Don’t wallow in brainstorming. Time spent fiddling with a business plan or filling up whiteboards with ideas is time that you could spend actually launching your business and seeing if the idea floats. Launching gives you real, solid feedback, instead of the imaginary “what if” scenarios dreamed up in a conference room.

Great entrepreneurs focus intensely on an opportunity where others see nothing. This focus and intensity helps to eliminate wasted effort and distractions. Most companies die from indigestion rather than starvation, i.e. companies suffer from doing too many things at the same time rather than doing too few things very well.

Go where your customers take you! For example, did you know that Sony's first product was a rice cooker? Since abandoning the rice cooker, it has merely managed to become the world's biggest consumer electronics company.

It's a simple fact: no individual can be good at everything. Everyone needs people around them who have complimentary sets of skills.

How important is failure - yes, failure - to the health of a thriving, innovative business? So important that Ratan Tata, chairman of India's largest corporation, gives an annual award to the employee who comes up with the best idea that failed.

In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option. We need to change this attitude toward failure - and celebrate the idea that only by falling on our collective business faces do we learn enough to succeed down the road.

If there is one thing I have learned on this incredible journey we call life, it is this: the sign of a truly successful individual is humility.