Photo: Richard Branson in Germany at the digital convention of Cologne by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0
by Arabella Walton
Richard Branson is one of the most successful entrepreneurs alive today. He is a businessman, investor, author and philanthropist. He founded the Virgin Group in 1970 and has since gone on to write numerous business and autobiographical books and dedicated much of his life to philanthropy.
Here’s a list of 6 of his top rules for success!
Follow your dreams
One of the most important first rules of success is to follow your dreams and believe in yourself. This Richard Branson tip is about helping you live a happier and more fulfilling life where you believe in yourself and your idea!
Hard work is a necessary part of any success story. However, it’s difficult to work hard when you lack passion. When you go after what you love, you’re more likely to enjoy the work that you put in and as a result, working hard becomes easy. Those who enjoy what they do will always outdo those who don’t.
Keep setting new challenges
One of the key rules of success is to always aim to better yourself and your ideas. A fantastic way to ensure you’re always striving to be better is to constantly set new and difficult challenges for yourself. Richard Branson suggests a great way of doing this by writing down your ideas. Writing your thoughts down helps you to keep on track of your goals and evaluate your progress as you go.
It’s also important to make your challenges difficult. If you set yourself easy challenges, you’ll never know what you’re capable of achieving. However, if you set yourself extreme challenges, you’ll work harder to reach your goal and achieve more than if you set yourself something easy.
Get out of the house and have fun
One of Richard Branson’s top rules for succeeding in life is to always have fun! He states that “fun is one of the most important – and underrated – ingredients in any successful venture” If you’re not having fun in life, then it’s very hard to be inspired and have fun in business.
Branson describes simply getting out of the house as one of the best ways to experience fun. When you get out of the house you meet new people, hear interesting stories and have new exciting experiences you can not have while sitting in front of a TV. If you have a positive balance of work, socialising and relaxation time, you’ll feel more happy while at work.
Delegate
Richard Branson states “The art of delegation is one of the key skills any entrepreneur can master”. He suggests that delegation allows you to pass on the task that might not be your strong suit as well as allowing you to spend more time on the tasks you excel in. Branson also highlights that delegation also leaves some free time for you to spend with family and friends which he reiterates is important for a happy life.
Realistically, you can’t do everything. For your business to be successful, it is better for you to be focusing on what you’re good at and what you enjoy. If you find someone who knows how to do the other stuff and enjoys doing it, your productivity will increase and you’ll be able to take your business to the next level.
Prove critics wrong
Within the corporate world, others are always going to doubt and criticise the things you do. Branson’s top tip for this is to not get angry but to prove them wrong and achieve everything they never thought you could.
People will always doubt you. They won’t be able to see your vision quite as you do. And quite frankly, they probably don’t want you to succeed while they don’t. There’s no use being sad or angry about it. The only thing you can do is prove them wrong. What people say doesn’t matter; it’s how you respond that does.
Never give up
Our last tip from Richard Branson and possibly the most important is to never give up! We all have moments where we think something is too much and we want to give up. Branson’s rule to combat these negative thoughts is to simply brush yourself off and keep working! If you work hard and believe in yourself, you can achieve anything!
You might not succeed the first time or the second or the third but you will eventually. You learn more from failure than success. Every time you fail, you approach the next attempt wiser than the previous one. Failure is not to something to be scared of. It happens. Giving up shows more about a person than failure.
These Richard Branson tips have been sourced from Virgin Group’s site.
This story is a part of Bookipi’s new series about inspiring entrepreneurs. We hope this series will help motivate you to achieve your dreams like the successful entrepreneurs in this series.
Kick start your entrepreneurial career with Bookipi.
