Entreprenuer
Advertising guru and entrepreneur Siimon Reynolds reckons too many people “tiptoe through life just so they can make it safely to death”.Speaking to freelance writers and creatives recently, Reynolds said ashes or a box await us all so we owe it to ourselves to try and make our dreams in life and our careers a reality.
Reynolds has spent a career breaking new ground.
At just 21 he became the creative director of a major Australian ad agency and has founded a string of ventures including his current agency Love Communications.
Reynolds has also written a book on happiness and being a panellist on Channel 7’s The Dragon’s Den a show where entrepreneurs pitch for venture capital on camera.
Reynolds said he has read close to 700 books and talked to high achievers from business, sports, entertainment and the arts about being successful.
“Based on everything I’ve read and all the people I’ve met, I’ve discovered successful people have four characteristics in common persistence, self-belief, vision and action.
“Successful people fail more often than even failures. However, they do not give up when they fail and they do not take failure personally.
“Colonel Sanders was turned down 1009 times before a restaurant said they would try his secret chicken recipe that led to Kentucky Fried Chicken and Thomas Edison tried 10,000 experiments before he invented the light bulb.”
Reynolds said self-belief was another must for success.
“Beliefs form in your mind like concrete and so we can get tripped up by self-limiting beliefs.”
He recommends people write down what they want to achieve using present tense, such as “I am getting fit”, and read it out every morning and visualise achieving that goal every night.
He said vision is the ability to see what other people don’t.
People with vision are not swayed by well-meaning friends who want to protect them from failure by discouraging them from trying something new.
And action speaks louder than words.
“Persistence, belief, vision and action get one of those right and you will achieve, get all of them right and you will be unstoppable,” Reynolds said.
