It’s true—entrepreneurship isn’t cut out for everyone.

It requires a rare kind of tenacity and independence, a willingness to initiate and persevere through doubt and uncertainty.

While entrepreneurship will test you, it can also be incredibly rewarding. I’ve experienced my own journey as my single most powerful interface for personal growth.

If you’re considering entrepreneurship and you think you’ve got what it takes, I’ve created a list of seven traits that you can be sure will serve you well in this fast-paced environment.

To help me create the list, I consulted fellow entrepreneur Adam Rivietz, the co-founder and CSO of world-leading influencer marketing firm #Paid. #Paid connects top influencers with top brands including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Audi, Airbnb, and Visa using an artificial intelligence algorithm. Its database empowers over 15k influencers across 105 different countries to monetize their content and communities.

On the latest episode of my podcast Unconventional Life, Rivietz opens up about what’s made him personally successful. Read on for our list of seven unmistakable signs you’ve got an entrepreneurial mind to see if entrepreneurship could be for you.

1. Your Gears Began Spinning Early. One common denominator of nearly every successful entrepreneur I’ve spoken to is that the gears of their “business mind” began spinning at a very young age. Designer eyewear brand Ellison founder Aristotle Loumis launched a “chores” business at age ten where he agreed to do his friends’ chores three times a week for $7 a visit. Word for this too-good-to-be-true service quickly spread beyond his circle of friends and soon, he had enough clients to make $500 a week. “My family didn’t have the most growing up but we prided ourselves on the fact that we worked so hard,” he says.
2. You Know How To Spot Trends. Entrepreneurs are constantly taking the pulse of their surroundings and looking for ways to satisfy rising demands. I remember in the summer of 2011 I noticed a wave of girls in my area wearing feathers in their hair. I decided to buy thousands of dollars worth of hair feathers from the fly fishing shops in my area to sell to salons online. Within weeks, my gut instinct turned out ot be right; all of the fly fishing shops in the midwest were out of stock of feathers and I suddenly had a five-figure business on my hands.
3. You Think On A Big Scale. Where a “rational” or “practical” mind might seek to avoid risk and play on a more manageable scale, the entrepreneurial mind sees grand potential. Case in point—Rivietz’ model for #Paid was tested on just one influencer before he expanded his service to tens of thousands. His first client was a girl he knew from high school who amassed 75k followers in a year. “We reached out to her and said, ‘we want to be your talent agency, let us help you.’ When we got her paid we said ok, our idea is validated now let’s find more influencers. We reached out to 700 more influencers on Instagram who had an email in their bio and within one week 500 of them said they were interested,” Rivietz reflects.
4. You Surround Yourself With Motivators. In the famous words of Tim Ferriss, “You are the average of the five people you most associate with.” Successful entrepreneurs know that having negative influences in your life can powerfully detract from your vision. Rivietz says, “You want to surround yourself with tailwinds, not headwinds. When a plane flies, it can cut a lot of time if it happens to get tailwinds that push it in the right direction forward. Headwinds make the plane take longer to get to its destination. Surround yourself with tailwinds—people who are gonna support you and motivate you—and you’ll reach your goal quicker.”
5. You Know How To Leverage Relationships. The average consumer is four times more likely to buy a product when referred by a friend. Great entrepreneurs live by this principle and are able to leverage the power of social networks to sell their products. Zuckerberg’s Facebook spread like wildfire because it let its users take care of its referrals. Likewise, Rivietz’ #paid monetizes the relationship between influencer marketers and their audiences.
6. You’re A Rapid Executioner. One of the skills I emphasize at my business accelerator programs for entrepreneurs is that of rapid execution. You wouldn’t believe how many people wait an extraneous amount of time to get in action around the things they want to create. The mark of a true entrepreneur is that they’re willing to say “yes, our doors are open for business,” far sooner than most would. This doesn’t mean they’re brash; on the contrary, they’re calculating the opportunity cost of waiting too long. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve whipped up a sales page on a night’s notice; that’s because entrepreneurs follow the 80/20 principle and seize the day.
7. You’re A Visionary. Entrepreneurs are experts at dreaming up ways to make things more efficient. Where others see limitations, they see possibility. Jobs’ famous iPod innovation with its “1,000 songs in your pocket” struck 2001 by surprise. According to entrepreneur Zach Benson, being a visionary means having conviction that you can make what you desire a reality. “Lifestyle by design is real,” he says. “I work with hundreds of influencers on Instagram. People are actually living these lives even though what you see on Instagram seems impossible. I always dreamt of living this lifestyle… Fast forward today I have made it into a reality.”

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Most people I talk to are astonished when I tell them I spend zero dollars in marketing for my company Unconventional Life’s sold-out business accelerators. Just last week, Inc. Magazine named us the #1 Event for Entrepreneurs To Attend In 2018.

You see, most people underestimate the value of community.

You’ve probably heard you need to have a massive community before you can monetize it—but in reality, it’s actually the quality, not the quantity of your members that counts.

Our community at Unconventional Life is humble in size compared to others, but it’s a force to be reckoned with. We consistently sell out our spots through word of mouth, and research shows that’s the most effective kind of marketing there is.

92 percent of consumers trust peer-to-peer recommendations over traditional advertising.

If you’re looking to grow your company, you may need to look no farther than your very own community.

This week on the Unconventional Life Podcast, I spoke with one millennial founder whose community is the engine of his company. Meet Aristotle Loumis, the founder and CEO of Ellison, a Greece-based, handmade designer eyewear company with an integrated social mission. Ellison offers a $10 VIP Club Membership that grants 50% discounted access to all of its eyeglasses after the purchase of one full-priced pair.

The only catch? Tell Ellison the epic tale of how you lost your first pair.

“Most people lose their glasses in the act of adventure,” Loumis says. “They’re snowboarding, skydiving, honeymooning, tailgating, they’re living life. We believe in the act of losing something you’re finding something bigger, so our call to action is don’t worry get lost.”

Ellison’s “insurance policy” for adventure has attracted a loyal membership base who helped fund its crowdfunding campaign 4x beyond its initial goal, making it one of the fastest and most successfully funded companies on Republic.

Below, learn from Loumis how you can translate your community into capital for your company.

Schroeder: Where did you get the idea for Ellison’s membership model?

Loumis: Picture this. You’d call me on Friday and be like hey Aristotle, I need a couple pairs of shades we’re going skiing this weekend. By Monday I’d get a call from you being like hey listen there was about a foot of snow, it was great skiing, but unfortunately I went off this ramp and while I’m still alive the glasses are not. As a result I’d say to you, hey listen, don’t tell anyone but I’m gonna give you a hookup price. Instead of paying $150 I’d give it to you at $75. I got the idea for Ellison’s model when I started hearing more of these stories. After about 2,000 stories that were submitted I knew we were on to something.

Schroeder: How did you convert these stories into marketing materials for your company?

Loumis: We mobilize our customers as our marketing engines. The only way you get that replacement pair is to tell us a story, that’s all we ask for. We’d say how’d you lose them did you have too many beers at that tailgate? How was that honeymoon did your wife push you off the boat? And then we reward you for that story. We reward our customers for their living experiences, not punish them. They then share their stories organically with their own networks, and everyone knows the best form of marketing is word of mouth. As a result we have a very high retention rate.

Schroeder: What words of advice do you have for entrepreneurs building a community?

Loumis: When you tap into and work with your customers on a very deep level, they are essentially part of the company and they feel like they’re part of the company. While we only have 6,500 members that’s equivalent to 200k+ members for other startups because the retention is so high for us. I’d rather have 10k loyal customers than 10M because they’re interacting with the company and they’re moving the company up. Every new customer we get is obsessed with what we’re doing… not only is that really good for retention but it’s really good for growing it. Our tribe is growing because we’re bringing authenticity and recruiting the people who are aligned with us. Instead of spending money on numbers we’re going for quality.

Schroeder: Tell me more about Ellison’s social impact.

Loumis: When I was participating in Doctors Without Borders, I fell in love with an eye organization called the Himalayan Cataract Project which was giving people their eyesight back. I realized how big the problem was and I wanted to be able to impact that problem. This was around the time Tom Shoes was just getting launched so this one for one model was very innovative. I thought to myself, if there’s a one for one model what if I was to do an eye for an eye.

I knew at the time there was a market gap when I created this. There’s essentially two big players that own the rights to licensing to some of the biggest brand names that everybody buys. What they do is they buy these brand names and then they artificially inflate the prices 10-20x the cost to manufacture them. I knew there was a way to create a better product at a better price, and that’s the idea behind our membership model.

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This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

With 2018 just around the corner many of us are beginning to ponder our resolutions for the upcoming year.

Maybe you’ve already begun thinking about purchasing a new gym membership or enrolling in a personal development program—or maybe you’re jaded about the whole thing and don’t really care to watch the ball drop in Times Square.

It’s no secret that 92% of New Year’s resolutions fail. Just the other night the topic of my family dinner was about how flimsy these resolutions can be. My sister summed it up when she said “you can’t just flip a switch and expect your life to change overnight.”

One of the main reasons why New Year’s resolutions don’t tend to last is because they bait us with the “quick fix” without integrating change into our existing habits.

That being said, the New Year represents a ripe opportunity to set new intentions and ambitions. It can provide a powerful burst of momentum to initiate new goals in the context of community.

But how do you create a resolution that actually sticks? That’s exactly what I asked my good friend Nadav Wilf on the Unconventional Life Podcast this week.

Wilf is the founder of Lifestyle Perfected, a coaching and consulting company for successful founders and CEOs in partnership with top-notch personal development resources like Tony Robbins, Landmark, Abraham Hicks, and Headspace. He’s also the founder of enlightened.org, a marketplace that integrates philanthropy into everyday life through social shopping.

This week on my podcast, Wilf and I chatted about how you can capitalize on the New Year to create lasting change with a methodology that actually works.

Instead of the “resolution” you may have been planning on jotting down in a journal, Wilf calls his change agent the “passion pivot.” At its essence, the passion pivot helps enact change at the level of the subconscious mind, which scientists say is the underpinning of our “nasty” little habits.

Below, read up on Wilf’s methodology behind the “passion pivot” to initiate a strategy for realizing your goals in 2018.

Step #1: Identify What Isn’t Working. The first step is to identify what isn’t working in your current situation. This is the key step where you meet yourself exactly where you are at. It’s critical in this step to try to witness yourself from the perspective of an objective observer to release any judgments you might have about your current situation. After all, psychologists say shame is not an effective motivator for change.

While considering your current situation, ask yourself the following questions: What undesired, recurring feelings do I have? What are the major sources of stress in my life? What are my limiting beliefs? Wilf suggests, “Maybe you’re anxious about not having enough money. Maybe your limiting beliefs are, ‘I have to work and grind to have what I want’ or ‘my family would disown me if I decided to do what I’m really passionate about.’”

Step #2: Identify Your Desired Future State. In this step, Wilf capitalizes on the operation of the subconscious mind. Experts speculate our beliefs and values tend to be at the root of our behavior. When we “reprogram” our beliefs, we can often shift our behavior.

Wilf says, “Get clear about how you want to feel—for example, ‘I want to trust,’ or ‘I want to feel in alignment’—and what you want to believe—for example, ‘I am aligned and everything I want flows easily and smoothly.’”

Make a habit of reaffirming these beliefs to yourself on a daily basis. Jake Ducey, bestselling author of Into The Wind, recommends starting each day writing down your desired beliefs 30-50 times. “The goal is to imprint them onto your mind. Most people start the day and they’re getting programmed with a bunch of negative things. They’re getting their thoughts and beliefs suggested to them by the outer world, living out of reaction instead of creation.”

Step #3: Take Action. While the subconscious mind is one component to behavior, we cannot rely on it alone; we must take deliberate, conscious action. Wilf says, “Create a practical action plan. For example, If you love social impact, reach out to social impact events and find successful people to model.” Taking action in alignment with your new beliefs can help you feel a sense of accomplishment and actualize your goals.

Step #4: Give. Wilf says the act of giving can be a potent source of life satisfaction, and it’s even been proven to reduce stress and aging and promote health and longevity. Consider donating to a cause you care about this holiday season. Or, rally your friends and community together by “donating your birthday.” Wilf is currently donating his birthday to the SAN-DAL project, which empowers an ancient African tribe to sustain itself by selling its signature sandals around the world.

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This article originally appeared on Forbes.com