This Is the 1 Quality Entrepreneurs Need to Be Successful

If there’s one thing that has enabled Man Crates CEO and founder Jonathan Beekman to be successful as an entrepreneur, it’s hustle.

In a recent interview with Stanford‘s Graduate School of Business, the founder of the gift company explained how he’s “been wired for entrepreneurship” since he was a kid.

In the entrepreneurial world, “hustle” goes by many names — grit, perseverance, determination, work ethic — but they all mean the same thing: “It means willing to make sacrifices to do whatever it takes to achieve results. If you’re someone who has skill and hustle, that’s a deadly combination,” entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and athlete Lewis Howes recently told Business Insider.

During her TED Talk, psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth explained that the willingness to push through, even when the odds are against you, is the greatest predictor of success — greater even than intelligence.

Hustle Con, a conference that celebrates the non-technical side of any tech startup, offers a“code” that sheds some light on how to hustle:

For the most part, that’s just what Beekman has been doing his entire life.

“My parents were in Christian ministry when I was a kid and there were times when money was tight,” he told Stanford. “My mom recognized an entrepreneurial streak in me early and always encouraged that in me. She regularly bought supplies for my crazy ideas and mentored me as things worked or failed.”

Beekman began by selling candy at school and homemade pretzels at every baseball game in which he wasn’t playing. He enlisted the help of friends to collect old newspapers to make papier-mâché sculptures to sell and sold dolls made out of mopheads to his mom’s friends.

In high school Beekman said he worked for a company that remodeled hotel rooms and spent most of the summer ripping up flooring and carpet. He and his friends discovered that they could make a lot more money by recycling the foam padding underneath the flooring.

Beekman went on to found Man Crates in 2011. The company curates gifts for guys like personalized barware, beef jerky, and barbecue sauces; packs them into wooden crates; and sends every crate with a crowbar for recipients to pry open.

“Through all the ideas, my mom taught me to be bold and just go for it. Failure is temporary. You’ll have 1,000 other ideas,” Beekman said.

This article originally appeared on Business Insider

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