1. Five Rules for Entrepreneurship
By Brian Tracy
Entrepreneurship is the art of finding profitable solutions to problems. Every successful
entrepreneur or business person has been able to identify a problem and come up with a
solution to it before someone else did. Here are the five rules for success.
1. Find a Need and Fill It
Human needs and wants are unlimited. Therefore, the opportunities for entrepreneurship
and financial success are unlimited as well. The only constraint on the business
opportunities available to you are the limits you place on your own imagination.
2. Find a Problem and Solve It
Wherever there is a widespread and unsolved customer problem, there is an opportunity
for you to start and build a successful business.
Once upon a time, before photocopies, the only way to type multiple copies of a letter
was with carbon paper places between sheets of stationary. But a single mistake would
require the typist to go through and erase the mistakes on every single copy. This was
enormously clumsy and time consuming.
Then a secretary working for small company in Minneapolis began mixing flour with nail
varnish in order to white out the mistake she was making in her typing. Soon, people in
other offices began asking for it. The demand became so great that she quit her job and
began working full-time manufacturing what she called “Liquid Paper.” A few years
later, the Gillette Corporation came along and bought her out for $47 million cash.
3. Unlimited Opportunities
There are problems everywhere. Your job is to find one of these problems and solve it
better than it has been solved in the past. Find a problem that everyone has and see if you
can't come up with a solution for it. Find a way to supply a product or service better,
cheaper, faster, or easier. Use your imagination.
4. Focus on the Customer
The key to success in business is to focus on the customer. Become obsessed with your
customer. Become fixated on your customer's wants, needs, and desires. Think of your
customer all the time. Think of what your customer is willing to pay for. Think about
your customer's problems. See yourself as if you were working for your customer.
5. Bootstrap Your Way to Success
Once you have come up with a problem or idea, resolve to invest your time, talent, and
energy instead of your money to get started. Most great personal fortunes in the United

2. States were started with an idea and with the sale of personal services.
Most great fortunes were started by people with no money, resources, or backing. They
were started by individuals who came up with an idea and who then put their whole heart
into producing a product or service that someone else would buy.