Russell Simmons: 3 Simple Ways Meditation Will Make You a Better Entrepreneur

Meditation is going to make you happier and more connected to the world. That’s what it’s done for me and that makes it the most beautiful gift that I could share with any of you.

It’s also the most effective tool to help you achieve your goals. I’ve been starting companies, rehabilitating brands and promoting artists for over 30 years now and I can promise you that no tool has made me a smarter, more focused and clearer thinking entrepreneur than meditation. I would not be living in my incredible home, surrounded by fun toys, if it were not for meditation.

That’s the message I share with Hollywood hustlers and it’s the message I want to share with you now: meditation is the greatest tool that I know of to help you both harness and maximize your entrepreneurial spirit.

And here are three ways it will do it:

How to Create a Profitable Business Idea

Breakthrough entrepreneurship is about solving problems -- but it's only half the battle. If you've brainstormed a business idea and have a sense of the customer pain your product can solve. The next step in your billion-dollar business generating process is to figure out if you can fill that need profitably.

To do this, you need to understand the value proposition you're creating. Estimate the economics as best you can so as to figure out ahead of time if customers will actually agree to purchase your product or service for significantly more than it costs you to produce it.

Three factors make up your value proposition:

How to Grow a Business Organically

The founder of The Marketing Zen Group talks about giving customers what they wanted and scaling growth to meet demand.

Name: Shama Kabani, 25
Founded: The Marketing Zen Group, 2009
Business: A Full-service digital marketing firm
Location: Dallas
Shama Kabani

Shama Kabani got her first taste of entrepreneurship at the tender age of nine selling gift wrap to her family and friends. She went on to build several successful businesses, including a college prep service, which earned enough revenue to put Kabani through college. She got her start in social media academically, writing her thesis on Twitter when the microblogging site was in its infancy, establishing herself as a social media maven. In 2009 she launched The Marketing Zen Group and in the same year was named one of Business Week's  "Top 25 under 25 in North America."

From Grad Student to Social Media Millionaire

Skeptics say social media hasn't existed long enough to produce experts. Clearly, those folks haven't met Shama Kabani. The 26-year-old wrote her master's thesis for the University of Texas at Austin about Twitter--when it had only 2,000 users, not the 175 million it has today. She hosts a web TV show about technology. Her 2010 book, The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz and Increase Revenue, is the No. 4 seller about web marketing on Amazon.com

How to Target Your Message to Find Customers

Big businesses spend a lot of time and money trying to find new potential customers with test campaigns and by using demographic research, psychographic analysis and market research. Small businesses don't need a data crunching geek squad to identify and reach more qualified groups of customers, however. All you need is a marketing strategy that targets people in the following four groups and reaches them with the right media and message combination.

To Find Your Next Great Business Idea, Narrow Your Focus

When you’re just starting out in business, narrowing your target market can be difficult for fear you’ll be excluding part of your potential customer base.

But if you can clearly define a market and its needs upfront, you can tailor your product or service offerings narrowly to meet that demand and quickly gain more wallet share than your competitors.

What exactly does this mean?

The Secret to Selling Your Brand With One Sentence

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You believe in the importance of your vision, but how do you get others to stop and listen to you? There will be many instances when you don’t have a lot of time to grab someone’s attention, be it a potential investoror a licensee. That’s why you need to be able to summarize the benefit of your business idea in a single, powerful sentence -- a sentence that is so direct and compelling, it stops whoever reads or hears it dead in their tracks. A good one-line benefit statement should make someone think: "I want to know more about that."

10 Secrets of Successful Leaders

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader, a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves.” But, becoming a great leader isn’t easy. Successfully maneuvering a team through the ups and downs of starting a new business can be one of the greatest challenges a small-business owner faces.

Leadership is one of the areas that many entrepreneurs tend to overlook, according leadership coach John C. Maxwell, whose books include The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (Thomas Nelson, 1998) and Developing the Leader Within You (Thomas Nelson, 1993).

“You work hard to develop your product or service. You fight to solve your financial issues. You go out and promote your business and sell your product. But you don't think enough about leading your own people and finding the best staff,” Maxwell says.

An Entrepreneur's Top Leadership Challenges -- and How to Meet Them

For first-time entrepreneurs, expanding the business and hiring those first employees is an exciting adventure. But it can also be rife with challenges and sometimes mistakes. The reason: The skills needed to successfully lead a growing enterprise are markedly different than what it takes to run a one-person business.

We spoke with three business leaders about challenges they faced as their companies grew, and how they dealt with them.

Need a Business Idea? Here are 55

This article has been excerpted from 55 Surefire Home Based Businesses You Can Start for Under $5,000 by Entrepreneur Press & Cheryl Kimball, available from Entrepreneur Press .

Today, tens of thousands of people are considering starting a home based business, and for good reasons. On average, people can expect to have two and three careers during their work life. Those leaving one career often think about their second or third career move being to their own home. People who have been part of the traditional nine-to-five work force and are on the verge of retiring from that life are thinking of what to do next. The good news: Starting a homebased business is within the reach of almost anyone who wants to take a risk and work hard.

4 Fighting Instincts to Succeed in Business and Life

An uppercut crashes into your jaw. Your fists clench your heart races and you feel adrenaline race inside. Time to fight.

Fighting brings out an instinctual, primordial power. But professional fighters know that the act of fighting isn’t a crude flash of fury. To come out on top, a fighter must have courage, a strategy, tenacity and an indomitable will to succeed. The same traits that shape the greatest fighters also define the best entrepreneurs.

Retiring at 27: Ambitious, Lazy or Crazy?

I don't know why the word "lazy" gets such a bad rap -- I'm a big fan of lazy.

Here's why: Lazy is a smart man's motivation to get from point A to B as quickly as possible. A lazy person knows there's lots of life and fun to be experienced, so finding the shortcuts through the slough just makes a lot more sense than dragging your feet down a long road.

Want to Thrive Like AirBnB and Uber? Build Growth Into Your Company's DNA.

When you’re trying to grow your business, you can never delegate it to one person and hope to succeed -- growth is a competency that must be baked into the DNA of the company. It has to matter to everyone to really work.

This is where most organizations get it wrong. They relegate the responsibility to grow to an individual or perhaps a small team. Larger companies put the onus on sales and marketing. But in most cases, growth is seen as the provenience of a select few, and not core across job functions, roles, titles and departments.

Finding Growth By Changing Your Mindset

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There’s a long-held secret in Silicon Valley that is starting to leak out. If you look around at some of the newest billion-dollar companies, you’ll find that most of them haven’t reached those heights through traditional marketing. Instead, they did it with a new mindset that views every activity through one lens: it’s value as a tool for driving measurable growth. It’s radically focused and very different than old school marketing of general awareness building—and it’s the key to success for today’s rising superstar companies like Square, Uber, and Airbnb. Today there’s a name for it: “growth hacking.” But what is this approach, and how can it work for your business?

Why Growth Hacking Won't Work for Every Company

The big new trend in the tech world and now in all industries is the cleverly coined term “growth-hacking,” which basically means the ability to quickly scale a product in creative ways outside of traditional marketing tactics. Think virality.

Companies like AirBnB, Dropbox and Facebook are famous for it, as they used specific hacks to grow their companies to a massive size. For example, Dropbox -- now valued at $10 billion -- created a program that rewarded both the inviter and the invitee 10 GB of free online storage if the invitee signed up. This “hack” heavily contributed to the growth of Dropbox.

The Race to Scale: How Fast Should You Accelerate?

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How to scale a business is a perennial question in entrepreneurship circles. Not only is the answer different for every company and every industry, it's also fairly tricky.

Growth leads to increased revenue, profits and valuations. But spending aggressively on scaling – anything form adding staff, regions or new products -- can lead to pitfalls, pains and sometimes the end of a business.

As a young entrepreneur, knowing when to grow can play a major role in your company's long-term sustainability. The key is to find the right balance of acceleration to maximize the business and capture market share without breaking the bank.

Here are a few tips to consider when looking to grow your startup: