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Understanding the skills and traits of successful entrepreneurs helps sharpen your own focus, guiding which areas you'll need to focus on to improve your own chances of success.

For example, basic coding skills have become incredibly important for entrepreneurs, who need to understand the technology even if they're not actually doing the coding work themselves. Thankfully, the barriers to building those skills are low, and you can easily take coding courses for free online.

It might be more difficult to develop the characteristics of an entrepreneur most likely to succeed, like persistence and the ability to accept failure, but it can be done. Often, these personality traits are learned over time and only through experience, which is why you may see founders succeeding only after they've failed many times!

Other skills to focus on in order to increase your startup's chance of success include developing your ability to make data-driven decisions, marketing savvy and accounting or bookkeeping. These are universal skills that will serve you well in any venture you attempt, whether you're actually having to do much of the legwork yourself in your early days, or simply needing to understand how the different parts of your business work in order to hire the best talent and make the most informed decisions.

This recent infographic from open university Udacity serves as a visual list of character traits and skills most critical to entrepreneurial success. Its creators interviewed experts including Eventbrite's Julia Hartz, Mark Cuban, and Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky, and shared their best advice for entrepreneurs as part of the infographic.

Check it out:

1. Persistent and determined.

2. Planner

3. Risk taker

4. Imaginative

5. Craves learning

6. Smart self-promoter

7. Accepts failure

8. Basic coding skills

9. Wireframing

10. Can make data-driven decisions

11. Accounting & bookkeeping

12. Articulate communicator

13. Marketing savvy

14. Business administration and planning.

Image credit: Udacity
About The Author
Originally published on Inc.com

Larry Kim is the CEO of Mobile Monkey and founder of WordStream. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

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14 Skills Successful Entrepreneurs Need to Have - Marketing and Entrepreneurship - Medium

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Understanding the skills and traits of successful entrepreneurs helps sharpen your own focus, guiding which areas you'll need to focus on to improve your own chances of success. For example, basic coding skills have become incredibly important for entrepreneurs, who need to understand the technology even if they're not actually doing the coding work themselves.