Entrepreneur Money Quotes

When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.

Money is always eager and ready to work for anyone who is ready to employ it.

If you are going to be in business, you must learn about money: how it works, how it flows, and how to put it to work for you.

I want to see a world in which entrepreneurs give time to their visions to reality so that they have more money, more family time, and more support, a world in which they can stop working so hard and start living!

Poverty is not only a lack of money, it's a lack of sense of meaning.

I like Texas and Texans. In Texas, everything is bigger. When Texans win, they win big. And when they lose, it's spectacular. If you really want to learn the attitude of how to handle risk, losing and failure, go to San Antonio and visit the Alamo. The Alamo is a great story of brave people who chose to fight, knowing there was no hope of success against overwhelming odds. They chose to die instead of surrendering. It's an inspiring story worthy of study; nonetheless, it's still a tragic military defeat. They got their butts kicked. A failure if you will. They lost. So how do Texans handle failure? They still shout, "Remember the Alamo!" That's why I like Texans so much. They took a great failure and turned it into a tourist destination that makes them millions. Texans don't bury their failures. They get inspired by them. They take their failures and turn them into rallying cries. Failure inspires Texans to become winners. But that formula is not just the formula for Texans. It is formula for all winners.

While others were dreaming about it - I was getting it done.

There is a limit to how much you can cut but there is no limit to how much you can earn.

Don't just create art to make money. Make money so you can create more art.

Always put your money back into your business.

Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a life of doing. And where money-making is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out.

An idea is not a business. It doesn't matter how wonderful your idea sounds. What matters is the revenue model and how the business is going to earn money consistently, sustainably and abundantly.

Be creative while inventing ideas, but be disciplined while implementing them.

No matter what the industry you choose to ultimately invest all your time and energy in, be sure you're the owner, founder, and CEO. Remember, if you don't own it, you can't control it nor can you depend on it.

You can be your own boss

Your job as an entrepreneur is to be an innovator and a builder of systems.

Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today, it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.

At the end of the day, if you’re wasting your time by not investing in yourself, you’re going to waste away—and that would be the greatest waste of all.

I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.

And then there is the most dangerous risk of all - the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.

Sell the results, not the nuts and bolts.

Most busy people want to mentor someone great

Very few people actually want to understand something they want results.

If you are working with no vision to be own your own boss, you are no different from people who are unemployed

When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.

When you truly make the decision, it becomes real. You fully commit and develop a belief that ensures that it is not a matter of if you will achieve your goals, but a matter of when.

The way to be irreplaceable is to become a social innovator. Start projects that motivate you to save the world and simultaneously make you money (and create mindshare) for your company. Social innovation makes magic happen.

You’re going to go through a time where you’re not going to make any money. It’s not going to be a week, it’s not going to be a month, it’s not going to be one year. It’s going to be years. And during that time, if you don’t love what you do, it’s going to be very hard to stick it out. That is something that people don’t understand when they hear, “Follow your passion.” They hear rainbows, unicorns, bullshit. But the truth of it is that it’s important, because if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’re going to be that much more likely to quit when shit’s hard.

When you are listening to someone you respect, treat their whispers like screams

Ideas don’t make money, effort does.

There is only one way to make money: sell something. You're either selling your time or a product. The secret? Productize your time. That's freedom.

Three key roles need owners: someone must lead the product vision; someone needs to build the technology; and someone needs to be focused on getting users and generating money.

Financial freedom is not a certain amount of money sitting in your bank account—it is when your passive income (earnings made by doing essentially no work) exceeds your expenses.

Even the richest person, provided the riches comes from mutually beneficial exchange, does not need to give anything "back" to the community, because this person took nothing out of the community. Indeed, the reverse is true: Enterprises give to the community. Their owners take huge risks, and front the money for investment, precisely with the goal of serving others. Their riches are signs that they have achieved their aims.

There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class — and often racial — prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. But these things cost money — $20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on — and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the 'social wage,' while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. And in the larger society, too, the cost of repression becomes another factor weighing against the expansion or restoration of needed services. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves.

Working on your business is about building systems. Period. An entrepreneur is someone who finds the solutions to opportunities and problems and then builds systems to consistently deliver those solutions through other people or things. However,

Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.” “Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins. People who leak to you, leak about you. Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade. Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society. Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics. Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities. Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.

The vain arrogance of the literati and the Bohemian artists dismisses the activities of the businessmen as unintellectual money-making. The truth is that the entrepreneurs and promoters display more intellectual faculties and intuition than the average writer and painter. The inferiority of many self-styled intellectuals manifests itself precisely in the fact that they fail to recognize what capacity and reasoning power are required to develop and to operate successfully a business enterprise.

In stark contrast, China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. That mentality leads to incredible flexibility in business models and execution, a perfect distillation of the “lean startup” model often praised in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter where an idea came from or who came up with it. All that matters is whether you can execute it to make a financial profit. The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.

Angels also often want to contribute more than money to a young company. Angels have the experience, and inclination, to be great mentors and valuable directors.

You have to get off your chair and into life.

I live in the world of what is notwhat should be.

Instead of working to break down the walls of segregation and the poverty trap they had created, the ghetto would be sent entrepreneurs.

Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This

An entrepreneur with strong network makes money even when he is asleep.

This would be a good time to share with you my definition of an entrepreneur: “someone who solves people’s problems at a profit.

Why did the entrepreneur cross the road? Because he could make more money on the other side.

Selling is a sacred trust between buyer and seller.

Do we create an impact to make money or de we make money to create an IMPACT ?

THINGS MONEY CAN'T BUY Manners Morals Respect Trust Patience Class Integrity Love Character Common sense

Making more money is about getting clear on who you are and what you can offer in the world. –Brittney Castro

Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.

Money doesn’t create a life—it supports one.

word of mouth. However, before customer retention, we need to think about customer acquisition (AKA marketing). The most successful entrepreneurs always start with marketing.

Invest your time and money in connecting yourself and others.

Dear entrepreneurs: Pricing is branding. Branding is a mindset. Your mindset, not the market, determines how much money you make or don’t make. Think about that.

For the entrepreneur, time is not money. Value is money.

Everyone wants to hear from an authoritative source. By being a content creator, you position yourself as an authority and expert in your niche.

An entrepreneur is someone who can make enough money to pay for their mistakes.

Money Can make things better but a perfect relationship makes your life complete.

So, if you’re willing to bleed a little bit every day but in exchange you’ll win big later, you will do better. That is, by the way, entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs bleed every day. They’re not making money, they’re losing money, they’re constantly stressed out, all the responsibility is upon them, but when they win they win big. On average they’ll make more. 19.

Its dramatis personae are not so much the worker and the industrialist, but rather the money-owner (and money-lender), the wholesale merchant, the trader and the entrepreneur or ‘functioning capitalist’.

Capitalism – which in its purest form is entrepreneurism even among the poorest of the poor – does work; but those who make money from it should put back into society, not just sit on it as if they are hatching eggs.

If the government controls, guarantees, channels, or directs investment, it is not capitalism. Pivotal to the investment process is interest rates. For entrepreneurs to control capital, interest rates must reflect its real cost rather than merely the cost of printing money. Otherwise the money printers will dominate investment.

Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore. "By telling you my life's story. "See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American business book wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like: TEN SECRETS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS! or BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY DAYS! "Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday. "I am tomorrow.

When you do things based on other people’s opinions of you or other people’s lack of ambition or beliefs, you’ll always feel regrets. If you do things based on others’ opinions, it’s challenging to have peace of mind and be happy and excited about your future.

Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history. Don’t let a ruling class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs. The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

To him, one of the most fascinating historical aspects of governments was their complete disregard for governing. Governments were single-minded and interested only in increasing their control and any governance that came out of the government's actions were purely coincidental. .... The lowest flunky as well as the most powerful bureaucrat was more interested in protecting his sinecure than in helping the citizens who coughed up tax money to pay the government worker's salaries.

Network = Net Worth Your network: That is the #1 key to success. You become the sum of the five people with whom you spend the most time. If you don’t walk away from a conversation feeling bigger or more empowered, then you need to hang around with some new folks. That’s the #1 mistake that young people make. They hang around with the wrong crowd for the wrong set of reasons, and they end up living a smaller life because the people they are around do not think big thoughts. –David Wood

Trump’s pick for secretary of state? Rex Tillerson, a figure known and trusted in Moscow, and recipient of the Order of Friendship. National security adviser? Michael Flynn, Putin’s dinner companion and a beneficiary of undeclared Russian fees. Campaign manager? Paul Manafort, longtime confidant to ex-Soviet oligarchs. Foreign policy adviser? Carter Page, an alleged Moscow asset who gave documents to Putin’s spies. Commerce secretary? Wilbur Ross, an entrepreneur with Russia-connected investments. Personal lawyer? Michael Cohen, who sent emails to Putin’s press secretary. Business partner? Felix Sater, son of a Russian American mafia boss. And other personalities, too. It was almost as if Putin had played a role in naming Trump’s cabinet. The U.S. president, of course, had done the choosing. But the constellation of individuals, and their immaculate alignment with Russian interests, formed a discernible pattern, like stars against a clear night sky. A pattern of collusion.

College does not equal job security. Entrepreneurship does not equal job security. For heaven's sake, "job security" does not equal job security. So what do you do? Don't be a one-trick pony. Add real value in everything you do. But most of all, study and apply business models. No matter what discipline you come from. Learn how to add value so that value can flow in the form of money to you. That, my friends, is job security. Learn where money comes from and you'll know where to turn when life throws a curve.

Finally, when young people who “want to help mankind” come to me asking, “What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world,” and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is: 1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business. Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (which is optional), spend your money generously on others. We need people to take (bounded) risks. The entire idea is to move the descendants of Homo sapiens away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, away from the kind of social engineering that brings tail risks to society. Doing business will always help (because it brings about economic activity without large-scale risky changes in the economy); institutions (like the aid industry) may help, but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic; I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming). Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.

I am in want of money” usually won. “You know every time they needed money they would sell a slave,” said Robert Falls. Traders calibrated their innovations not only for southwestern entrepreneurs who wanted hands, but also to provide a highly useful service to southeastern white folks—the ability to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice.20

As VCs invest more and more money in each company, they have to wait longer and longer before they can exit.

Ask people what they want don' tell them what they need.

Charging a premium amount allows me to offer a premium service.

In a world of infinite choice if something is not made specifically for me I'm gone.

If you set up your business like you don’t need the money, people are happier to pay you. When someone’s doing something for the money, people can sense it, like they sense a desperate lover. It’s a turnoff. When someone’s doing something for love, being generous instead of stingy, trusting instead of fearful, it triggers this law: We want to give to those who give.

Today, the optimum financial strategy for most technology entrepreneurs is to raise money from angels and plan an early exit to a large company in just a few years for under $30 million.

Professional Answer from Tom Wheelwright Taxes are a part of life. The simple question is whether you are going to use the tax law to make them a smaller part of your life, or do nothing and let them stay a huge expense. With a sound education on how the tax laws work coupled with better tax planning from a competent tax advisor who understands the laws, most entrepreneurs and investors can permanently reduce their taxes by 10 percent to 40 percent. And the money you save in taxes can be used to invest and build your wealth. So don’t wait. Take action now and learn how you can reduce your taxes.

Without enough money, we cannot fully realize our authentic selves. Money amplifies who we are. There isn’t a single ounce of doubt in my mind that there is something big you are intended to do on this planet. You wear the cape of what I believe is the greatest of all superheroes: the Entrepreneur. But your superhero powers can only yield as much power as your energy source provides. Money. You need money, superhero.

As entrepreneurs we have a “can do” mindset. This often means that when something needs to be done, we are tempted to just roll up our sleeves and just do it. However, spending a lot of time doing things that aren’t your area of expertise or aren’t a good use of your time can quickly become a very expensive exercise. Remember, money is a renewable resource—you can always get more money but you can never get more time.

What is thus improperly regarded as profit, instead of as part of capital, is consumed by the entrepreneur or passed on either to the consumer in the form of price-reductions that would not otherwise have been made or to the labourer in the form of higher wages, and the government proceeds to tax it as income or profits. In any case, consumption of capital results from the fact that monetary depreciation falsifies capital accounting.

The Kochs were also directing millions of dollars into online education, and into teaching high school students, through a nonprofit that Charles devised called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy. The financially pressed Topeka school system, for instance, signed an agreement with the organization which taught students that, among other things, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminatory, and the government, rather than business, caused the 2008 recession. The program, which was aimed at low-income areas, also paid students to take additional courses online.

Money Is a Magnifying Glass Money makes you more of who you already are. If you are a jerk, it will make you a bigger jerk; if you’re insecure, you become even more insecure; if you are generous, you become even more generous; if you are nice, you become even nicer. Making money is like holding up a magnifying glass to who you are, personally and professionally. It creates a lot of energy and power, and it’s up to you to use that in a really good way.

There are three phases of uncertainty: fearing it, starting to overcome it, and then embracing it. There’s a great quote from Tim Ferriss, “Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty,” and it is this uncertainty that makes people unhappy. Once you get to a point where you embrace the uncertainty, you basically look at things and say, I don’t know what’s going to happen so I can make anything I want to happen. That is an entrepreneur’s best friend.

You get to a question of, is that what capitalism is supposed to do?” Schwartz asked. “There’s so many little ways that a company like this tells the next generation of entrepreneurs what success looks like. One way to ask this question is, in the system we have set up, do the people who were successful reflect the values we want? Should we care, or not care, if someone makes a lot of money exploiting the system?” Schwartz didn’t mind if Adam got rich; he wanted to get rich, too. “The reason I care is that if the most successful companies are the ones that just drive really hard, and play fast and loose with the truth,” Schwartz said, “then maybe the whole idea that capitalism is great, or even useful, is really challenging to uphold.

If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money. Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful. Being a teacher is meaningful. Being a physician is meaningful. So is being an entrepreneur,

I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game. This way of learning and improving has been best for me because of what I’m like and because of what I do. I’ve always had a bad rote memory and didn’t like following other people’s instructions, but I loved figuring out how things work for myself. I hated school because of my bad memory but when I was twelve I fell in love with trading the markets. To make money in the markets, one needs to be an independent thinker who bets against the consensus and is right. That’s because the consensus view is baked into the price. One is inevitably going to be painfully wrong a lot, so knowing how to do that well is critical to one’s success. To be a successful entrepreneur, the same is true: One also has to be an independent thinker who correctly bets against the consensus, which means being painfully wrong a fair amount. Since I was both an investor and an entrepreneur, I developed a healthy fear of being wrong and figured out an approach to decision making that would maximize my odds of being right.

I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.

I had heard an amazing story that supported what the Archbishop was saying. When I met James Doty, he was the founder and director of the Center of Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford and the chairman of the Dalai Lama Foundation. Jim also worked as a full-time neurosurgeon. Years earlier, he had made a fortune as a medical technology entrepreneur and had pledged stock worth $30 million to charity. At the time his net worth was over $75 million. However, when the stock market crashed, he lost everything and discovered that he was bankrupt. All he had left was the stock that he had pledged to charity. His lawyers told him that he could get out of his charitable contributions and that everyone would understand that his circumstances had changed. “One of the persistent myths in our society,” Jim explained, “is that money will make you happy. Growing up poor, I thought that money would give me everything I did not have: control, power, love. When I finally had all the money I had ever dreamed of, I discovered that it had not made me happy. And when I lost it all, all of my false friends disappeared.” Jim decided to go through with his contribution. “At that moment I realized that the only way that money can bring happiness is to give it away.” •

There's no "get rich quick." There's no "overnight success." However, this doesn't mean that when you decide to start a business that you're just starting. You could start making new money tomorrow. I was fishing with my son and taught him that you can't catch a fish unless your line is in the water. A truth my dad once taught me. You may have spent years learning a skill or creating a product or service that you just simply haven't thought to monetize. Like leaving a fishing pole on the ground along side the river, but not having your line in the water yet. All you need to create a new stream of income is to make something consumable and offer it at a price that someone will pay. If you're not making offers, you're not making money. Get your line in the water!

Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry. 2. Entrepreneurship is management. A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty. In fact, as I will argue later, I believe “entrepreneur” should be considered a job title in all modern companies that depend on innovation for their future growth. 3. Validated learning. Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision. 4. Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop. 5. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.

It wasn’t until I got to the law firm that things started hitting me. First, the people around me seemed pretty unhappy. You can go to any corporate law firm and see dozens of people whose satisfaction with their jobs is below average. The work was entirely uninspiring. We were for the most part grease on a wheel, helping shepherd transactions along; it was detail-intensive and often quite dull. Only years later did I realize what our economic purpose was: if a transaction was large enough, you had to pay a team of people to pore over documents into the wee hours to make sure nothing went wrong. I had zero attachment to my clients—not unusual, given that I was the last rung down on the ladder, and most of the time I only had a faint idea of who my clients were. Someone above me at the firm would give me a task, and I’d do it. I also kind of thought that being a corporate lawyer would help me with the ladies. Not so much, just so you know. It was true that I was getting paid a lot for a twenty-four-year-old with almost no experience. I made more than my father, who has a PhD in physics and had generated dozens of patents for IBM over the years. It seemed kind of ridiculous to me; what the heck had I done to deserve that kind of money? As you can tell, not a whole lot. That didn’t keep my colleagues from pitching a fit if the lawyers across the street were making one dollar more than we were. Most worrisome of all, my brain started to rewire itself after only the first few months. I was adapting. I started spotting issues in offering memoranda. My ten-thousand-yard unblinking document review stare got better and better. Holy cow, I thought—if I don’t leave soon, I’m going to become good at this and wind up doing it for a long time. My experience is a tiny data point in a much bigger problem.

From these definitions and axioms springs my central hypothesis: political parties in a democracy formulate policy strictly as a means of gaining votes. They do not seek to gain office in order to carry out certain preconceived policies or to serve any particular interest groups; rather they formulate policies and serve interest groups in order to gain office. Thus their social function—which is to formulate and carry out policies when in power as the government—is accomplished as a by-product of their private motive—which is to attain the income, power, and prestige of being in office. This hypothesis implies that, in a democracy, the government always acts so as to maximize the number of votes it will receive. In effect, it is an entrepreneur selling policies for votes instead of products for money. Furthermore, it must compete for votes with other parties, just as two or more oligopolists compete for sales in a market.

THREE COMMUNICATION LESSONS FROM THE MOST FASCINATING BRANDS       1.   Don’t focus on how you are similar to others, but how you are different. Leading brands stand out by sharpening their points of difference. The more clearly and distinctly a brand can pinpoint its differences, the more valuable it becomes. If a brand can carve out a very clear spot in people’s minds, the product or service ceases to be a commodity. As we’ll see in Part II, different personality Advantages can be more valuable than similar ones. 2.   Your differences can be very small and simple. The reality is, most products are virtually indistinguishable from their competitors. Yet a leading brand can build a strong competitive edge around very minor differences. Similarly, you don’t need to be dramatically different than everyone else—your difference can be minute, as long as it is clearly defined. The more competitive the market, the more crucial this becomes. 3.   Once you “own” a difference, you can charge more money. People pay more for products and people who add distinct value in some way. And just as customers pay more for fascinating brands, employers pay higher salaries for employees who stand out with a specific benefit. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, your clients and customers will have a higher perceived value of your time and services if they can clearly understand why you are different than your competitors. The more crowded the environment, the more crucial these lessons become.

While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. “You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve. It means you’re putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you’re not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.” This perspective shift is key. It encourages risk taking and enhances creativity while simultaneously guarding against the inevitable decline. Teller explains: “Even if you think you’re going to go ten times bigger, reality will eat into your 10x. It always does. There will be things that will be more expensive, some that are slower; others that you didn’t think were competitive will become competitive. If you shoot for 10x, you might only be at 2x by the time you’re done. But 2x is still amazing. On the other hand, if you only shoot for 2x [i.e., 200 percent], you’re only going to get 5 percent and it’s going to cost you the perspective shift that comes from aiming bigger.” Most critically here, this 10x strategy doesn’t hold true just for large corporations. “A start-up is simply a skunk works without the big company around it,” says Teller. “The upside is there’s no Borg to get sucked back into; the downside is you have no money. But that’s not a reason not to go after moonshots. I think the opposite is true. If you publicly state your big goal, if you vocally commit yourself to making more progress than is actually possible using normal methods, there’s no way back. In one fell swoop you’ve severed all ties between yourself and all the expert assumptions.” Thus entrepreneurs, by striving for truly huge goals, are tapping into the same creativity accelerant that Google uses to achieve such goals. That said, by itself, a willingness to take bigger risks

One way to get a life and keep it is to put energy into being an S&M (success and money) queen. I first heard this term in Karen Salmansohn’s fabulous book The 30-Day Plan to Whip Your Career Into Submission. Here’s how to do it: be a star at work. I don’t care if you flip burgers at McDonald’s or run a Fortune 500 company. Do everything with totality and excellence. Show up on time, all the time. Do what you say you will do. Contribute ideas. Take care of the people around you. Solve problems. Be an agent for change. Invest in being the best in your industry or the best in the world! If you’ve been thinking about changing professions, that’s even more reason to be a star at your current job. Operating with excellence now will get you back up to speed mentally and energetically so you can hit the ground running in your new position. It will also create good karma. When and if you finally do leave, your current employers will be happy to support you with a great reference and often leave an open door for additional work in the future. If you’re an entrepreneur, look at ways to enhance your business. Is there a new product or service you’ve wanted to offer? How can you create raving fans by making your customer service sparkle? How can you reach more people with your product or service? Can you impact thousands or even millions more? Let’s not forget the M in S&M. Getting a life and keeping it includes having strong financial health as well. This area is crucial because many women delay taking charge of their financial lives as they believe (or have been culturally conditioned to believe) that a man will come along and take care of it for them. This is a setup for disaster. You are an intelligent and capable woman. If you want to fully unleash your irresistibility, invest in your financial health now and don’t stop once you get involved in a relationship. If money management is a challenge for you, I highly recommend my favorite financial coach: David Bach. He is the bestselling author of many books, including The Automatic Millionaire, Smart Women Finish Rich, and Smart Couples Finish Rich. His advice is clear-cut and straightforward, and, most important, it works.

Those who govern on behalf of the rich have an incentive to persuade us we are alone in our struggle for survival, and that any attempts to solve our problems collectively – through trade unions, protest movements or even the mutual obligations of society – are illegitimate or even immoral. The strategy of political leaders such as Thatcher and Reagan was to atomize and rule. Neoliberalism leads us to believe that relying on others is a sign of weakness, that we all are, or should be, ‘self-made’ men and women. But even the briefest glance at social outcomes shows that this cannot possibly be true. If wealth were the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the ‘self-attribution fallacy’.10 This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you were not responsible. The same applies to the belief in personal failure that assails all too many at the bottom of the economic hierarchy today. From birth, this system of belief has been drummed into our heads: by government propaganda, by the billionaire media, through our educational system, by the boastful claims of the oligarchs and entrepreneurs we’re induced to worship. The doctrine has religious, quasi-Calvinist qualities: in the Kingdom of the Invisible Hand, the deserving and the undeserving are revealed through the grace bestowed upon them by the god of money. Any policy or protest that seeks to disrupt the formation of a ‘natural order’ of rich and poor is an unwarranted stay upon the divine will of the market. In school we’re taught to compete and are rewarded accordingly, yet our great social and environmental predicaments demand the opposite – the skill we most urgently need to learn is cooperation. We are set apart, and we suffer for it. A series of scientific papers suggest that social pain is processed11 by the same neural circuits as physical pain.12 This might explain why, in many languages, it is hard to describe the impact of breaking social bonds without the terms we use to denote physical pain and injury: ‘I was stung by his words’; ‘It was a massive blow’; ‘I was cut to the quick’; ‘It broke my heart’; ‘I was mortified’. In both humans and other social mammals, social contact reduces physical pain.13 This is why we hug our children when they hurt themselves: affection is a powerful analgesic.14 Opioids relieve both physical agony and the distress of separation. Perhaps this explains the link between social isolation and drug addiction.

In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.