Personality Traits of an Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is a person engaged in a business or in the formulation and implementation of an idea and hence reaps full benefits from its success or suffers when it fails.The word "entrepreneur" is borrowed from the French language and it is believed to have been coined by the celebrated French Economist Jean-Baptiste Say in the year 1800. He defined an entrepreneur as "one who undertakes an enterprise, especially a contractor, acting as an intermediary between capital and labor."Essentially, entrepreneurs are those who start a new businesses or ideas and implement it according to the plan until it becomes a success story that can be embraced or copied by others. But are there any personality traits of an entrepreneur or for that matter a successful entrepreneur? Yes, for one to be a successful entrepreneur, he/she must possess certain unique traits that are a prerequisite for the success of the enterprise.The key personality trait of an entrepreneur is that he must be self-driven and motivated to achieve the utmost in any endeavor he lays his hands on. This motivation should sometimes be to the point of being an obsession. Once he sets goals to be achieved, they must be achieved at any cost.There is nothing that can be achieved without somebody breaking a sweat. Another important personality trait of an entrepreneur is that he must work hard to realize his goals. Working your socks off and setting your eyes on the prize is the only way to come out successfully as a businessman.To embrace a business idea and work to implement it to fruition, one has to be a visionary. This is one of the very important personality traits of an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur must be farsighted and creative when laying the groundwork for his idea. This way, he/she focuses on the bigger and overall picture of the idea to be implemented and the vision brings the passion that drives the successful implementation of the initiative.Another of important personality traits of an entrepreneur is that he has to be a strategist to implement properly an idea that has fermented well in his mind. This involves proper planning and figuring out that everything is in place and is done according to the laid down plan.Entrepreneurs should be independent minded and always think outside the box. They should not be conformist who will be easily swept to toe the line for the sake of agreeing with conventions but rather self-thinkers who follow personal intuition at the expense of popular opinion.Achievers are inundated with endless supply of resilience and oozes with commitment to achieve "to whatever it takes" attitude. Sometimes it takes a short time for an idea to be embraced or to sell to the intended clients but at other times, the entrepreneur must wait a little bit longer before the idea is accepted. Thus commitment and resilience are two other must have personality traits of an entrepreneur.Any engagement has equal chances of succeeding or failing. Entrepreneurs must be risk takers who are aware that their ideas stand to succeed or fail because of reasons that are sometimes beyond their control. The higher the risk, the greater are the benefits. Although entrepreneurs need not take bigger risks as long as they have planned well what they want to do and roll it out as per the laid down plan.These are the personality traits of an entrepreneur. Most famous and successful entrepreneurs have been found to posses these traits.