If you were to peruse a range of guides advising you on the best strategies for becoming an entrepreneur, chances are you wouldn’t find much relating to what you shouldn’t be doing. The world of business is built on entrepreneurial blunders, strategies mishaps and complete misfires. Want to know what you should be avoiding? Read on to find out.

Chase fame and success in the wrong places

Most young, naïve entrepreneurs are driven by one principle: get rich and famous. However, there’s more to being an entrepreneur and successful business owner than achieving fame and financial success. If you choose to operate your business on that philosophy, you are doomed to fail. If you want the best chance of success, make sure it revolves around something you are passionate about. Passion is arguably the essential attribute of a good entrepreneur.

Make everything about the customer

There is this misguided view that EVERYTHING must be about the customer. While adopting a customer-centric approach is crucial, letting down individual customers is unavoidable sometimes. You can’t please everyone, no matter how perfect your business is. Steve Jobs was reportedly a victim of this, especially when designing the iPhone.

Try and keep your messaging simple. Ensure that your staff are aware that pleasing the customer is essential; however, make sure there is some flexibility in that message. Honour the customer’s wishes, but don’t assume everything they want or need is essential. You’ll end up hurting most of your customers and pleasing the minority.

Use ineffective servant leadership

Most business owners think “servant” leadership is the philosophy your workers need to use. However, it’s the opposite. It would help if you worked to “serve” your employees, thereby giving them what they need to succeed. This includes things like training, compassion and holding them to a high standard. Sometimes, the most appropriate form of servant leadership is making someone redundant when things aren’t working out. It seems mean and harsh, but it’s unfair to keep someone in a job they aren’t thriving in.

Most business stories are conventional – a business magnate born into wealth, a “rags to riches” stories or a regular business owner that suddenly falls into that “lightbulb” moment. Some of these crazy stories below happened after the person had become an enormous business success; however, that doesn’t undermine the value of the story in any way. If you’re struggling to find success in your career, check out some of these ridiculous stories for inspiration, or to pass the time.

Mark Zuckerberg radically changed his diet

Zuckerberg is universally known as the founder and creator of Facebook (albeit contentiously). In 2011, Zuckerberg decided to switch things up in his diet by announcing that he would only eat meat that he killed. The purpose was to learn about sustainable farming and more ethical forms of consumption. The Facebook founder lived this way for a year before switching back to meat from the store.

Clive Palmer loves dinosaurs

Famous Australian billionaire, Clive Palmer, loves dinosaurs so much that he tried to clone a dinosaur. He discussed the idea with scientists; however, it never took off. To quell his fix for the prehistoric icons, Palmer opened a dinosaur theme park called Palmersaurus in 2013. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long either.

David Daneshgar funded his start-up via poker winnings

David Daneshgar is the co-founder of BloomNation, an online floral marketplace. While he’s not a billionaire, Daneshgar is a multi-millionaire whose fortune came off the back of winning a poker tournament. He and a group of friends needed around $30 000 to get BloomNation up and running, which just happened to be the prize winnings attached to a poker tournament (the World Series of Poker in 2008). After collecting the money needed, Daneshgar reportedly told his friends “It’s flower time”.

There are millions of successful entrepreneurs living in the world today. However, that doesn’t mean that all entrepreneurs are equal in terms of their influence and importance to the industry they work in. Across history, there have been some incredibly significant entrepreneurs, each of whom have brought something paramount to the world of business and production. Here are our top 3 below:

#1 Henry Ford

Henry Ford is one of the greatest business minds of the modern era. While he didn’t invent the automobile, he designed a production model that would ensure that cars could be mass-produced and made available to more members of the public. His gift to the world was the creation of the production line, a production approach that hinged on breaking down a complex production process into smaller tasks. His progressive labour policies and promotion of specialisation meant automobiles could be produced at a higher rate and for a more affordable price.

#2 Bill Gates

Any list featuring the greatest entrepreneurs of all time has to include Bill Gates. Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975. Through technical innovation, Microsoft was able to monopolise the personal computer operating system and make an absolute fortune. Since the early 1990s, the company has adequately diversified its offerings through several corporate acquisitions and expansions, including acquiring LinkedIn in 2016.

#3 Walt Disney

In the 1920s, Walt Disney was a gifted animator for an advertising firm. Using a small studio garage, Disney started creating his own animated shorts, leading to the creation of one of animation’s most original characters: Mickey Mouse. The character became a huge success, and Disney was able to turn the character into a cultural institution effectively. He soon had a cartoon factory with hundreds of employees, thousands of items of merchandising, theme parks across the world and hundreds of animated feature films.