10 Success Stories You Might Have Missed

There comes a moment in everyone’s life when we ask ourselves What is my mission? What am I supposed to do to feel accomplished?

Some figure it out very early on while others bounce from job to job changing directions several times until they find themselves on the right path.

Life is a self-discovering journey. We discover what our talents and our abilities are and we learn how to best use them to achieve our mission.

We designed the Success Stories category of our blog to provide you, our viewers with stories of successful entrepreneurs. Their journey is inspirational and can serve as an example for anyone looking to make a difference and change the world for the better.

In the past months, I reached out to every entrepreneur in these stories and invited them to share their mission with us.

If you have subscribed to receive website notifications, you may have read them – they are published on Thursdays.

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For those of you who missed our Success Stories, here is a wrap up of our first ten articles each showcasing an entrepreneur and their journey.

Here are 10 success stories that you might have missed:

1. Alex Govoreanu – Exploring Games With Questo

Are you bored with going to the same tourist attractions?

Do you want to discover exciting places while visiting a new city?

There’s an app for that – it’s called Questo.

Find out how Alex Govoreanu, co-founder of Questo came up with this idea.

2. Mihai-Toader Pasti: Building The Homes of the Future at EFdeN

The future may hold many surprises for mankind but one thing’s for sure: our homes will continue to be important to us.

How will our future homes look like?

Mihai-Toader Pasti has been designing and building greenhouses for the past nine years. Discover where his journey began and where will it lead him.

3. Mădălin Preda (Deqod): On Leadership and Technology

Today’s technology is about AR/VR, Artificial Intelligence, bots, IoT (internet of things) and Blockchain.

Digital innovation empowers thought leaders to unlock greater profitability through strategic technology development.

Find out how Madalin Preda helps his clients achieve their goals through custom software.

4. Javier Goyeneche (ECOALF) – Turning Plastic Sea Waste Into Fashion

Human civilization has known great progress in the last century and technology developments are happening faster than ever before.

But our achievements have come at great costs to our environment: heavy pollution is harming our planet.

Javier Goyeneche, co-founder of Ecoalf has made his mission to clean our planet’s oceans of plastic waste. Discover his story. 

5. Diana Miron (JSLeague) – Changing The World One Block Of Code At A Time

Are you familiar with the saying There is strength in numbers? Communities are powerful; their strength lies in numbers but also in unity.

A leader’s main purpose is to build strong communities around one goal. And that’s exactly what Diana Miron, co-founder of JSLeague has achieved. Read her story.

6. Anna Lowe (Smartify) – Using Tech To Enhance The Way We Experience Art

Ever since the first cave paintings, mankind expressed itself through art. The pervasiveness of technology today had some of us state tech is responsible for the decreasing number of museums visitors all over the world.

Anna Lowe believes it is possible to use tech to help museums.

Discover how Anna and her team at Smartify plan to revive people’s interest in museums.

7. Marius Istrate (UiPath) – Success Is Being Open By Default

As of April 2019, UiPath is valued at $7 billion which makes it one of the highest values enterprise software companies in the world and a leader in the robotic process automation industry.

Discover what makes UiPath so amazingly successful.

8. Cristina Aleixendri Munoz (bound4blue) – Bringing Sustainability To The Shipping Industry

The shipping industry is one of the highest consumers of natural resources while producing an unsustainable amount of pollutant emissions.

Through creativity, innovation and engineering, Christina and her team offer a wonderful solution which is elegant by design, highly efficient and also clean and sustainable.

What is it? Find out! 

9. Henrik Hagemann (CustoMem) – Cleaning Wastewaters With An Innovative Solution

Our civilization has thriving cities. Modern developing cities attract people because they provide them with many opportunities for a better life.

Unfortunately, urban life comes with various challenges such as cleaning wastewater.

Henrik Hagemann, co-founder and CEO at CustoMem has come up with a sustainable solution to clean wastewaters.

10. Briac Barthes – Driving Change Through Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is about recognizing social problems and finding solutions to alleviate those problems and trigger social change.

Briac Barthes has dedicated his life to supporting people to get out of poverty.

Discover how Briac empowers the people in Tanzania through his Iron Battery.

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Do You Want To Be Successful? Listen To These 9 DON’Ts (1 of 3)

There are many articles telling entrepreneurs what to do in order to be successful.

This article offers a different approach.

Do you want to be successful?

Listen to these 9 DON’Ts!

9 DON’Ts to put into practice if you want to be successful

1. DON’T leave things unfinished

Whether it’s a book, a project, an activity – don’t leave them unfinished. Get them done.

Read that book, finish that project, finish your training. If you encounter a problem you don’t know the solution to, take a break but get back to it and find a way to solve it.

It requires patience and resilience. It’s hard but the satisfaction you feel when you finish whatever you started makes up for everything! You feel better about yourself, you feel a sense of accomplishment which leads to a boost in self-confidence and self-worth. It’s psychological: the brain releases small amounts of dopamine that fuel us to get more done!

If you are looking for ways to get every activity on your agenda done, read 5 time management tips & tricks for entrepreneurs.

Successful people never walk away from a project. Even when things get tough, they see it through. You’ll never get anywhere if you get in the habit of giving up or walking away when things aren’t going as planned.

2. DON’T allow technology to distract you

Technology is a two-way street.

It can be a source of great opportunities, business success and personal development. But it can also negatively influence your mental health, self-confidence and work life.

Don’t allow technology to distract you!

Successful people don’t let things that are unimportant get in the way of their goals.

Turn off your smartphone notifications or schedule an hour a day for browsing your social media channels. Don’t let your smartphone overpower your day.

Being glued to your smartphone has been found to be the most damaging to your health. Mental health experts and organizations have done extensive research into this subject and reached alarming conclusions:

• While real-world social networks are positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook is negatively associated with overall well-being;
• Facebook use in one year leads to a decrease in mental health in the following year;
• Liking others’ content and clicking links predicts a subsequent reduction in physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction;
• Well-being is closely linked to the quantity and the quality of social media platforms use.

That is why Facebook introduced last year tools that you can use to limit your time spent on Facebook and Instagram.

3. DON’T dismiss other people’s thoughts or opinions

Successful people don’t dismiss other people’s thoughts or opinions because they think they know better. They are always willing to listen.

Diversity is one of today’s secret of successful companies.

Rocio Lorenzo, management consultant and diversity researcher has found that organisations with women in management are more innovative. She discovered that innovation revenues rise as the share of female managers increases above 20%.

This means keeping an open mind to ideas coming from people from different backgrounds or different cultures. Your company can only benefit from diversity because diversity is one of the four recruiting trends revealed by LinkedIn in its 2018 study.

Diversity used to be a box that companies checked. But today, diversity is directly tied to company culture and financial performance. LinkedIn data shows that 78% of companies prioritize diversity to improve culture and 62% do so to boost financial performance.

Companies that didn’t adapt to changing demographics have realised their talent pools were shrinking. Evidence has shown the benefits of diverse teams: increased levels of productivity, innovation and engagement.

PwC has arrived at the same conclusion when it identified 5 megatrends which will influence the business environment in 2019.

Demographic change is one of the five megatrends. This change shows that businesses need to empower three categories of workers if they want to be successful: women, people aged over 65 and young people. Learn how to take advantage of this social and economic change.

This article will be continued with part 2.

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10 Habits of Successful Entrepreneurs (2 of 2)

This article is delivered in two parts. Read the first part: 10 Habits of Successful Entrepreneurs (1 of 2)

We are all creatures of habit. Some habits can ruin our lives while others can be beneficial to us. Whether we choose to nurture bad habits or good habits, it’s up to us.

6. Break big goals into small steps

Having a big, ambitious goal is wonderful but reaching it may feel intimidating. The secret is to break your big goal into small achievable steps. In this way, you will feel empowered to begin your journey and more motivated each time you achieve your small step.

Stephen Duneier, the former Head of Currency Option Trading at Bank of America, has applied this method throughout his life with impressive outcomes. By breaking his ambitious goals into small tasks and making marginal improvements to the process along the way, he managed to advance in his career, learn German, lose 25 pounds and crochet his way into the Guinness Records – yeah, you read this correctly! Listen to Stephen’s TED talk, you won’t regret it:

7. Experiment

What is the method giant companies use to develop, innovate and grow? The answer is experimentation. According to fastcompany.com, Google and P&G run 7000 experiments a year, Amazon – 2000 and Facebook – more than 100,000! Rapid experimentation is the strategy by which startups and small businesses grow exponentially.

The companies which build their culture with experimentation at its core are winning in the long run.

Read More: The 10,000-experiment rule – your path to success.

8. Reframe failure

What if Elon Musk gave up after so many of his rockets crashed? Instead he said “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you’re not innovating enough” and moved on.

In your entrepreneurial journey you will face failure multiple times. View it as normal, reframe it into a learning experience and keep going. Reframing failure is a process and if you turn it into a habit, it will be greatly beneficial to your personal and professional life.

Read more: How to reframe failure – 6 steps.

9. Monitor your inner talk

Do you have critical thoughts? Like I will definitely fail because I cannot do anything right?

This is your inner talk and it is disempowering. Such negative inner talk is strongly correlated to low self-esteem and self-confidence. A low self-esteem is the expression of a negative image of yourself: you don’t like or love yourself which usually leads to a low self-confidence. Self-confidence means you have little trust in your abilities and you perceive yourself of being less capable than others to perform certain tasks.

Read more: Self-Awareness – 5 tactics to improve it.

10. Never give up

Turn never giving up into a habit.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth found that never giving up is a characteristic related to the temperament of successful leaders and entrepreneurs. She calls it grit.

Grit is perseverance, passion for long-term and the ability to maintain effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity and plateaus in progress.

Read more: This is the no 1 trait that predicts entrepreneurial success.