“Positive thinking is not rose-tinted glasses”: 4 success rules by Andrew Pometun
Andrew Pometun is an entrepreneur with a rich track record. His business portfolio includes a script builder, online shops, his own consultancy agency, and over 100 marketing projects with major international companies. Today he is known primarily as a business speaker, the author of such books as “Business Relationships Digital Transformation” and “Marketing for Love”, and the founder of the targeting sales accelerator Selvery. Andrew Pometun spoke about the four rules of his success that are universal for any entrepreneur.
Every person has their own rules. One cannot get through the day without a cup of coffee in the morning. Another always saves a certain percentage of his earnings in a special investment account. Another never says ‘no’. Entrepreneurs in particular often make rules for themselves. Some do not do business with people who hide their name on social networks. Some don’t eat meat before an important meeting. Some even believe in the magic of numbers or signs. Business, indeed, looks like a special religion, where failure to follow personal rules threatens losses and expulsion from the club. And while most of life’s rules are different for everyone, I am sure that there are universal rules for success. These are the rules that have become my rules of life.
Rule 1: Persistence
Imagine that one person mustered the courage to quit a job he didn’t like and started his own business. Let’s say he opened a store. But customers did not know about the new outlet, did not come, and our hero fell into despondency and went bankrupt. What’s wrong with this story? The failed entrepreneur didn’t have persistence.
Persistence is the foundation of everything, in business. In this, I completely agree with the idea of the movie “The Founder.” You can sell multimixers, be a pianist in a jazz band, or a real estate agent, but without the persistence you will drown in the swamp of your own despair and never leave it again. Any defeat is a test of the ability to rise. Any missed blow points to weaknesses in the defense. Failure is always only a temporary condition, and without persistence you will never find other ways to solve problems, take risks, or engage in ventures that can lift you to the heights of your desired success.
Rule 2: Proactivity
It may seem that proactivity is synonymous with persistence, but it is not. There is a huge gap between these entrepreneurial terms. The fact is that persistence is the ability to achieve a result, while proactivity is the measure that increases the possibility of a result. Let me explain.
If you read interviews with business founders, very often you will find approximately the same statements that the result is a coincidence, that “the market situation was then”, that “we were lucky at that time”. Being proactive allows you to get rid of this context and succeed regardless of the time of year, the market situation, or international relations. The more proactive you are, the more likely you are to be in the right situation.
For example, the idea of creating a Selvery Targeted Sales Accelerator for sellers from large companies with multiple customer segments came to me in 2017. I could have dropped everything and gone headfirst into this innovative project, pioneered it, and then could have failed, despite all my persistence. Because in 2017, the market was not yet ready for ABS platforms. But the idea soaked me, and so I was constantly proactive. In parallel with other things, I tested the validity of the hypothesis about the demand for such a platform and created my own account-based selling methodology, the basis for Selvery’s work. In 2020 the project was launched and, again thanks to activity, got its first clients: Megafon, VTB, MTS, and others.
Rule 3: Implementation of what have learned.
There’s hardly a business coach or textbook that doesn’t talk about the importance of entrepreneurial learning.”Learning is light,” courses, internships, intensives, MBAs… A Google query for “entrepreneurship education” alone yields 116 millions results. But most sources are silent about one important nuance.
Any training is, at best, small-scale work. At worst, it is theoretical work at all. Why are there so many opponents of popular training for entrepreneurs? Because most training does not give practice. They provide no risk, no in-house experience, no practice.
The process of continuous entrepreneurial learning needs to be built out of two stages. The first stage is actual learning. At this stage a person is open to any knowledge he considers important for his business. He absorbs, is interested, learns, accumulates information.
The second stage is implementation. This stage comes when the person considers the amount of information acceptable to start some certain actions. For example, “learn marketing” is an indefinite action, while “solve a business problem with a marketing campaign” is just right because of its concreteness. During the application of knowledge a person closes himself off to any information, he uses only what he already has in his head thanks to the previous stage, he becomes an expert in what he applies. But no matter how much he has learned, there will always come that moment when the knowledge is not enough. Then the person stops acting, opens himself again to new things — and enters a new round of the cycle of continuous learning.
Theoretical learning is a sure path to the couch troops with the title of honorary loser. The implementation of knowledge is the only way to a well-deserved expertise.
Rule 4: Positive thinking
Positive thinking may seem like trivial advice. But it’s important to realize that because of all those couch experts today, this phrase is losing its true meaning, and young entrepreneurs are dismissing it as an obvious truism. But positive thinking is not rose-tinted glasses. It’s not an auto-training, “Everything will be okay, because I’m the most charming and attractive!”
Positive thinking is a paradigm shift in how we perceive things. When an unpleasant surprise happens in anyone’s life, they often clench their fists and shout to the sky, “Why me?!” Really, why? Why is anything happening at all? And no one knows. The man swears at the world, wastes his energy on useless actions, figuring out what is impossible to figure out.
With positive thinking, a person no longer asks himself why exactly the failure happened to him. From “why me?” his paradigm changes to “what should I do now?” Instead of futile and useless swearing, he begins to use the situation at hand.
Let’s say a pipe bursts, a warehouse floods. The negative-thinking entrepreneur starts to feel sorry for himself, scold his subordinates, punish those he thinks are to blame, and count the losses. The positive-thinking entrepreneur asks himself what he should do now, what resources he can and should use, where he should turn, so that something like this doesn’t happen again. He doesn’t waste time with meaningless questions, the answers to which will not yield anything. He hires lawyers and sues the landlord, he plays around afterwards in social networks and announces “wet discounts” for the goods that can still be sold, he hires a professional foreman who can keep an eye on the old pipes. In general, he turns a problem into a puzzle whose solution brings positivity to his business, life, and relationships with others.
You don’t have to think that everything is going to be okay. “Everything” by definition cannot be good. But how you deal with an unfortunate incident determines the rest of your life.
These four rules have saved my career, my business life, more than once. I make no claim to their authorship or priority, because everyone has the right to define for himself a set of rules to live by. But I can say with confidence that they can make the life of any entrepreneur more productive and interesting. And are these not indicators of success?
