Entrepreneurs Need Quotes

If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.

We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.

Firestarters are flexible. They recognize situational needs and are able to flow into the accessible role identity most relevant to overcome emergent challenges.

Youngsters want to change world. Elders want to enjoy their works. The entrepreneur sells anything needed by both to win their desires.

The most important purpose of any product is to satisfy a customer’s need and not the entrepreneur’s need.

Your customers are always changing and so are their values, perceptions, and needs. Having up-to-date knowledge about them will help you in satisfying their needs as well as delighting them.

Hard work without a solid plan isn’t likely to get you where you want to be. You need to be teachable; you need to be dedicated, and you need to work smart.

Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.

We seldom consider how much of our lives we must render in return for some object we barely want, seldom need, buy only because it was put before us...And this is understandable given the workings of our system where without a job we perish, where if we don't want a job and are happy to get by we are labeled irresponsible, non-contributing leeches on society. But if we hire a fleet of bulldozers, tear up half the countryside and build some monstrous factory, casino or mall, we are called entrepreneurs, job-creators, stalwarts of the community. Maybe we should all be shut away on some planet for the insane. Then again, maybe that is where we are.

You need to choose your association according to your vision.

Make something people want and sell that, or be someone people need and sell you.

An idea is like a play. It needs a good producer and a good promoter even if it is a masterpiece. Otherwise the play may never open; or it may open but, for a lack of an audience, close after a week. Similarly, an idea will not move from the fringes to the mainstream simply because it is good; it must be skillfully marketed before it will actually shift people's perceptions and behavior.

To stay vigorous, a company needs to provide a stimulating and challenging environment for all these types: the dreamer, the entrepreneur, the professional manager, and the leader. If it doesn't, it risks becoming yet another mediocre corporation.

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.

Even as an entrepreneur, you need to see yourself as an employee of your business.

In order to have a healthy economy, we need both entrepreneurs and employees. We need business of every size and we need people to accept the many jobs offered by those businesses. So it's okay to celebrate entrepreneurship, but let's also celebrate the good things about being an employee.

This is not true. Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

The point is not to find the average customer but to find early adopters: the customers who feel the need for the product most acutely. Those customers tend to be more forgiving of mistakes and are especially eager to give feedback.

Entrepreneurship requires passion! It's so challenging being an entrepreneur and sometimes a little bit lonely too, so you really need to love what you're doing.

To succeed in business, you need somebody in your corner who cares enough to challenge you and is courageous enough to tell you the truth, especially when the pressure is on.

Our society today celebrates entrepreneurship way too much. It's great to be an entrepreneur. But it's also great to be an employee. In order to have a healthy economy, we need both entrepreneurs and employees. We need business of every size and we need people to accept the many jobs offered by those businesses.

People declare themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, mavericks, and coaches without any real-life experience. And they do this not because they actually think they are greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary. Our

Debt is just as dangerous in business as it is in personal finance. Entrepreneurs need to be careful not to cripple the businesses they lead with debt. Because one thing debt does well is cripple it's host.

Right now what I need to think about is what would be possible, not all the reasons I can't make a change.

You don’t need to doubt yourself – plenty of people will do that for free!

Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this: 1. Hassle. 2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.) 3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid's insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.) 4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had developed bulging varicose veins in her legs during pregnancy that never retreated, and the prospect of calves branched in blue tree roots mortified me more than I could say. So I didn't say. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.) 5. Unnatural altruism: being forced to make decisions in accordance with what was best for someone else. (I'm a pig.) 6. Curtailment of my traveling. (Note curtailment. Not conclusion.) 7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.) 8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend's five-year-old in the room.) 9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew--every woman, too, which is depressing--would take me less seriously.) 10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother would feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter's life is hideous, too.)

To become a distinguished entrepreneur, you need to have an undeniable, unquestionable and unmovable passion for your vision.

Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.

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

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.

Not every single broke and unemployed person needs a job; some need customers.

When your pain gets tough, your game needs to get rough.

Before you can decide on your brand fonts, colors or imagery, let alone your messaging, you need to know who you're trying to attract first.

Your business is always changing- your process needs to change too.

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.

People who have wellbeing and feel fulfilled, need far less than people who feel unfulfilled, who always seem to need more." By Rethinking Your Mindset you can create SWIFT sustainable success.

If you sincerely want to be successful in life, all you need is one person to believe in you, and that one person should be YOU. As long as you genuinely believe in yourself, you can and will be a success. Your mindset is a powerful force! What you think and how you think will be the ultimate factor of your journey’s end.

Many entrepreneurs have a “can do” attitude, which is often a requirement if you want to succeed. Unfortunately, this attitude often leads to a dangerous mindset where you feel like you need to do everything yourself.

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.

Why have so many schools reduced the time and emphasis they place on art, music, and physical education? The answer is beyond simple: those areas aren’t measured on the all-important tests. You know where those areas are measured… in life! Art, music, and a healthy lifestyle help us develop a richer, deeper, and more balanced perspective. Never before have we needed more of an emphasis on the development of creativity, but schools have gone the exact opposite direction in an effort to make the best test-taking automatons possible. Our economy no longer rewards people for blindly following rules and becoming a cog in the machine. We need risk-takers, outside-the-box thinkers, and entrepreneurs; our school systems do the next generation a great disservice by discouraging these very skills and attitudes. Instead of helping and encouraging them to find and develop their unique strengths, they're told to shut up, put the cell phones away, memorize these facts and fill in the bubbles.

This generation of entrepreneurs needs to know even more than prior generations that value is the heart of business. Followers and likes are not business. Popularity is not business. What makes a business a business is its offering of value and the real existence of customers to buy that offering of value.

The best negotiating tactic is to build a genuine, trusting relationship. If you’re an unknown entrepreneur and the person you’re dealing with isn’t invested in you, why would he or she even do business with you? But on the other hand, if the person is your mentor or friend, you might not even need to negotiate.

Nowadays,” my tour guide says, “it is a man’s world here in China. But 6000 years ago, it was a woman’s world. Man and woman don’t need to get married. Man can just visit the woman’s house at night. When you have a baby, it doesn’t matter who the father is.

Effective sales is about finding a perceived need and helping someone fulfill it.

Don’t worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive. —HOWARD THURMAN

A blog post is like a miniskirt … it needs to be long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to keep it interesting.” And

Without content, we would not need Google. If you think content is irrelevant, expect to fail.

To sell successfully, you don't have to be aggressive. You don't need to be anything other than you. You just need to experiment until you find a way that feels natural.

Filling a need is not merely good business; it's a basic attitude towards life. If you see a need, do whatever you can to meet that need.

If you are not successful yet, the mindset that got you to where you are today, Cannot get you to where you dream to be tomorrow! You need to Rethink Your Mindset to Ensure Success.

Perhaps the most important thing that I learned as an entrepreneur was to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things that I did wrong or might do wrong.

The more we live as 'free individuals' . . . the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities--we have to be impelled or disturbed into freedom. . . . This paradox thoroughly pervades the form of subjectivity that characterizes 'permissive' liberal society. Since permissiveness and free choice are elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on subjects' freedom: they have to appear as (and be sustained by) individuals experiencing themselves as free. There is a multitude of forms of this appearing of un-freedom in the guise of its opposite: in being deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are being given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious job every couple of years, we are told that we are being given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover our creative potential; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we are now able to become 'entrepreneurs of the self," acting like a capitalist freely choosing how to invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed). In education, health, travel . . . we are constantly bombarded by imposed 'free choices'; forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not qualified (or do not possess enough information), we increasingly experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. Unable to break out of this vicious cycle alone, as isolated individuals--since the more we act freely the more we become enslaved by the system--we need to be 'awakened' from this 'dogmatic slumber' of fake freedom.

The hard-charging Silicon Valley entrepreneur has become a respected, admired icon in the modern age. Do these descriptors match the stereotype? A ball of energy. Little need for sleep. A risk taker. Doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Confident and charismatic, bordering on hubristic. Boundlessly ambitious. Driven and restless. Absolutely. They’re also the traits associated with a clinical condition called hypomania. Johns Hopkins psychologist John Gartner has done work showing that’s not a coincidence. Full-blown mania renders people unable to function in normal society. But hypomania produces a relentless, euphoric, impulsive machine that explodes toward its goals while staying connected (even if only loosely) with reality. With

Loan covenants are agreements outlining specific conditions the borrower must meet during the loan term. If you’re an entrepreneur obtaining a business loan, you really need to think methodically about the loan covenant.

For most entrepreneurs the road is long and challenging. In fact, a good rule of thumb is to estimate how much time and energy you think you’ll need to invest in your new venture and then double that number. Still interested?

Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says ‘Make Me Feel Important.’ Not only will you succeed in business, but you will succeed in life.” —MARY KAY ASH, FOUNDER OF MARY KAY COSMETICS

He saw something more in those eyes. The emotion wasn't nakedly apparent, but Mr. Cawley was a professional at reading the subtleties of people. The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnate believed that certain human frailties could actually help fuel success. Insecurity drove billionaire entrepreneurs. Emotional instability made for superb art. The need for attention built great political leaders. But anger, in his experience, led only to inertia.

Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

Any entrepreneur who wants to stay sane needs to let go of the silly notion that challenges are scary. Challenges never stop coming, so you’d better learn to love them and thrive on them. Every struggle is an opportunity to grow and improve.

To the furniture worker's child in North Carolina who wants to become a doctor or a scientist, an engineer or an entrepreneur, a diplomat or even a president -- that's the future we hope for. That's the vision we share. That's where we need to go -- forward

as architect of choosing... choose. to. live. awakened. entirely. wholly. wildly powerful,  deeply masterful,  authentically creative, thriving.  this is not a hoped-for possible self. [reminder: this is an immutable Law of your being] needing not to learn the skill of being whole,  the antidote is to unlearn the habit of living incompletely here’s the practice: ‘know thyself‘—its about spirit  righteousness is underrated elevate connection with the changeless essence seek similitude with the will of Source and will of self 'choose thyself'—its about substance sacred. sagacious. spacious. in thought, word and deed— intend to: honor virtue. innovate enthusiastically. master integrity. 'become who you are'—its about style  a human, being an entrepreneur of life experiences a human, being a purveyor of preferences being-well with the known experience of soul, in service your relationship with insecurities, contradictions, & failures? obstacles or...invitations to grow? [mindset forms manifestation] emotions are messengers are gifts data for discernment: dare to deconstruct them your fears a belief renovation: fear.less. & aspire towards ascendance, anyway support your shine lean into the Light be.come. incandescent as architect of choosing, I choose...  to disrupt the energy of the status quo, to eclipse the realms of ordinary, & to live--a life-well lived. w/ spirit, substance & style.

When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called escalation of commitment. Evidence shows that entrepreneurs persist with failing strategies when they should pivot, NBA general managers and coaches keep investing in new contracts and more playing time for draft busts, and politicians continue sending soldiers to wars that didn’t need to be fought in the first place.

As a startup entrepreneur, you need to know who your ideal customer is. Your new business will likely fail before it starts if you don’t know your ideal customer. And honestly, if you don’t know your ideal customer, there’s no purpose for the business to even exist anyway.

We’re all scared. Yes, all of us. I’m afraid every day. If I’m not afraid, I must not be doing something I need to be doing. I believe that when you’re doing important work, you feel fear because you don’t want to fail. The challenge is to not let the fear stop you from doing the work that will enable you to achieve your goals. You need to recognize the fear for what it is and allow your “why” (your compelling vision) for what you’re doing be bigger than the fear itself. So where do you start? Identify your fears. As they say, "name it to tame it." Then, move forward.

As surely as I feel love and need for food and water, I feel love and need for God. But these feelings have nothing to do with Supramundane Males planning torments for those who don't abide by neocon "moral values." I hold the evangelical truth of our situation to be that contemporary politicized fundamentalists, including first and foremost those aimed at Empire and Armageddon, need us non-fundamentalists, mystics, ecosystem activists, unprogrammable artists, agnostic humanitarians, incorrigible writers, truth-telling musicians, incorruptible scientists, organic gardeners, slow food farmers, gay restaurateurs, wilderness visionaries, pagan preachers of sustainability, compassion-driven entrepreneurs, heartbroken Muslims, grief-stricken children, loving believers, loving disbelievers, peace-marching millions, and the One who loves us all in such a huge way that it is not going too far to say: they need us for their salvation.

REAL Entrepreneurs will be the one's who change the world for the better. Governments must become PUBLIC servants to create the best context and mindsets for people to succeed. We need to ReThink Entrepreneurial success and the role of Public Service in supporting that... or we, and our children, will pay the ultimate price.

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

During the inevitable times when you feel like your work has no meaning, find meaning at home. If you need something more to feel creative or need extra cash, then moonlight: start dream projects after work hours. At some point in time, a successful side project can become your main project and you’ll be fortunate enough to make your work and your dreams become one. || You should always have meaning outside the workplace. Work to support your lifestyle — don’t live to support your work.

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

You don't need to chase wealth, just become a real entrepreneur and the world is your oyster.

for you to provide the best that you imaginably can, it needs to come from both your head and your heart.

It is a big deal being a small business. The world needs you. Actually, the world starves for you.

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

three basic tests. First, your idea has to be big enough to justify devoting your life to it. Make sure it has the potential to be huge. Second, it should be unique. When people see what you are offering, they should say to themselves, “My gosh, I need this. I’ve been waiting for this. This really appeals to me.” Without that “aha!” you are wasting your time. Third, your timing must be right. The world actually doesn’t like pioneers, so if you are too early, your risk of failure is high. The market you are targeting should be lifting off with enough momentum to help make you successful. If you pass these three tests, you will have a business with the potential to be big, that offers something unique, and is hitting the market at the right time. Then you have to be ready for the pain. No entrepreneur anticipates or wants pain, but pain is the reality of starting something new. It is unavoidable

You would think that this would be whether the entrepreneur’s idea is actually a good one. But finding a good idea is apparently not all that hard. Finding an entrepreneur who can execute a good idea is a different matter entirely. One needs a person who can take an idea from proposal to reality, work the long hours, build a team, handle the pressures and setbacks, manage technical and people problems alike, and stick with the effort for years on end without getting distracted or going insane. Such people are rare and extremely hard to spot.

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.

Many self-help teachers say that our schools only focus on “preparing today’s youths to get good jobs by developing scholastic skills.” They think that’s a bad thing. It’s probably the right thing. Not everyone is suited for entrepreneurship, as statistics seem to suggest. Even future entrepreneurs usually need to begin as employees to get their starting capital and to learn while they work.

(Note curtailment. Not conclusion.) 7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.) 8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend’s five-year-old in the room.) 9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew—every woman, too, which is depressing—would

When I speak to potential entrepreneurs,” Davila reflects now, “I tell them, don’t expect that the sky’s going to open and a lightning bolt is going to hit you with the next Facebook idea. Those things are Haley’s comet—they come by once every hundred years. You don’t need to have that as entrepreneur. You just have to figure out something people need and find a way to execute it better than everyone else.

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.

Most people are operating at a fraction of what they are really capable of. As the leader you will need to find the unique seeds of greatness buried in each member of your team. You need to remove the weeds (fears, inhibitions, uncertainties), water and fertilize (invest in their personal growth), and provide the sunshine (your positive attitude, belief in them, and example) to transform that miraculous seed inside them into a bountiful harvest of results and productivity.

Entrepreneurial management in the new venture has four requirements: It requires, first, a focus on the market. It requires, second, financial foresight, and especially planning for cash flow and capital needs ahead. It requires, third, building a top management team long before the new venture actually needs one and long before it can actually afford one. And finally, it requires of the founding entrepreneur a decision in respect to his or her own role, area of work, and relationships.

The cause of this transformation, effected by the Meiji Restoration from 1868 onward, was the determination of influential members of the Japanese elite to avoid being dominated and colonized by the West, as seemed to be happening elsewhere in Asia, even if the reform measures to be taken involved the scrapping of the feudal order and the bitter opposition of the samurai clans.39 Japan had to be modernized not because individual entrepreneurs wished it, but because the “state” needed it. After

WE MAY FEEL...BUT WE DON'T We may feel the need to change employment, but we don’t. We may feel the need to start a specific project, but we don’t. We may feel the need to pursue higher education, but we don’t We may feel the need to heal a broken relationship, but we don’t. We may feel the need to work to improve our spiritual lives, but we don’t. We may feel the need to take steps toward a healthier physical or emotional life for ourselves and/or our family, but again, we don’t. (This list could likely go on for eternity.) The desire for progression is innate, but the problem we face is that the actual act of progression is also a choice. Without embracing our inherent need for progress, for positive growth and/or change, we’ll still go on living. ...But at what cost?

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.

Catch a customer with emotion and you will have a customer for a day; but, capture a customer with value and you will keep a customer for a lifetime. I truly believe in good, old-fashioned values when it comes to business. That is what timelessness is made of! At the end of the day, the question is, “Do you want to build a good hut for a day or do you want to build a good fortress for a lifetime?” Quality, value, understanding the needs of your clientele— that’s how you build a legacy. Connect with people, because you can never underestimate just how many people out there are yearning for any form of good interpersonal connection that they can find and when you can provide that as a brand name, you can allow the person behind your business to shine through. That’s how timelessness is created. It’s not created by luring people into a myth; it’s created by making connections, by remembering people’s names, by being genuinely interested in everybody.

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.

Optimists Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything. If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. A study of people who exaggerate their expected life span beyond actuarial predictions showed that they work longer hours, are more optimistic about their future income, are more likely to remarry after divorce (the classic “triumph of hope over experience”), and are more prone to bet on individual stocks. Of course, the blessings of optimism are offered only to individuals who are only mildly biased and who are able to “accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality. Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders—not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. They are probably optimistic by temperament; a survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine than midlevel managers about life in general. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.

What's the difference between people who see and seek gaps and those that see and seek bridges? The first stops and stays on the side. The second, crosses and reaches new worlds. As soon as your mind identifies the bridge, the gap is gone...but the bridge was always there...you just had to see it. There are holes in the ground, yet a bridge (which is there, but may take time to see) filled it. That's where asking better questions comes in. Where is the bridge so I can cross? There is one. Believing there is a bridge from where you are to where you want to go is 99% of the battle. The other 1% is to cross it. But do I have to build the bridge? Maybe. But everything is first created in the mind and then in the world. The bridge is there. See it. Cross it.

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.

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Women are often convinced by many different social norms, expectations, and incentives to live within constraints that similarly placed (in terms of race, class, culture, and time period) men need not consider. This sort of internally constrained vision, whether it is because of false consciousness, shame, stereotype, or trauma, is the kind of violation of their positive freedom that should most concern feminists. Capitalism, by providing an option outside kin and traditional community norms for independence and social power, can allow women the wherewithal to escape these constraints. Even if a particular woman does not choose to work outside the home or compete in the marketplace as an entrepreneur, the fact that women have this option under capitalism increases the freedom of all women. Enlarging the set of things that women are seen as capable of can reduce the sense that women have that they are inferior, and this can increase their confidence in a wider set of social circumstances. It puts the lie to the idea that women are incapable, and helps women to stand up to ill-treatment and violence.

Diego Gambetta, however, presents an elegant economic theory of the Mafia’s origins: mafiosi are private entrepreneurs whose function is to provide protection of individual property rights in a society in which the state fails to perform this basic service. That is, if one party to a private transaction is cheated by the other, he would normally take his partner to court in a well-ordered rule-of-law society. But where the state is corrupt, unreliable, or perhaps altogether absent, one must turn instead to a private provider of protection and task him to threaten to break the legs of the other party if he doesn’t pay up. By this account, the Mafia is simply a private organization providing a needed service that is normally performed by the state—that is, use of the threat of violence (and sometimes actual violence) to enforce property rights. Gambetta shows that the Mafia arose precisely in those parts of southern Italy where there was economic conflict over land, mobile wealth and a high volume of transactions, and political discord in connection with the changes taking place in the nature of the Italian state after 1860.

If that’s the case, though, why did the Union, under Lincoln, so catastrophically fail? The easy answer might be that no strategy anticipates all contingencies, that every solution creates new problems, and that these can, at times, overwhelm. The harsher one—although I think the more accurate one—lies in the possibility that the Founders left the Union to test itself: knowing the need to proportion aspirations to capabilities, recognizing the incompatibilities in good things, they chose to save their new state, and leave to their descendants the saving of its soul. Augustine and Machiavelli had both seen in proportionality a way to balance the respective claims of souls and states: their differences lay in whether equilibria reached required accountability to God. Augustine said yes and labored mightily to provide it. Machiavelli’s God left statecraft to man. Americans, in varieties almost as infinite as those of Elizabeth I, straddled this divide: they could be, like their early leaders, coolly pragmatic, like their revivalists fiercely religious, and like their entrepreneurs anywhere in between. What’s clear, though, is that few in the young republic questioned—at least not openly—what so many in the mature republic would give their lives to change: the anomaly that a Constitution promising a “more perfect Union” assumed slavery’s legality. 69

The Entrepreneurial Model What does The Entrepreneur see off in the distance that The Technician finds so difficult to see? What exactly is the Entrepreneurial Model? It’s a model of a business that fulfills the perceived needs of a specific segment of customers in an innovative way. The Entrepreneurial Model looks at a business as if it were a product, sitting on a shelf and competing for the customer’s attention against a whole shelf of competing products (or businesses). Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model, he surveys the world and asks: “Where is the opportunity?” Having identified it, he then goes back to the drawing board and constructs a solution to the frustrations he finds among a certain group of customers. A solution in the form of a business that looks and acts in a very specific way, the way the customer needs it to look and act, not The Entrepreneur. “How will my business look to the customer?” The Entrepreneur asks. “How will my business stand out from all the rest?” Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed. The Technician, on the other hand, looks inwardly, to

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.

GET BEYOND THE ONE-MAN SHOW Great organizations are never one-man operations. There are 22 million licensed small businesses in America that have no employees. Forbes suggests 75 percent of all businesses operate with one person. And the average income of those companies is a sad $44,000. That’s not a business—that’s torture. That is a prison where you are both the warden and the prisoner. What makes a person start a business and then be the only person who works there? Are they committed to staying small? Or maybe an entrepreneur decides that because the talent pool is so poor, they can’t hire anyone who can do it as well as them, and they give up. My guess is the latter: Most people have just given up and said, “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” I know, because that’s what I did—and it was suicidal. Because my business was totally dependent on me and only me, I was barely able to survive, much less grow, for the first ten years. Instead I contracted another company to promote my seminars. When I hired just one person to assist me out of my home office, I thought I was so smart: Keep it small. Keep expenses low. Run a tight ship. Bigger isn’t always better. These were the things I told myself to justify not growing my business. I did this for years and even bragged about how well I was doing on my own. Then I started a second company with a partner, a consulting business that ran parallel to my seminar business. This consulting business quickly grew bigger than my first business because my partner hired people to work for us. But even then I resisted bringing other people into the company because I had this idea that I didn’t want the headaches and costs that come with managing people. My margins were monster when I had no employees, but I could never grow my revenue line without killing myself, and I have since learned that is where all my attention and effort should have gone. But with the efforts of one person and one contracted marketing company, I could expand only so much. I know that a lot of speakers and business gurus run their companies as one-man shows. Which means that while they are giving advice to others about how to grow a business, they may have never grown one themselves! Their one-man show is simply a guy or gal going out, collecting a fee, selling time and a few books. And when they are out speaking, the business terminates all activity. I started studying other people and companies that had made it big and discovered they all had lots of employees. The reality is you cannot have a great business if it’s just you. You need to add other people. If you don’t believe me, try to name one truly great business that is successful, ongoing, viable, and growing that doesn’t have many people making it happen. Good luck. Businesses are made of people, not just machines, automations, and technology. You need people around you to implement programs, to add passion to the technology, to serve customers, and ultimately to get you where you want to go. Consider the behemoth online company Amazon: It has more than 220,000 employees. Apple has more than 100,000; Microsoft has around the same number. Ernst & Young has more than 200,000 people. Apple calls the employees working in its stores “Geniuses.” Don’t you want to hire employees deserving of that title too? Think of how powerful they could make your business.

As we’ve seen, one of the most frequently pursued paths for achievement-minded college seniors is to spend several years advancing professionally and getting trained and paid by an investment bank, consulting firm, or law firm. Then, the thought process goes, they can set out to do something else with some exposure and experience under their belts. People are generally not making lifelong commitments to the field in their own minds. They’re “getting some skills” and making some connections before figuring out what they really want to do. I subscribed to a version of this mind-set when I graduated from Brown. In my case, I went to law school thinking I’d practice for a few years (and pay down my law school debt) before lining up another opportunity. It’s clear why this is such an attractive approach. There are some immensely constructive things about spending several years in professional services after graduating from college. Professional service firms are designed to train large groups of recruits annually, and they do so very successfully. After even just a year or two in a high-level bank or consulting firm, you emerge with a set of skills that can be applied in other contexts (financial modeling in Excel if you’re a financial analyst, PowerPoint and data organization and presentation if you’re a consultant, and editing and issue spotting if you’re a lawyer). This is very appealing to most any recent graduate who may not yet feel equipped with practical skills coming right out of college. Even more than the professional skill you gain, if you spend time at a bank, consultancy, or law firm, you will become excellent at producing world-class work. Every model, report, presentation, or contract needs to be sophisticated, well done, and error free, in large part because that’s one of the core value propositions of your organization. The people above you will push you to become more rigorous and disciplined, and your work product will improve across the board as a result. You’ll get used to dressing professionally, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing official correspondence, and so forth. You will be able to speak the corporate language. You’ll become accustomed to working very long hours doing detail-intensive work. These attributes are transferable to and helpful in many other contexts.

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.