Entrepreneurship requires leadership (so what's new) and sales skills, but more than anything it requires the ability to get up every morning, no matter what, and infuse everyone you meet or contact with a sense of the inevitability of the success of your deal. 

• Attitude is everything!
• Never let them see you sweat
• Be nice to assistants
• Entrepreneurship isn’t an event, it’s a lifestyle

And perhaps most importantly:

• When you ask an entrepreneur how things are going, everything is going great!  If they say otherwise, their deal is already dead!

Investors, partners and employees can smell fear or see fear in your eyes.  I had someone (okay, lots of someones) ask me as we startd DoBox if I liked it.  I said

"As long as you can get past the reality that you may completely fail, it's great!" 

If you wrestle with that fear every day, no one will ever believe in the inevitabiliity of the success of your deal - you have to put that fear aside and focus instead on making your success inevitable. 

I was reading in Business 2.0 an article on audible.com, "Audible Cranks it up."  What long ago memories it dredged up for me.  It said that Audible is 11 years old, and turned its first profitable quarter  in 2003.  Just about 11 years ago, both Brad and I worked at "a large networking company that has since lost several billion dollars", and Audible approached the company.  As we were in the mobile division and were part of the new technology review team there (he in software, I in miarketing), we were roped in to looking this thing over.  We even hired a consultant to do an analysis of the opportunity.   Brad said, at the time, that they needed some kind of standards-based player!  (Ah, if only we'd invented one at the time!)  The original Audible player was simply not going to be a success in the market, at least not on the scale our company needed - and our company wasn't interested.  Of course the same company turned down the first MP3 players about a year later!  This is an enterprneur who didn't give up almost in the face of unimaginable odds.  Did he sweat, yea, for a decade, through lots of big company wonks criticizing and rejecting, through unprofitable quarters, and then the dot com bubble, but with a lot of tenacity and vision, Audible is, as Paul Keegan said, "finally starting to catch fire."

Entrepreneurship isn't an event, it's a lifestyle!!!!