In my quest to find great role models for my liber8yourbusiness programme, I’ve found myself talking to all sorts of very successful business people lately.  A number of things strike me.  One is that successful people seem to be very generous with their time.  People with more zeros in their bank balance than I’d care to mention and business empires to run are still happy to sit down and share their experiences with me over coffee.  Why is that?  I can only believe that with success comes a desire to see others succeed too.  When you have done something well, you like to teach someone else how to do it well too. Isn’t that why good soccer players like to coach others? And good scrabble players like nothing better than to teach a lowly letter scorer their strategies (thanks Mum, summer afternoons in Martinborough might pay off one day!).

Another phenomenon I’ve uncovered is that very successful business people have some very similar traits.  As I thought about the various success stories I’d heard, some common themes became clear.  I put my theories to the test and ran a quick survey with some of the most successful business people I know, asking them what they thought were the most common traits for people in their position.

Here’s the top 10 list of what very successful business people have in common.

1. A vision for success
2. Passion
3. Belief
4. Clear goals
5. A plan
6. Action
7. Determination
8. Willingness to fail
9. Wealth positive not money negative
10. Desire to give back

I’ll expand on each of these in turn in my next blogs.