerce. And yet, as time passed and Apple eventually produced a whole line of blockbuster products, your proprietary move hugely paid off. Go figure!

Sometimes it's really hard to tell what works and what doesn't, if we look at a career simply from a profit-making point of view. So try looking at your greatest career achievement from a different angle. Instead of focusing on a decision that helped you make so much money, maybe you’d like to look at the decision to give so much of it away. 

After all, no other person in history has become a philanthropist on the scale of Bill Gates. Nations in Africa and Asia are receiving billions of dollars in medical and educational support. This may not be as luxurious as your big house on Lake Washington with its digitalized works of art, but it’s certainly something to be proud of.

The process of determining your greatest career achievement is a very personal decision. It can be something obvious or it can be something very subtle. But it should make you proud of yourself when you think of. it. Maybe it's something you did many years ago. Or maybe it's something you'll do today.