Entrepreneurial Life Quotes

The type of person you are is usually reflected in your business. To improve your business, first improve yourself.

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.

Success in life is not for those who run fast, but for those who keep running and always on the move.

Entrepreneurs don't have weekends or birthdays or holidays. Every day is my weekend, my birthday, my holiday. OR, every day is my work day. Mostly it's a choice.

An entrepreneur is a man who knows he can fail, but he does not accept to fail before he actually fails, and when he fails he learns from his errors and moves on.

Pivoting is not the end of the disruption process, but the beginning of the next leg of your journey.

No obstacle is so big that one person with determination can't make a difference.

As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education.

Just because you have baggage doesn't mean you have to lug it around.

The real challenge is for each of us to determine where we feel we can make the most impact.

Lifelong learning is no longer a luxury but a necessity for employment.

Disruptors don't have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.

Entrepreneurs see what others can't, do what others won't, and accomplish what others dream.

When we love something, emotion often drives our actions. This is the gift and the challenge entrepreneurs face every day. The companies we dream of and build from scratch are part of us and intensely personal. They are our families. Our lives. But the entrepreneurial journey is not for everyone. Yes, the highs are high and the rewards can be thrilling. But the lows can break your heart. Entrepreneurs must love what they do to such a degree that doing it is worth sacrifice and, at times, pain. But doing anything else, we think, would be unimaginable

At the heart of all sales and marketing is the ability to create demand even in the absence of logic.

You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.

Every threat to the status quo is an opportunity in disguise.

All businesses -- no matter if they make dog food or software -- don't sell products, they sell solutions.

Insight and drive are all the skills you need. Everything else can be hired.

You'll never know how close you are to victory if you give up.

No one who ever led a nation got there by following the path of another.

Your energy is a valuable resource, distribute it wisely.

Starting each day with a positive mindset is the most important step of your journey to discovering opportunity.

It is not incumbent on the world to conform to your vision of change. It is up to you to explain the future in terms that those living in the past and present can follow.

Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure

Speed to fail should be every entrepreneur's motto. When you finally find the one idea that can't be killed, go with it.

The most important tool you have on a resume is language.

To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.

The best entrepreneurs are not the best visionaries. The greatest entrepreneurs are incredible salespeople. They know how to tell an amazing story that will convince talent and investors to join in on the journey.

If your idea is big enough and crazy enough, all you have to do is survive. If you survive you will succeed.

Learning to embrace and savor rejection is one of the best things that entrepreneurs can do. Launching a startup is the time to find your ever-optimistic inner child again.

Business is still more often about whom you know, not what you know.

A free and open Internet is a despot's worst enemy.

Be the best at what you do or the only one doing it.

A disruptor finds opportunity and profit from his misfortunes.

There is a difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up.

Our world's future is far more malleable and controllable than most people realize.

A negative mind will never find success. I have never heard a positive idea come from a person in a negative state.

A dream with a deadline is a goal.

Accepting that the odds are against you is the same as accepting defeat before you begin.

A career is just a longer trip with a whole lot more baggage.

You will have more regrets for the things you didn't try than the ones you tried and didn't succeed at.

An average idea enthusiastically embraced will go farther than a genius idea no one gets.

Problems are just businesses waiting for the right entrepreneur to unlock the value.

Smart entrepreneurs learn that they must fail often and fast.

Data may disappoint, but it never lies.

The majority of people are not willing to risk what they have built for the opportunity to have something better.

Would you rather work forty hours a week at a job you hate or eighty hours a week doing work you love?

Most startup failures result from entrepreneurs who are better at making excuses than products.

Data has no ego and makes an excellent co-pilot.

Does your story inspire you? If not, it's time to change it.

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

The greatest asset of the university has been its capacity for innovation. That capacity, in turn, rests partly on its traditions of small size, weak interdepartmental boundaries, and solid adminstrative support (or at least hunting licenses) for entrepreneurial undertakings.

I have noticed over the past three years that most African Christians depend on their pastor or preachers for directions in life than their lecturers, politicians and nurses. That tells why most people refuse certain medical priorities with regards to their pastor's messages. I think if every pastor should have entrepreneurial knowledge coupled with spiritual integrity, Africa will shake!

To be big, you have to think big. Don’t limit your imagination.

Yesterday is a pile of rubble. Today is a pile of opportunity. Life takes a new dump each morning

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

One of the best ways to attract capital is to outperform the competition.

Ideas are meaningless without a masterful execution.

Entrepreneur, if your're going to start up, make sure you start up with excellence in mind.

The best big idea is only going to be as good as its implementation.

Building a career or a company is about living a few years of your life like most people won't so that you can spend the rest of your life living at a level most people can't.

Corporate planning cycles are a classic example of generals fighting the last war over again instead of preparing for what might lie ahead.

If you can imagine a solution, you can make it happen.

Those that recognize the inevitability of change stand to benefit the most from it.

The customer is always right...even when they're wrong.

The joy of disruption comes from accepting that we all live in a temporal state.

The most successful people have the same twenty-four hours in a day that you do.

If you don't know where you want to be in five years, how do you ever expect to get there?

You can truly have it all, just not all at the same time.

Plan for ways to get more enjoyment into your life and you will get more joy out of it.

Whether driven by ambition or circumstance, every career gets disrupted.

Security doesn't rob ambition; the illusion of security robs ambition.

Disruption isn't about what happens to you, it's about how you respond to what happens to you.

There are riches to be found simply by capturing the value released through others' disruptive breakthroughs.

There are two types of people in this world: those whose look for opportunity and those who make it happen.

If life, you get what you believe you deserve.

The business world is littered with the fossils of companies that failed to evolve. Disrupt or be disrupted. There is no middle ground.

Billions of dollars worth of research knowledge lie dormant at American universities waiting for the right disruptor to come along and create a business.

All Disruption starts with introspection.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. —Anatole France

What is more, when the funds do run dry, blacks, having never learned how the dollars were earned, will be left in the position of once again needing to beg the government for survival. Handouts absent hard work render men weak, and with depleted self-esteem; they stifle the entrepreneurial spirit, by removing our innate senses of drive and aspiration. Poverty and despair become the life of the man who is given a fish but never learns to cast his own line. And though many will sympathize, prosperity will never be won until we become our own lifeline.

As I have often said, governments don’t produce economic growth, people do. What government can do is encourage Americans to tap their well of ingenuity and unleash their entrepreneurial spirit, then get out of the way.

Entrepreneurship is a journey, not an outing. You cannot make a deal with yourself by saying, ‘I’m going to try this out for two years and see.’ Entrepreneurship is about living life on your own terms. Dream huge. And when you do, dream with your eyes open.

The disappearance of American optimism would be a bad thing. Much of the dynamism of American life springs from the habits of risk taking, innovation, and entrepreneurialism that an optimistic mindset creates. A more pessimistic America might be a wiser country that made fewer foreign policy blunders, but it would be weaker, poorer, and less influential than the America we know.

Productivity -- real, self-driven productivity -- was one of the first entrepreneurial skills I learned. It served me well when I was on my own, and it has served me even better as an employee because it requires a kind of organization and self-motivation that employees aren't necessarily incentivized to cultivate. After all, if you are superproductive, all you'll get is more work to do, right?

With the invention of the city and its powerful combination of economies of scale coupled to innovation and wealth creation came the great divisions of society. Our present social network structures barely existed in their present form until urban communities evolved. Hunter-gatherers were significantly less hierarchical, more egalitarian and community oriented than we are. The struggle and tension between unbridled individual self-enhancement and the care and concern for the less fortunate has been a major thread running throughout human history, especially over the past two hundred years. Nevertheless, it seems that without the motive of self-interest our entrepreneurial free market economy would collapse. The system we have evolved critically relies on people continually wanting new cars and new cell phones, new widgets and gadgets, new clothes and new washing machines, new thrills, new entertainment, and pretty much new everything, even when they already have enough of “everything.” It may not be a pretty picture and it doesn’t work for everyone, but so far, it’s worked remarkably well for most of us, and apparently most of us seem to want it to continue. Whether it can is a topic I’ll return to in the last chapter.

Q. Which is my favorite country? A. The United States of America. Not because I'm chauvinistic or xenophobic, but because I believe that we alone have it all, even if not to perfection. The U.S. has the widest possible diversity of spectacular scenery and depth of natural resources; relatively clean air and water; a fascinatingly heterogeneous population living in relative harmony; safe streets; few deadly communicable diseases; a functioning democracy; a superlative Constitution; equal opportunity in most spheres of life; an increasing tolerance of different races, religions, and sexual preferences; equal justice under the law; a free and vibrant press; a world-class culture in books,films, theater, museums, dance, and popular music; the cuisines of every nation; an increasing attention to health and good diet; an abiding entrepreneurial spirit; and peace at home.

After graduating from college, I was expected to find a good job. I didn't and instead dove into entrepreneurial ventures. My family thought I was crazy and proclaimed, “You're wasting a five-year education!” Peers thought I was delusional. Oh dear, delivering pizza and chauffeuring limousines while two business degrees hung from the wall?! Women wouldn't date me because I broke the professional, “college-educated” mold the fairy tale espoused. Going Fastlane and building momentum will require you to turn your back at the people who fart headwinds in your direction. You have to break free of society's gravitational force and their expectations. If you aren't mindful to this natural gravity, life can denigrate into a viscous self-perpetuating cycle, which is society's prescription for normal: Get up, go to work, come home, eat, watch a few episodes of Law and Order, go to bed … then repeat, day after day after day.

Like the railroads that bankrupted a previous generation of visionary entrepreneurs and built the foundations of an industrial nation, fiber-optic webs, storewidth breakthroughs, data centers, and wireless systems installed over the last five years will enable and endow the next generation of entrepreneurial wealth. As Mead states, "the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was to get a company going during the bubble". Now, Mead says, "there's space available; you can get fab runs; you can get vendors to answer the phone. You can make deals with people; you can sit down and they don't spend their whole time telling you how they're a hundred times smarter than you. It's absolutely amazing. You can actually get work done now, which means what's happening now is that the entrepreneurs, the technologists, are building the next generation technology that isn't visible yet but upon which will be built the biggest expansion of productivity the world has ever seen.

If you want to work in a business, get a job in somebody else’s business! But don’t go to work in your own. Because while you’re working, while you’re answering the telephone, while you’re baking pies, while you’re cleaning the windows and the floors, while you’re doing it, doing it, doing it, there’s something much more important that isn’t getting done. And it’s the work you’re not doing, the strategic work, the entrepreneurial work, that will lead your business forward, that will give you the life you’ve not yet known.

People know us best for our entrepreneurial success as the founders of Three Dog Bakery; what they don’t know is that we owe it all to a gigantic deaf dog named Gracie. But even though Gracie sowed the seeds of our success, this isn’t a book about “making it.” This is the story of a dog who was born with the cards stacked against her, but whose passionate, joyful nature helped her turn what could have been a dog’s life into a victory of the canine spirit—and, in the process, save two guys who thought they were saving her.

People come from all over the world to see what's happening in our area, to see the speed with which our technology is changing and what that means in terms of the economy and education, and that whole entrepreneurial spirit comes over to protecting the environment and dealing with education and other issues - just solving problems. Then you come back here [Washington D.C.] and you're engaged in debates based on old, stale assumptions. It's practically irrelevant to what is going on in the state...It's a state of mind that exists in our area that has to be represented at the table.

There is one last way to break with your past and begin a new stage of your career journey, which is to take some advice that appears at the end of the 1964 film Zorba the Greek. Zorba, the great lover of life, is sitting on the beach with the repressed and bookish Basil, an Englishman who has come to a tiny Greek island with the hope of setting up a small business. The elaborate cable system that Zorba has designed and built for Basil to bring logs down the mountainside has just collapsed on its very first trial. Their whole entrepreneurial venture is in complete ruins, a failure before it has even begun. And that is the moment when Zorba unveils his philosophy of life to Basil: ZORBA: Damn it boss, I like you too much not to say it. You’ve got everything except one thing: madness! A man needs a little madness, or else… BASIL: Or else? ZORBA:…he never dares cut the rope and be free. Basil then stands up and, completely out of character, asks Zorba to teach him how to dance. The Englishman has finally learned that life is there to be lived with passion, that risks are there to be taken, the day is there to be seized. To do otherwise is a disservice to life itself. Zorba’s words are one of the great messages for the human quest in search of the good life. Most of us live bound by our fears and inhibitions. Yet if we are to move beyond them, if we are to cut the rope and be free, we need to treat life as an experiment and discover the little bit of madness that lies within us all.

Reading this book, you will probably get motivated to take a major faith step, but life can stare you back in the face and tell you that you are stupid to believe that God will answer your prayer. The bottom line is, GOD CAN DO IT, and He will do it if you let Him. Numbers, 23:19 states, “God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?” Your entrepreneurial dream may seem impossible, but God can do it. Your finances might be in the worst shape that you have ever experienced in your life, but God can fix it. You might not have the education or the skill that you know is required to follow through on your dream, but God can supplement it. Will you trust Him to do it?

As a conductor of orchestras, Ozawa is quite naturally in touch with a large number of people on a daily basis and has to act as the guiding member of a team. But no matter how talented he might be, people would not follow him if he were constantly moody and difficult. Interpersonal relations take on a great significance. A conductor needs like-minded musical colleagues, and he is often called upon to perform social and even entrepreneurial tasks. He has to give much thought to his audiences. And as a musician, he has to devote a good deal of energy to the guidance of the next generation. By contrast, as a novelist I am free to spend my life hardly seeing or talking to anyone for days at a time, and never appearing in the media. I rarely have to do anything that involves teamwork, and while it’s best to have some colleagues, I don’t especially need any. I just have to stay in the house and write—alone. The thought of guiding the next generation has never crossed my mind, I’m sorry to say (not that anyone has ever asked me to do such a thing).

Equity financing, on the other hand, is unappealing to cooperators because it may mean relinquishing control to outside investors, which is a distinctly capitalist practice. Investors are not likely to buy non-voting shares; they will probably require representation on the board of directors because otherwise their money could potentially be expropriated. “For example, if the directors of the firm were workers, they might embezzle equity funds, refrain from paying dividends in order to raise wages, or dissipate resources on projects of dubious value.”105 In any case, the very idea of even partial outside ownership is contrary to the cooperative ethos. A general reason for traditional institutions’ reluctance to lend to cooperatives, and indeed for the rarity of cooperatives whether related to the difficulty of securing capital or not, is simply that a society’s history, culture, and ideologies might be hostile to the “co-op” idea. Needless to say, this is the case in most industrialized countries, especially the United States. The very notion of a workers’ cooperative might be viscerally unappealing and mysterious to bank officials, as it is to people of many walks of life. Stereotypes about inefficiency, unprofitability, inexperience, incompetence, and anti-capitalism might dispose officials to reject out of hand appeals for financial assistance from co-ops. Similarly, such cultural preconceptions may be an element in the widespread reluctance on the part of working people to try to start a cooperative. They simply have a “visceral aversion” to, and unfamiliarity with, the idea—which is also surely a function of the rarity of co-ops itself. Their rarity reinforces itself, in that it fosters a general ignorance of co-ops and the perception that they’re risky endeavors. Additionally, insofar as an anti-democratic passivity, a civic fragmentedness, a half-conscious sense of collective disempowerment, and a diffuse interpersonal alienation saturate society, this militates against initiating cooperative projects. It is simply taken for granted among many people that such things cannot be done. And they are assumed to require sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts. In most places, the cooperative idea is not even in the public consciousness; it has barely been heard of. Business propaganda has done its job well.106 But propaganda can be fought with propaganda. In fact, this is one of the most important things that activists can do, this elevation of cooperativism into the public consciousness. The more that people hear about it, know about it, learn of its successes and potentials, the more they’ll be open to it rather than instinctively thinking it’s “foreign,” “socialist,” “idealistic,” or “hippyish.” If successful cooperatives advertise their business form, that in itself performs a useful service for the movement. It cannot be overemphasized that the most important thing is to create a climate in which it is considered normal to try to form a co-op, in which that is seen as a perfectly legitimate and predictable option for a group of intelligent and capable unemployed workers. Lenders themselves will become less skeptical of the business form as it seeps into the culture’s consciousness.

Although I have suggested that American culture tends to favor the side of independence over the side of inclusion (and I would extend that to Western culture in general), it is not a generalization that seems to apply uniformly to men and women in our culture. Indeed, although I have no idea why it may be, it seems to me that men tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for inclusion, tend to me more oriented toward differentiation, and that women tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for distinctness, tend to be more oriented toward inclusion. Whether this is a function of social experience throughout the lifespan, the effects of parenting anatomical (even genital) density, or some combination, I do not know. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. In this respect constructive-developmental theory revives the Jungian notion that there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man; saying so is both a consequence of considering that all of life is animated by a fundamental evolutionary ambivalence, and that 'maleness'/'femaleness' is but one of its expressions. Similarly, I believe that while Western and Eastern cultures reflect one side or the other of this ambivalence, they project the other. Western cultures tend to value independence, self-assertion, aggrandizement, personal achievement, increasing independence from the family of origin; Eastern cultures (including the American Indian) value the other pole. Cheyenne Indians asked to talk about themselves typically begin, 'My grandfather...' (Strauss, 1981); many Eastern cultures use the word 'I' to refer to a collectivity of people of which one is a part (Marriott, 1981); the Hopi do not say, 'It's a nice day,' as if one could separate oneself from the day, but say something that would have to be translated more like, 'I am in a nice day,' or 'It's nice in front, and behind, and above" (Whorf, 1956). At the same time one cannot escape the enormous hunger for community, mystical merging, or intergenerational connection that continually reappears in American culture through communalism, quasi-Eastern religions, cult phenomena, drug experience, the search for one's 'roots,' the idealization of the child, or the romantic appeal of extended families. Similarly, it seems too glib to dismiss as 'mere Westernization' the repeated expression in Eastern cultures of individualism, intergenerational autonomy, or entrepreneurialism as if these were completely imposed from without and not in any way the expression of some side of Eastern culture itself.