business success tools In my last post on “Business success tools”, I shared the single most important character trait that you need to successfully achieve your entrepreneurial or business goals. Today, I’ll share another success-creating attitude that you probably have never heard applied to business success.

Business Success Tool #3 is Surrender

A few months ago, I read an excellent book for entrepreneurs entitled “Rules for Renegades”, by Christine Comaford-Lynch. One of the most intriguing chapter headings in the book was the following instruction:

“Resign As General Manager Of The Universe”

What that chapter headline highlights is the importance of knowing when to surrender for entrepreneurs and business owners. If you’re like the typical entrepreneur, you have probably reached your level of success by your refusal to give up… your refusal to be dictated to…whether by people or by circumstance.

While persistence and a degree of stubbornness is an admirable trait for an entrepreneur, your long-term sanity depends on your ability to know the difference between factors you can control and those you cannot.

This issue goes much deeper than it might first appear, because it’s all about emotional intelligence and emotional discipline. Emotional intelligence is about understanding yourself, your weaknesses, your motivations, your risk thresholds and decision making patterns.

Emotional discipline is about applying your self-knowledge when and where it counts. Not later.

I believe that a final, oft-hidden frontier of emotional discipline for entrepreneurs and business leaders is the ability to surrender what is not in control, and sometimes, to surrender when continuing on (knowing when to quit).

The vast majority of entrepreneurs (myself included) are inclined towards “eternal optimism” and a touch of stubbornness. It takes emotional discipline to change strategy or change directions when the road you’re on clearly will not lead to the ultimate goal.

Many of the most longest surviving businesses in the world have grown on emergent strategies (strategies other than those planned on when they started out). They succeeded because the leaders at the helm had the emotional discipline to change their strategy. Whether that involved changing their target customer, marketplace, or even core competencies/processes, they had the courage to pull the switch.

Mastering the art of surrender will also help you delegate what can profitably be delegated as soon as it is practical to do so. Surrender is as important as Strategy and Sacrifice in your success toolbox.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this series and my conclusions. For your review, here are the first 2 parts of this series:

Business Success Tools Part 1 – Strategy in Success

Business Success Tools Part 2 – Sacrifice as part of success

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