You are an entrepreneur; no matter if you own an official business or not. The word entrepreneur is defined as: a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk. Your enterprise is you and it requires considerable initiative and risk to accomplish great things!

Every entrepreneur knows that if you want to have a sustainable level of success you have to have patience. It will always take longer than you thought and be harder than you anticipated. Without the discipline of patience you will give up and bail out from your pursuit to success. Our lives our the same way. The journey of a successful life must be built on patience. Thinking you will be an overnight success is not reality. In fact, I once heard it said that anyone can become an overnight success after 20 years of hard work. The journey of success is a daily process of pushing on even when it gets tough.

Patience is the name of the game. But you can’t truly have patience unless you couple it with endurance. Endurance is the ability to have patience, and patience is the ability to endure. So to experience a life as an entrepreneur of you own success you must extract endurance within yourself. You have to reach deep within and live from a place of purpose and dedication to your cause. If you don’t have an unwavering sense of determination you will give up when things get shaky…and things always get shaky. Radio personality Paul Harvey used to say, “You can tell you’re on the road to success; it’s uphill all the way.”

So how do you extract entrepreneurial endurance within yourself?

1) Know Your Purpose

If you don’t have a strong sense of why you’re here and where you want to go you will struggle with endurance. You will be tempted to jump ship as soon as some waves hit your boat. When you know your why you’ll have the will to keep going. If you are struggling with endurance it may be because your purpose is unclear. You should be able to describe your why on the spot in 30 seconds or less. My why is simple: to help people discover the purpose, develop their potential, and do great things! I do all things under the banner of that why statement. In fact, the way I help people do that is through faith, leadership and innovation. The faith to know your purpose, the leadership to develop your potential, and the innovation/creativity to do great things! When you know why you are here no one can stop you from enduring.

2) Get Back Up When You Fall Down (or get knocked down)

The question is not will you get knocked down, the question is what are you going to do when you get kicked down. Someone, somewhere, somehow is going to knock you down to your knees. You will experience set-backs, opposition, enemies, rejection, and a host of other bricks thrown at you. But it’s what you do when these things happen that makes the difference. David Brinkley said, “A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.”

Shake off the dust and get back up. If you think success happens without opposition you have a limiting view of success. The road of success is paved with obstacles. I saw this great illustration of how life works…

Embrace the journey of success no matter what comes your way and keep on keepin’ on…it will pay off.

3) Extract Growth Out Of Everything That Happens

Everything that happens to you can teach you. Life is a classroom, and it is up to us to extract the lessons we can learn. Life is not happening to you, it is happening for you. View everything as an opportunity to grow into a better person. If you have a growth mind-set you extract the potential out of every experience; good and bad. When you take the time to learn from your successes and failures you will gain incredible insight that will propel you forward. Nothing can knock you off course when you view it all as a stepping stone to something greater. Growth is not automatic. Just because you experience something does not mean you learn from it. You must extract specific lessons from your experiences and apply them to your future.