Entrepreneurs need to master many skills in order to create a successful startup. They need to be able to create a product, sell it, raise funds, manage employees, and comply with governmental regulations.
It’s a long list, and you need to be good at all these things if you want to succeed. It’s hard to become an expert in so many different fields, and sometimes you get paralysed and don’t know what to do next.
This is why founders try to find coaches and mentors to help them fill in the gaps in their knowledge; and get a co-founder, so they can create a team together to help the company to grow.
Being Zen Is Important
However, over and beyond all these skills, which include: leadership, negotiation, accounting, engineering, coding, and HR, there is one overarching skill which every founder needs to become proficient at – meditation.
Unless you can learn to control yourself, you are not going be able to control anyone or anything else. You need to control the way you think and the way you behave, which is why success always starts with yourself.
Meditation allows you to slow down your perception of time. It clears your head, so that your thinking improves.
The great thing about meditation is that you can learn this for free. It seems to be simple, but it’s not easy. You do need grit and determination to become good at it. However, if you are willing to work at it, you will get better. The good news is that if you learn how to meditate, you will become a far better entrepreneur.
Meditation will allow you to respond instead of reacting because it creates that moment of clarity in your brain before you do something you may regret later on, because it allows you to control how you behave.
[This post by Dr. Aniruddha Malpani first appeared on LinkedIn and has been reproduced with permission.]
