Self-discovery, self-mastery, initiative, responsibility, team-building, prioritization, and open-mindedness are just some of the characteristics that Covey suggests are necessary for success. And even after acquiring his designated habits, entrepreneurs should strive to continually improve them, the author said.

Universal Good Habits

An example of Covey’s continued relevance: In August 2011, Time listed “Seven Habits” as one of the 25 most influential business management books. And even though norms have changed over the last quarter century, Covey’s “habits” remain universal and timeless, continuing to guide acolytes even after the author’s death in 2012; plus, they have prompted other businesspeople to identify their own habits for success. They always seem to come in sevens.

For example, Entrepreneur magazine has advocated its own set of seven habits necessary for success. They are more practical when compared to Covey’s more philosophical instruction. Entrepreneur recommends:

■ Establish a detailed plan before starting your business.

■ Organize your resources thoroughly before beginning business operations.

■ Surround yourself with the right people who will help you reach your goals.

■ Apply the art of delegating the right task to the right person.

■ Monitor performance of others with an efficient reporting system.

■ Measure your progress to be sure your business is on the right track.

■ Make employees feel like part of the company by keeping them informed of developments and progress.

“When you become competent and capable in each of these areas, you’ll be able to accomplish extraordinary results, far faster and easier than your competitors,” according to “Million Dollar Habits” from Entrepreneur Press.

Lessons for Life

And Covey continues to be an inspiration for a new generation of writers who have pinpointed their own successful habits, many of which can be applied as life lessons that go beyond the business world. Darrell Zahorsky is one such small business expert, author and consultant who espouses his own ideas about success. Remember the old shampoo commercial about the advantages of telling two friends about the benefit of using the product? Then they will tell two friends, who in turn will tell two friends, and so on, and so on…

Zahorsky borrows that idea by being a proponent of building an inner network of five successful colleagues, mentors and advisers who can introduce you to another five successful businesspeople, and so on, and so on…

It’s just one of the writer’s suggestions for success. He also reminds people to remain adaptable to changing situations and vigilant about new opportunities that might emerge in times of trouble. Moreover, Zahorsky offers a lesson in humility to those with Type A personalities.

“Business success requires the ability to know your strengths and weaknesses. Being open and honest about yourself and your business creates growth as an individual and as a company,” he says. “In the book, ‘Now, Discover Your Strengths,’ Gallup Organization reveals that building our strengths instead of fixing our weakness is the path to mastery and success.”

Finding balance in all aspects of your life, is another key to success, he suggests.

Add ‘Lean In’ to the List

But it may be time to add a new habit to Covey’s list that wasn’t really talked about when he published his book in 1989. It has become a recent buzz term and applies primarily to women executives and entrepreneurs. Of course, I’m talking about “leaning in,” the advice dispensed by Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg in her recently published first book, “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead.”

Sandberg encourages women to “lean into” their ambitions in order to achieve professional and personal goals, break down societal and personal barriers, and achieve positions of leadership. The book has inspired a movement. With more female voices in positions of power, Sandberg asserts, more equitable opportunities will be created for everyone.

If that can be achieved, leaning in could become as good a habit as anything put forth by Covey.

With a bitterly divided Congress, constant reminders of differences between red and blue states and never-ending attacks on our country’s leaders, negativity has become the norm in the United States. And while it is endemic to politics, negativity can also permeate the business world.

Entrepreneurs, particularly those pioneering a new product or service, are perhaps most susceptible to negative comments from family, friends, even peers. Their disparaging comments about your ideas can range from shooting them down to mocking them and citing statistics about how slim your chances are of succeeding.

Listen to the Voices of Experience

Luckily there are others out there who have been through the experience of building a business and their words can inspire confidence. I consider myself among this group. Accentuating the positive is one of the guiding principles of this website as I try to share information that will assist others with personal growth as well as business development. If I had listened to naysayers, I might never have founded my company Breakaway Solutions.

I can relate to the words of Steve Chou, founder of the website My Wife Quit Her Job.

“Anytime you start your own business or take any risks for that matter, you’ll inevitably meet people who will doubt you. These people often mean well, but their negative comments can be a devastating blow to your self-esteem and your entrepreneurial spirit if you are not careful.

“The most important thing when dealing with the doubters is to take everything they say with a grain of salt. There are too many variables for anyone to accurately predict the success or failure probability of your small business.”

Successful Failures

Budding entrepreneurs surrounded by detractors might also take comfort in a rather long list of captains of industry who were not deterred by negativity, even after some of their initial enterprises or concepts failed. Michael Michalko, author of the best sellers “Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques,” ThinkPak: A Brainstorming Card Deck” and Cracking Creativity: The Secrets Of Creative Genius,” offered such a list last year on The Creativity Post.

■ A newspaper editor once fired Walt Disney because “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”

■ The famous “secret recipe” that eventually made Harland David Sanders a household name as Colonel Sanders of KFC was rejected more than 1,000 times before a restaurant accepted it.

■ A Harvard dropout, Bill Gates failed with his first business Traf-O-Data before he founded Microsoft.

■ Henry Ford was discouraged from getting into the automobile business because, people said, he lacked the required capital and the expertise.

■ An early employer rejected F. W. Woolworth’s ideas for marketing dry goods—the same ideas that later made Woolworth one of the most successful retailers in the United States.

■ Akio Morita was ridiculed for his first product, a rice cooker that burned more than it cooked rice. Morita persevered with his company, Sony, which went on to become the multibillion-dollar company it is today.

Turn a Negative Into a Positive

The best thing an entrepreneur can do is learn how to deal with negativity in a positive way. Some would say to just ignore critics so as not to be discouraged. Author Peter Bregman, who wrote “18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction and Get the Right Things Done” offered a very interesting take on how to respond to negativity in a blog post he created last year for Harvard Business Review. Bregman suggests responding negatively and positively with detractors rather than against them. He explained his strategy in three easy steps:

1. Understand how they feel and validate it. This might be hard because it could feel like you’re reinforcing their negative feelings. But you’re not. You’re not agreeing with them or justifying their negativity. You’re simply showing them that you understand how they feel.

2. Find a place to agree with them. You don’t have to agree with everything they’ve said, but, if you can, agree with some of what they’re feeling. If you share some of their frustrations, let them know which.

3. Find out what they are positive about and reinforce it. This doesn’t mean trying to convince them to be positive. It means giving attention to whatever positive feelings they do show—and chances are they will have shown some because it’s unusual to find people who are purely negative.

Perhaps the bottom line, however, is to persevere no matter what sort of obstacles you encounter. Who knows, you might just become the next Bill Gates.

“I don’t know what to do. Who will marry him?” the mother cries in Agarwal’s book “How I Braved Anu Aunty & Co-Founded a Million Dollar Company.”

What’s so terribly wrong with Agarwal that causes so much consternation for his mother?

He decided to pursue a path of entrepreneurship rather than the more socially acceptable trajectory of working for a short time after college before getting an MBA and accepting a salaried position with a good company.

I should point out that Agarwal lives in India, where entrepreneurship is discouraged by the older generation because it tends to interfere with the custom of arranged marriage.

“Parents of prospective brides strike me off the list when they find I am a start-up guy,” the author/entrepreneur told writer Saritha Rai in a blog that appeared last fall in the global edition of The New York Times. “They want a safety net for their daughters. They feel I could not provide her a nice house or a luxury car as I don’t have a job and banks will not give me credit.”

Something tells me Agarwal is having the last laugh. In his mid-20s, he’s the founder of a successful company, Alma Mater, which sells logo-adorned merchandise for colleges and schools across India. And his book, masquerading as fiction, chronicles the resistance he faced in fulfilling his dream, has sold more than 30,000 copies and is in a third reprint.

His story, however, makes me feel fortunate to be an American where entrepreneurship is encouraged and arranged marriages are hardly the norm.

As an entrepreneur and husband, I understand the demands of starting a business and how it has the potential to put stress on a marriage. Starting a company requires copious amounts of time, money and energy. But being a successful entrepreneur is not the antithesis of being a good husband, wife or parent, as some might have you believe. I have read many articles and blogs that characterize marriage to an entrepreneur as being a “roller coaster ride,” for spouses who have to deal with exorbitant egos, cash-strapped households and neglect by a partner who is preoccupied with building an empire.

I rather like writer Chris Dannen’s take on the subject. The editor of Co.Labs at FastCompany observes:

“The phenomenon of the entrepreneur with the MBA is a relatively recent one; entrepreneurship programs are sprouting up at universities all over the country, but most of the folks that start businesses don’t have the knowledge or inclination to be ‘empire builders.’ What they do have, however, is creativity, drive, self-confidence and dynamism.”

And there is plenty of advice out there for spouses who might be married to an entrepreneur, whether they are wives or husbands.

Nicole Bailey, wife of Petra Coach founder and CEO Andy Bailey, offered several tips in a story for BusinessNewsDaily. She suggests that couples keep to schedules that allow them to spend time together and get away from it all when they can. She also suggests that the non-entrepreneur in the relationship develop his or her own outside interests.

“Understand how your dreamer thinks,” suggests another writer for wikiHow. “Dreamers are ideas people. They always have a new one. It doesn’t mean that they are going to sell everything and go start that bed and breakfast out in the wilderness. They are just expressing a thought. It’s like exercising a muscle. They work out that muscle every day. So don’t freak out. You never know when that one idea is the one that brings success.”

The blog marriedtoanentrepreneur.com offers similar advice: “As spouses of entrepreneurs, we don’t want to kill the dream (or the dreamer for that matter). We don’t want to be the reason that someone, aka our entrepreneur, doesn’t achieve their potential. We don’t want to thwart their passion or creativity or talent, BUT we would like some piece of mind when it comes to being able to afford groceries next week, let alone college in 5 years.”

Writing for Forbes magazine earlier this year, Anson Sowby owner of an advertising agency called Rocket XL, takes the advice to a whole other level by pointing out the advantages of two entrepreneurs marring one another, based on his experience with wife Ro Cysne, co-founder of JilRo clothing.

Sowby writes that he and his wife benefit from such things as networking together, mutual motivation, short commutes and being each other’s sounding board.

Two entrepreneurs under the same roof: I kinda like that. Of course, my wife might have a different opinion…

The thing about a million dollar idea is you have to put it into action.

I’m lucky to have had great success with my business, Breakaway Solutions, by having the knowledge, skills and experience to help other businesses with their needs in web design, development and Internet marketing. Since we are an award-winning company that is thriving, I like to think about this as my own “million dollar idea.”

But the success I have achieved is something anyone can attain. I was ruminating on this recently after reading an article about Tony Robbins, probably the most influential motivational speaker and life coach in the world. As an entrepreneur, I really relate to what Robbins has to say about everyone’s potential and I believe his words should resonate with anyone who might be thinking of starting their own business.

Here’s just one of the things Robbins has to say:

“The truth of the matter is that there’s nothing you can’t accomplish if: (1) You clearly decide what it is that you’re absolutely committed to achieving, (2) You’re willing to take massive action, (3) You notice what’s working or not, and (4) You continue to change your approach until you achieve what you want, using whatever life gives you along the way.”

Oprah Winfrey has expressed the same philosophy more succinctly:

“Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it. It’s a message to both you and others about what you think is possible. Don’t put a ceiling on yourself.”

Those are words worth remembering whether you’re considering opening your own business, or you have some other goal in mind.

I read about another “million dollar idea” recently that I found remarkable and it relates to the words of Robbins and Winfrey. If you’re like me, you can remember running with a couple of quarters in your hand as a kid every time you heard the sound of an ice cream truck. That carnival-style music would set your mouth watering for a Fudgsicle or Rocket Popsicle.

Tony Lamb sure remembered it. When he heard the sound of one of those trucks in his neighborhood one summer afternoon, he went running along with his 3-year-old daughter and the rest of his family. But this was not the kind of truck he remembered as a boy. It was a barely running 1970 Chevy van spitting blue smoke. The music was blaring. The driver was bare-chested, tattooed and pierced. And while his daughter was intrigued, she was also hesitant to embrace an experience that should have been fun for a child. This wasn’t exactly the Good Humor man.

Lamb remembers looking at his wife and saying, “They’ve completely destroyed that business model.”

He set about reinventing an American icon — the ice cream truck — and his business, Kona Ice, was named the No. 1 new franchise for this year by Entrepreneur magazine.

The company not only entered Entrepreneur magazine’s Franchise 500 list, but was also No. 27 among the fastest growing in the country. The first truck hit the road in 2007 and today there are more than 300 Kona Ice trucks in communities across the country in more than 40 states.

But what I really like about Lamb’s story is a fundraising component he built into his business model that allows his franchise partners to not only make a profit, but also raise money for charities and worthy groups by giving back to their community while they do business. The company has raised more than $10 million since its start for various organizations, particularly schools.

To me, that is a “a billion dollar idea” that might even prompt Robbins to amend his advice that when you’re motivated to do something that’s helping others as well as yourself, your impetus to succeed is that much stronger.