Entrepreneurs Thoughts Quotes

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

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.

Writing is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time. The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and writing some more can help you control issues that you face.

Philanthropist is the thought which should be followed by the world.

The most liberating of all thoughts is disregard or “disconcern” for what other people think. Famous mail-order impresario and entrepreneur J. Peterman wrote (in his autobiography Peterman Rides Again); “Once you realize that most people are keeping up appearances and putting on a show, their approval becomes less important.” Excessive concern over what other people think inhibits personality more than any other factor.

Disruptive innovation is entrepreneurs changing their industry with unique creativity.

Creativity is the new currency, so, are you credited with new thoughts or overdrawn in old thinking?

Entrepreneur, make today count and but don't let the day count you.

The real problem is that most people fear failure, and thus take no action. They really they should be fearful of their thoughts that cause their failure to take action!

S.T.O.P. = Start To Open Possibilities

One way to prevent high conflict is to learn to recognize the conflict entrepreneurs in your orbit. Notice who delights in each new plot twist of a feud. Who is quick to validate every lament and to articulate wrongs no one else has even thought of?

The moment you think you can do something that you previously thought you couldn't, you can.

To become distinguished in your industry, you have to constantly manage, master and maximise your time.

For any creative thought to be contagious, it must first be worthy of a sneeze.

I had always thought of sales as a way to get something, I could now see it as a tool for giving. For the first time, I began to understand the strange, wonderful irony that sales isn’t about selling at all.

IT'S TIME TO LEARN YOUR A.B.C.s Always BE CONFIDENT Confidence is a feeling, feel it. Always BE CREATIVE Creativity is an ability, enable it. Always BE CURIOUS Curiosity is a desire, desire it. Always BE COMPASSIONATE Compassion is an awareness, be aware. Always BE CHARITABLE Charity is generous, be generous. Always BE CONSIDERATE Consideration is thoughtful, think. Always BE COURTEOUS Courtesy is a mindset, be mindful. Always BE COACHABLE Coachability is a willingness, be willing. Always BE COMMITTED Commitment is purpose, live on purpose. Always BE CARING Caring is giving, give.

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.

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!

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

What I now know is that it’s next to impossible to truly be a thought leader in your industry without a killer blog, a thoughtful book, and a speech that rocks.

In the future - 60-80 years from now, what would a historian of that time look back at as the one big thing that changed everything?

Don't disregard your so-called "stupid ideas." They may be inspired thoughts and high-potential opportunities. Whatcha gonna do?

Smile and Slay. You have to slay it in life or life will slay you.

A product in the marketplace is the result of thought in an inner space and action more than the common place.

Embrace iteration as the road to improvement, but don't let that lull you into rolling out poorly-thought-out crap.

An entrepreneur is not deterred by his lack of perfection, he knows no one else is

When we think a thought enough times it becomes a belief and that belief becomes a pattern which, in turn, becomes how we live our lives.

A real writer (or artist or entrepreneur) has something to give. She has lived enough and suffered enough and thought deeply enough about her experience to be able to process it into something that is of value to others, even if only as entertainment. A fake writer (or artist or entrepreneur) is just trying to draw attention to himself. The word “fake” may be too unkind. Let’s say “young” or “evolving.

Companies maintain lively web sites to put their view across but entrepreneur-owners have not stepped forward to do the same to help organize the mass of little owners and to provide a way for them to share views. Sure, there are bloggers writing about anything and everything, but there don’t seem to be shareholder-controlled sites to exchange thoughts and ideas about a company that participants own in common.

The world needs not new governments - the world needs not new parties - the world needs not new dictators masquerading as leaders or entrepreneurs - what the world needs is thought, punned in the flames of reason, courage and humaneness.

Third, many entrepreneurs are afraid. Acknowledging failure can lead to dangerously low morale. Most entrepreneurs’ biggest fear is not that their vision will prove to be wrong. More terrifying is the thought that the vision might be deemed wrong without having been given a real chance to prove itself.

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.” •

ideas are lost if they aren’t captured in some way. Additionally, according to the Zeigarnick Effect, any incomplete thought—such as an idea or task you need to complete—will occupy your mind until you take some kind of action on it by either completing the task or capturing the idea with a plan for accomplishing the task.

If you’re the type of person who’s always thought of “sell” as a four-letter word, this is good news for you. You can now replace that with another four-letter word: HELP. How can you help? How does your product or service address someone’s deepest need or fear? What problem does it solve? How does it make a positive difference?

If you are ever going to become the kind of person who achieves huge amounts of success, you must learn to focus only on what you can control. You can't control the weather. You can't control the thoughts of other people. You can't control the overall economy. However you can control your thoughts, your expectations and your luck.

The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting “power” as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized. Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by the results. This means, for example, that economic decisions will be made by stakeholders rather than by shareholders, and that entrepreneurship and markets will cease to play their present role. When they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place. […] Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of non market economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this. The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function. The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. […] The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century. Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable non market economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. […] But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.

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!

What entrepreneurs quickly learn is that they need to price their product at least 2.3 times its cost to allow for at least one 50 percent margin for them and another 50 percent margin for their retailers (1.5 × 1.5 = 2.25). That first 50 percent margin for the entrepreneur is really mostly covering the hidden costs of doing business at a scale that they hadn’t thought of when they first started,

After identifying when you’re having fixed mindset thoughts, Dweck suggests the next steps are to recognize that you have a choice in how you interpret the challenge, setbacks, or criticism; then “talk back” to the fixed voice with a growth mindset voice. Examples she gives are, “If I don’t try, I automatically fail”; “Others who succeeded before me had passion and put forth effort”; and, “If I don’t take responsibility, I can’t fix it.

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.

Large or small, our actions forge our futures, hopefully inspiring others along the way. 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. In times of adversity and change, we really discover who we are and what we’re made of. Effective leaders share two intertwined attributes: an unbridled level of confidence about where their organizations are headed, and the ability to bring people along. Fixing moments, like mopping a dirty floor, only provides short-term satisfaction. But take the time to understand the cause of the problem—like how to keep a floor from getting so dirty in the first place—solves, and maybe eliminates, a problem. How leaders embody the values they espouse sets a tone, an expectation, that guides their employees’ behaviors. While I would not want to constantly battle against the odds, the raw feeling of accomplishing something that others did not think possible, or leading people beyond where they thought they could go, is extremely gratifying.

In every potential sponsor’s eyes, I was a nobody. And soon I had notched up more rejection letters than is healthy for any one man to receive. I tried to think of an entrepreneur and adventurer that I admired, and I kept coming back to Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin. I wrote to him once, then I wrote once more. In all, I sent twenty-three letters. No response. Right, I thought, I’ll find out where he lives and take my proposal there myself. So I did precisely that, and at 8:00 P.M. one cold evening, I rang his very large doorbell. A voice answered the intercom, and I mumbled my pitch into the speakerphone. A housekeeper’s voice told me to leave the proposal--and get lost. It’s not clear quite what happened next: I assume that whoever had answered the intercom meant just to switch it off, but instead they pressed the switch that opened the front door. The buzzing sound seemed to last forever--but it was probably only a second or two. In that time I didn’t have time to think, I just reacted…and instinctively nudged the door open. Suddenly I found myself standing in the middle of Sir Richard Branson’s substantial, marble-floored entrance hall. “Uh, hello!” I hollered into the empty hall. “Sorry, but you seem to have buzzed the door open,” I apologized to the emptiness. The next thing I knew, the housekeeper came flying down the stairs, shouting at me to leave. I duly dropped the proposal and scarpered. The next day, I sent around some flowers, apologizing for the intrusion and asking the great man to take a look at my proposal. I added that I was sure, in his own early days, he would probably have done the same thing. I never got a reply to that one, either.

Now there are conferences for “creatives,” and it just won’t go away. It took me a while to figure out what irritated me about it, but it comes down to this: we’re all creative. There is no “creative class.” Sure, there are people who make their living as artists and entrepreneurs. But those people, I insist, are no more creative than anyone else. Lewis and Tolkien, you won’t be surprised to know, spoke to both the sinful allure of being a part of an Inner Ring and the inherent creativity of all people. (Read “The Inner Ring” by Lewis and “On Fairy Stories” by Tolkien.)

Thought Leadership “The new economics for industry, government, education” Book by W. Edwards Deming “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” William Edwards Deming, Statistician, Professor and Author #smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business

Being a brash entrepreneur, Roberts responded to the crisis by deciding to launch a whole new business. He had always been fascinated by computers, and he assumed that other hobbyists felt the same. His goal, he enthused to a friend, was building a computer for the masses that would eliminate the Computer Priesthood once and for all. After studying the instruction set for the Intel 8080, Roberts concluded that MITS could make a do-it-yourself kit for a rudimentary computer that would be so cheap, under $400, that every enthusiast would buy it. “We thought he was off the deep end,” a colleague later confessed.112 Ed Roberts (1941–2010).

[I]f Modi is toast, it will in one sense be a tremendous pity. In his way, he represents a third generation in cricket's governance. For a hundred years and more, cricket was run by administrators, who essentially maintained the game without going out of their way to develop it. More recently it has been run by managers, with just an ounce or two of strategic thought. Modi was neither; he was instead a genuine entrepreneur. He has as much feeling for cricket as Madonna has for madrigals, but perhaps, because he came from outside cricket's traditional bureaucratic circles, he brought a vision and a common touch unexampled since Kerry Packer.

A minimum viable product (MVP) helps entrepreneurs start the process of learning as quickly as possible. 3 It is not necessarily the smallest product imaginable, though; it is simply the fastest way to get through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop with the minimum amount of effort. Contrary to traditional product development, which usually involves a long, thoughtful incubation period and strives for product perfection, the goal of the MVP is to begin the process of learning, not end it. Unlike a prototype or concept test, an MVP is designed not just to answer product design or technical questions. Its goal is to test fundamental business hypotheses.

These cultural generalizations, perhaps correctly, reduce the history of immigration to a binary. When immigrants come into this country, whether they join the labor force, like the Irish, Mexicans, and Central Americans, or they become small-time entrepreneurs, oftentimes in Black neighborhoods. Regardless of their choice, their economic asesion will depend on their relationship with Black Americans. If you accept this analysis, Black people are the only race in America. Everyone else is either white or on their way to becoming white. The new Asians, much like the Jews and the Irish before them, will one day be white, and their dream of generic Americanness will be achieved.

Imaginary Lives Imaginary Lives is a thought experiment I have adapted from two important career-change thinkers, Julia Cameron and John Williams, which aims to take your ideas a stage closer towards specific job options.55 It’s simple but potentially powerful. • Imagine five parallel universes, in each of which you could have a whole year off to pursue absolutely any career you desired. Now think of five different jobs you might want to try out in each of these universes. Be bold in your thinking, have fun with your ideas and your multiple selves. Your five choices might be food photographer, member of parliament, tai chi instructor, social entrepreneur running a youth education project, and wide-achieving Renaissance generalist. One person I know who did this activity – a documentary film maker who was having doubts about her career – listed massage therapist, sculptor, cellist, screen-play writer, and owner of her own bar on a tiny, old-fashioned Canarian island. Now come back down to earth and look hard at your five choices. Write down what it is about them that attracts you. Then look at them again, and think about this question: • How does each career measure up against the two motivations in the previous activity that you chose to prioritize in the future? If you decided, for instance, that you want a combination of making a difference and high status, check whether your five imaginary careers might provide them. The point is to help you think more deeply about exactly what you are looking for in a career, the kind of experiences that you truly desire.

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.

For many people, money is an index of how successful one is. And so they fear competition and attach themselves to their shadows. Such path drives one towards materialism rather than spiritualism. So what’s the difference between such individuals and those that work in the hope of quitting their job? Well, the main difference is that materialist people separate the two realities in the hope they can earn money from the work they love and then quit the work they don’t like. And by creating such division they remain there, in the middle, trapped. They think that by following what they love to do, step by step, they’ll be guided towards the right direction. But if their thoughts were clear, they would know they’re diving themselves and perpetuating their fate, rather than solving it. They neglect the mental barriers stopping them from achieving their goal. And anyone is responsible for determining the result that one holds in his thoughts. In other words, if you had not made such division in the first place, and instead accepted the lack of duality, you would achieve your result much faster. That is why almost all entrepreneurs rather work hard and be poor when starting a business than waiting for the right time to quit their job. There’s not such thing as the right time, or a shift from one reality unto another, because you create both things, your fortune and your unfortunate, and you own your luck and results, all the time. Whatever you believe in present time, perpetuates that same present time.

forgot about my huge goal. I focused on what I could control: what I did every day. After a little experimentation and a lot of thought, I settled on a process. Because the Internet never sleeps, here’s what I did every day: Write a new post. Without fail. No excuses. Build relationships. I contacted three people who tweeted my posts that day, choosing the three who seemed most influential, the most noteworthy, the most “something” (even if that “something” was just “thoughtful comment”). Then I sent an e-mail—not a tweet—and said thanks. My goal was to make a genuine connection. Build my network. I contacted one person who might be a great source for a future post. I aimed high: CEOs, founders, entrepreneur-celebrities . . . people with instant credibility and engaged followings. Many didn’t respond. But some did. And some have become friends and appear in this book. Add three more items to my “list of great headlines.” Headlines make or break posts: A great post with a terrible headline will not get read. So I worked hard to learn what worked for other people—and to adapt their techniques for my own use. Evaluate recent results. I looked at page views. I looked at shares and likes and tweets. I tried to figure out what readers responded to, what readers cared about. Writing for a big audience has little to do with pleasing yourself and everything to do with pleasing an audience, and the only way to know what worked was to know the audience. Ignore my editor. I liked my editor. But I didn’t want her input because she knew only what worked for columnists who were read by a maximum of 300,000 people each month. My goal was to triple that, which meant I needed to do things differently. We occasionally disagreed, and early on I lost some of those battles. Once my numbers started to climb, I won a lot more often, until eventually I was able to do my own thing. Sounds simple, right? In a way it was, because I followed a self-reinforcing process:

When Musk took delivery of his F1, CNN was there to cover it. “Just three years ago I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor,” he told the camera sheepishly, “and now obviously, I’ve got a million-dollar car… it’s just a moment in my life.” While other McLaren F1 owners around the world—the sultan of Brunei, Wyclef Jean, and Jay Leno, among others—could comfortably afford it, Musk’s purchase had put a sizable dent in his bank account. And unlike other owners, Musk drove the car to work—and declined to insure it. As Musk drove Thiel up Sand Hill Road in the F1, the car was the subject of their chat. “It was like this Hitchcock movie,” Thiel remembered, “where we’re talking about the car for fifteen minutes. We’re supposed to be preparing for the meeting—and we’re talking about the car.” During their ride, Thiel looked at Musk and reportedly asked, “So, what can this thing do?” “Watch this,” Musk replied, flooring the accelerator and simultaneously initiating a lane change on Sand Hill Road. In retrospect, Musk admitted that he was outmatched by the F1. “I didn’t really know how to drive the car,” he recalled. “There’s no stability systems. No traction control. And the car gets so much power that you can break the wheels free at even fifty miles an hour.” Thiel recalls the car in front of them coming fast into view—then Musk swerving to avoid it. The McLaren hit an embankment, was tossed into the air—“like a discus,” Musk remembered——then slammed violently into the ground. “The people that saw it happen thought we were going to die,” he recalled. Thiel had not worn a seat belt, but astonishingly, neither he nor Musk were hurt. Musk’s “work of art” had not fared as well, having now taken a distinctly cubist turn. Post-near-death experience, Thiel dusted himself off on the side of the road and hitchhiked to the Sequoia offices, where he was joined by Musk a short while later. X.com’s CEO, Bill Harris, was also waiting at the Sequoia office, and he recalled that both Thiel and Musk were late but offered no explanation for their delay. “They never told me,” Harris said. “We just had the meeting.” Reflecting on it, Musk found humor in the experience: “I think it’s safe to say Peter wouldn’t be driving with me again.” Thiel wrung some levity out of the moment, too. “I’d achieved lift-off with Elon,” he joked, “but not in a rocket.

Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.

The attitudes, thoughts and emotions you choose to have in the present moment will dictate the success of your mental, physical, educational and financial status of your future.

So what’s his secret? Musk has a few, but none are more important to him than passion and purpose. “I didn’t go into the rocket business, the car business, or the solar business thinking this is a great opportunity. I just thought, in order to make a difference, something needed to be done. I wanted to have an impact. I wanted to create something substantially better than what came before.” Musk, like every entrepreneur in this chapter, is driven by passion and purpose. Why? Passion and purpose scale—always have, always will. Every movement, every revolution, is proof of this fact. Plus, doing anything big and bold is difficult, and at two in the morning for the fifth night in a row, when you need to keep going, you’re only going to fuel yourself from deep within. You’re not going to push ahead when it’s someone else’s mission. It needs to be yours.

Marketing is the thoughtful practice of speaking to one individual with content that is personal and purposeful. What email would you send the one? What audio would you record for the one? What information would you tell the one? What question would you ask the one? Speaking to 1 speaks to all, while speaking to all speaks to none. Who is the 1 that you are creating for today?

Going from PayPal, I thought: ‘Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?' Not from the perspective, ‘What's the best way to make money?

As a business owner, you’ll ultimately take 100% responsibility for the direction you choose.

creating a company for acquisition or IPO is different from building a profitable enterprise; it’s about building a sellable enterprise. Startups are not trying to earn revenue (which is a liability); they are setting themselves up to win more capital. They are not part of the real economy or even the real world but part of the process through which working assets are converted into new stockpiles of dead ones. That’s all they have really accomplished with whatever digital fad they’ve foisted onto the market or sold to yesterday’s tech winners. They thought they were engineering a new technology, when they were actually engineering a reallocation of capital. That’s why digital entrepreneurs who do win often end up becoming the next generation of venture capitalists. Everyone from Marc Andreessen (Netscape) to Sean Parker (Napster) to Peter Thiel (PayPal) to Jack Dorsey (Twitter) now runs venture funds of his own. Facebook and Google, once startups themselves, now acquire more businesses than they incubate internally. With each new generation, firms and investors leverage the startup economy more deliberately, or even cynically. After all, a win is a win.

Thought Leadership “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” Book by Ashlee Vance “Take risks now and do something bold. You won’t regret it.” - Elon Musk (CEO of SpaceX and Tesla) #smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business

Thought Leadership “The Keys To Success” Book by Jim Rohn “The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.” - Jim Rohn (Entrepreneur) #smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business

Thought Leadership “The Downing Street Years” Book by Margaret Thatcher “I have a habit of comparing the phraseology of communiques . . . noting a certain similarity of words, a certain similarity of optimism . . . and a certain similarity in the lack of practical results during the ensuring years.” Margaret Thatcher Author Former British Prime Minister #smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business

I’ll get her back, one way or another, he thought as he worked into the evening. Money talks. Everybody can be bought or sold, even Alice.

It was peaceful without Rock and Roll music pounding away in the background. For one of the few times in her life, Alice was at peace with herself. The bird flew away to the fountain below. Free as a bird, Alice thought. Suddenly something sour welled up inside her as she realized that she was back where she had started with Ray and the business. She cried, gently at first then sobbed; realizing she was a prisoner in King Ray’s castle again. She knew Ray would kill to keep her in his dungeon. By returning, she was his property forever.

It was peaceful without Rock and Roll music pounding away in the background. For one of the few times in her life, Alice was at peace with herself. The bird flew away to the fountain below. Free as a bird, Alice thought. Suddenly something sour welled up inside her as she realized that she was back where she had started with Ray and the business. She cried, gently at first then sobbed; realizing she was a prisoner in King Ray’s castle again. She knew Ray would kill to keep her in his dungeon. By returning, she was his property forever.

And then there are people – and these don’t unsettle but enrage me – who think comedy is trivial. They believe that serious, intelligent people should focus on worthy, momentous things and that jokes, levity, piss-taking, subverting and satirising are the pastimes of the second-rate. Words cannot express how second-rate I consider such people. In my experience the properly intelligent, whether they’re astrophysicists, politicians, poets, lawyers, entrepreneurs, comedians, taxi drivers, plumbers or doctors, however serious or trivial their career aims, all adore jokes. And they have that in common with a lot of idiots. For as long as I can remember, I have always thought that being funny is the cleverest thing you can do, that taking the piss out of something – parodying it, puncturing it – is at least as clever as making that thing in the first place. This view, which, I’m happy to say, will be most offensive to the people I want most to offend, was probably formed watching my cold grandfather, with all his financial acumen and preference for fish over humans, cry with laughter at a van being repeatedly driven into a swimming pool.

Thiel’s doomsday predictions also prompted an unusual request. In preparation for a summer 2000 board meeting, Thiel had asked Musk if he could present a proposal. Musk agreed. “Uh, Peter’s got an agenda item he’d like to talk about,” Musk said, handing the reins to Thiel. Thiel began. The markets, he said, weren’t done driving into the red. He prophesied just how dire things would get—for both the company and for the world. Many had seen the bust as a mere short-term correction, but Thiel was convinced the optimists were wrong. In his view, the bubble was bigger than anyone had thought and hadn’t even begun to really burst yet. From X.com’s perspective, the implications of Thiel’s prediction were dire. Its high burn rate meant that it would need to continue fundraising. But if—no, when—the bubble truly burst, the markets would tighten further, and funding would dry up—even for X.com. The company balance sheet could drop to zero with no options left to raise money. Thiel presented a solution: the company should take the $100 million closed in March and transfer it to his hedge fund, Thiel Capital. He would then use that money to short the public markets. “It was beautiful logic,” board member Tim Hurd of MDP remembered. “One of the elements of PayPal was that they were untethered from how people did stuff in the real world.” The board was uniformly aghast. Members Moritz, Malloy, and Hurd all pushed back. “Peter, I totally get it,” Hurd replied. “But we raised money from investors on a business plan. And they have that in their files. And it said, ‘use of proceeds would be for general corporate purposes.’ And to grow the business and so forth. It wasn’t to go speculate on indices. History may prove that you’re right, and it will have been brilliant, but if you’re wrong, we’ll all be sued.” Mike Moritz’s reaction proved particularly memorable. With his theatricality on full display, Moritz “just lost his mind,” a board member remembered, berating Thiel: “Peter, this is really simple: If this board approves that idea, I’m resigning!

As he was doing his home visits, Brian developed a clever method for extracting valuable feedback. Instead of just asking what people thought about the product as it existed now, he’d ask what they thought about the product he might build. “If I ask, ‘What can I do to make this better?’ they’ll say something small,” Brian explains. So instead, he’d ask bigger, bolder questions, like “What can we do to surprise you?” or “What would it take for me to design something that you would literally tell every single person you’ve ever encountered?” In doing so, he invited users to join him in imagining a bigger, bolder version of Airbnb.

On the value of exclusivity: GoApe!'s 26‐year exclusive deal with the UK Forestry Commission would not have happened without Tristram Mayhew having thought ahead about how best to build a business whose business model could grow and how to maintain attractive profit margins. Keeping prospective competitors from bidding against him for future Forest Commission sites was a stroke of genius. You should try to do likewise whenever you can. It will help you keep competition at bay!

As best‐selling author and social psychologist Carol Dweck puts it, a mindset is a self‐perception or “self‐theory” that people hold about themselves.16 More particularly, mindsets are the “collection of beliefs and thoughts that make up the mental attitude, inclination, habit or disposition that predetermines a person's interpretations and responses to events, circumstances and situations.

I started having desperate thoughts, thoughts that for an entrepreneur are almost worse than suicide: I thought about getting a job.

Transforming Challenges into Opportunities: Enhancing Problem-Solving Skills through Critical Thinking In today's fast-paced and competitive business world, the ability to think critically and solve problems effectively is crucial for success. Whether you are a seasoned entrepreneur or a budding startup owner, developing strong problem-solving skills can give you a significant edge in the market. By harnessing the power of critical thinking, you can transform challenges into opportunities and propel your business towards success. As a coach for business start-ups and a catalyst for innovation, I understand the importance of equipping entrepreneurs with the necessary tools to overcome obstacles and thrive in the face of adversity. In this blog post, I will explore how honing your critical thinking skills can help you navigate the challenges of starting and growing a business. 1. Identifying the Problem: Critical thinking involves the ability to accurately identify and define the problem at hand. As a coach for business start-up ideas, I can help you analyze your unique challenges and break them down into manageable parts. By clarifying the problem, you can focus your efforts on finding the most effective solution. 2. Analyzing Different Perspectives: One of the key aspects of critical thinking is considering different perspectives and viewpoints. When faced with a problem, it is important to step back and evaluate the situation from various angles. This allows you to gain valuable insights and uncover opportunities that may not be immediately apparent. As a coach, I can guide you through this process, helping you see the bigger picture and explore alternative solutions. 3. Developing Creative Solutions: Critical thinking encourages out-of-the-box thinking and the ability to generate creative solutions. By breaking away from conventional thought patterns, you can discover innovative approaches to solving problems. As your coach, I can help you tap into your creative potential and unlock new possibilities for your business. 4. Evaluating Risks and Benefits: Effective problem-solving requires a thorough analysis of the risks and benefits associated with different solutions. Through critical thinking, you can weigh the pros and cons, assess potential outcomes, and make informed decisions. As your coach, I can guide you in evaluating the risks and benefits of various options, enabling you to make strategic choices that align with your business goals. 5. Adapting to Change: In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, adaptability is crucial. Critical thinking allows you to embrace change and adapt your strategies as needed. By honing your problem-solving skills, you can navigate unexpected challenges with ease and turn them into opportunities for growth. As your coach, I can provide you with the tools and techniques to foster adaptability and resilience in the face of change. In conclusion, developing strong problem-solving skills through critical thinking is essential for entrepreneurs and business start-ups. By working with a coach who specializes in business start-up ideas, you can enhance your problem-solving abilities, uncover new opportunities, and position your business for long-term success. So, why wait? Invest in your critical thinking skills today and unlock the potential within your business. If you are looking for a coach to guide you in transforming challenges into opportunities, I am here to help. Contact me to explore how we can work together to enhance your problem-solving skills and achieve your business goals. Keywords: coach startup ideas, coach for business start-up, problem-solving skills, critical thinking, challenges, opportunities, entrepreneurs, innovation, analyze, creative solutions, risks, benefits, adaptability.

Teams were involved in creating new technologies, processes, and systems. • Cross-functional teams were formed around new great ideas. • Customers were involved from the inception of each feature concept. It’s important to understand that the old approach did not lack customer feedback or customer involvement in the planning process. In the true spirit of genchi gembutsu, Intuit product managers (PMs) would do “follow-me-homes” with customers to identify problems to solve in the next release. However, the PMs were responsible for all the customer research. They would bring it back to the team and say, “This is the problem we want to solve, and here are ideas for how we could solve it.” Changing to a cross-functional way of working was not smooth sailing. Some team members were skeptical. For example, some product managers felt that it was a waste of time for engineers to spend time in front of customers. The PMs thought that their job was to figure out the customer issue and define what needed to be built. Thus, the reaction of some PMs to the change was: “What’s my job? What am I supposed to be doing?” Similarly, some on the engineering side just wanted to be told what to do; they didn’t want to talk to customers. As is typically the case in large-batch development, both groups had been willing to sacrifice the team’s ability to learn in order to work more “efficiently.

When you talk to people who have scaled a business—and we have talked to many, at length and in depth—you begin to uncover some counterintuitive truths about scaling: The best, most scalable ideas are often the ones that seem the most implausible. An encounter with resistance at the start of your journey is a good thing. Early, honest feedback from the right people will have an outsized impact on helping you refine your idea. Doing things that don’t scale—especially at the earliest stages—can set you up for dramatic scale later on. Even if everything you thought you knew turns out to be wrong, you can still achieve your goals—as long as you accept the truth and adjust your plan.

The problem was a crazy problem. It wasn’t going to have a non-crazy solution. Still, she’d sort of shocked herself. She’d never had the slightest interest in business. But if she wanted to save the country, she’d need to become an entrepreneur, and create a company—though in business, she quickly learned, she couldn’t talk like that. When she said she wanted to build a tool “to save the country,” people just smiled and thought she was goofy in the head. But when she said things like “I’m going to create a data-based tool for disease prevention that companies can use to secure their supply chains,” serious business types nodded. “Five smart people have replied with confusion when I said the company was to save the world and protect our country,” said Charity, after her first attempts to explain her vague idea. “Then when I said, ‘We’re going to do private government operations, like Blackwater,’ their eyes lit up and they said, ‘Oh wow, you could take over the world.’ ” She’d entered the private sector with the bizarre ambition to use it to create an institution that might be used by the public sector. She’d already hired twenty people, among them public-health nurses and some of the team at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub responsible for genomic sequencing, including Josh Batson and David Dynerman. Joe DeRisi had signed on as an adviser; Carter Mecher was about to. She’d raised millions of dollars in capital. Venrock, a leading health care venture capitalist, had taken a stake in the new company. As a local health officer, she hadn’t been able to get the tens of thousands of dollars she needed for some new disease-stopping machine. In the private sector, people would throw tens of millions at an idea: if she failed, it wouldn’t be because investors wouldn’t give her the money to try. The Public Health Company, she’d called it.

The shortest distance between two people,” said the celebrated Chicago Black youth advocate and entrepreneur Darius Ballinger, “is a story.

Our culture measures success by how much money we have, the amount of achievement we complete, and how much influence we reach. Yet,” thought the entrepreneur, “while both The Spellbinder and Mr. Riley agree that those victories are important, they’ve encouraged me to consider how well I’m running my life by another series of metrics as well. By my connection with my natural power and by my intimacy with my authenticity and by the vitality around my physicality and by the size of my joy. This seems like a much better way to look at success. Being both accomplished in the world yet peaceful within myself.

Which it literally could be. Many of history’s greatest thinkers, leaders, scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs found some of their greatest inspiration going for walks. Beethoven used to take walks carrying blank pages of sheet music and a pencil. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth used to write as he took walks around a lake where he lived. Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle would lecture their students while taking long walks with them, often working out their ideas at the same time. Two thousand years later, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say, “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” Einstein refined many of his theories about the universe while walking around the Princeton University campus. The writer Henry David Thoreau would say, “The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.

One of my prevailing philosophies is that if any individual were to find out that he or she had only six days to live, all people’s final thoughts would revolve around life’s most important things: the people they’ve loved and the places they’ve explored. Nothing shapes an individual as much as these two influences. {Kent family archives} An early safari on the shores of Lake Baringo.   My parents and I started Abercrombie & Kent out of necessity when the land in Kenya that we’d spent our lives developing was taken away from us. Many entrepreneurs agree that it’s our worst vulnerabilities that inspire us to find our greater purpose. When the most precious part of yourself is taken away, you will do whatever it takes to get your power back. You’ll even travel to the ends of the earth. This book is more than a collection of the best moments that I’ve experienced along the path; this book is my love story. By bringing the same sense of adventure found on safari to other places around the world, I defined luxury experiential travel . . . but my own greatest adventure has been this business itself.

While the mind may make it seem like change is impossible, there is nothing in your past, which limits your potential for changing today. Put your thoughts into action and start the harnessing the possibilities now.

An Introduction to CFD Trading Increase, commit, and individuals trying to trade systems and their cash in different areas are usually trying to find new strategies. Like several good buyer, you won’t be joining the group, instead you had want in order to change lives begin or to create one. Stocks trading is really 80s within the sensation that perhaps young kids today understand how it operates, and have the ability to survive without any formal education. If you should be looking for a new company shift, you should provide a try to this new venture. First what’s a CFD? CFD stands for contract for difference. It’s thought as a small business contract an entrepreneur and by an expense business. If the contract expires, both parties can trade notes concerning the differences between the original and final price indices of particular monetary things like shares of items and futures. This is exactly what CFD Trading is focused on. The one edge that traders have within this economic contract is the fact that they get to purchase these factors at lower costs despite the fact that it includes nonvoting stocks where the trader can’t vote on all aspects of the company as opposed to what stockholders are blessed to do. Another thing is the fact that a CFD does not hold taxes on files even if these aspects are acquired in large amounts. In simple terms, it’s a in which a derivative asset is founded on an underlying asset’s cost between two entities that transactions the differences. These parties will need to pay the differences required to eachother. The way in which CFD Trading works is that among the entities gives the difference before contract ends included to the other. Just about like what occurs in spreadbetting, the trader continues the opposite end-of the deal with investment institution or CFD service, where the trader anticipates which cost will increase and having three selections to take whether to buy, to slide or to sell the component required. Another similarity with spreadbetting is the fact that you can find no tax tasks since CFD’s don’t involve buying of assets to become settled. It just requires the activity of the fee. Since the investor is just needed to spot a minor amount on these things, that are also called edges, the earnings and in addition losses will soon be on the basis of the money set in. In other words, a CFD is good for the entrepreneur since it gives him the chance of owning main assets without so much problem. Does It Work A good example of that is to ingest a share worth $20 and the entrepreneur buys 100 of these. He will be cost $2,000 by this exchange. Employing a stockbroker will demand the entrepreneur to shell 50% of this amount out. That is $1,000. A meager initial cashout is needed which amounts as much as only $100, should you evaluate that to an expenditure finished with a CFD representative. However, allow it to be regarded that whenever an investor enters a deal of difference, the cost place usually begins in a loss. Which damage is definitely equal to the spread. Which means the spread is at $8 along with if you come into a deal, the underlying resource must generate $8 merely to break even. Let us say if the actual resource reaches a quote cost of $ 20, then the CFD price will be a few cents less than that since the dealer will have to escape at that point. So as opposed to increasing your money to $40, he will must settle for several dollars. Nevertheless not really a terrible package to get a purchase with less trouble.

The Zeigarnik effect is a psychological term based on studied that show unfinished goals cause intrusive, uncontrolled thoughts.

I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries. FRANK CAPRA

Ajit was an entrepreneur. He spoke with enthusiasm, with energy and passion and that’s what connected with the young audience. Shashank thought to himself, “Wow! I want to be like that guy.

We adopted the view that our job was to find a synthesis between our vision and what customers would accept; it wasn’t to capitulate to what customers thought they wanted or to tell customers what they ought to want.

REBEKAH ILIFF (Writer and Entrepreneur): Perfection is: you, as you are, with all of your mistakes, failures, freckles in weird places, and beliefs you had that simply didn’t work out the way you thought they would. Perfection is not: others’ ideas and perceptions of you, so clearly unattainable by any human being as to almost be ridiculous.

you’ve never experienced a failure like this, it is hard to describe the feeling. It’s as if the world were falling out from under you. You realize you’ve been duped. The stories in the magazines are lies: hard work and perseverance don’t lead to success. Even worse, the many, many, many promises you’ve made to employees, friends, and family are not going to come true. Everyone who thought you were foolish for stepping out on your own will be proven right. It wasn’t supposed to turn

Give gifts freely and often. The value and importance of showing appreciation through small, thoughtful gifts is a habit that took me too long to acquire. Sending

But employee ownership is not just about sharing. It is also, in practice, often about giving. Such schemes depend on someone, usually the proprietor, deciding at some point to transfer ownership of some or all of a company to its employees. And it is this aspect of the ideal, I think, that has the greatest significance for my story. Of all the things I have given, it is arguable that the shares in my company that I gave away had the greatest financial value. In fact, I have rarely thought of this transfer of ownership as a gift, and I would be wrong if I did. The staff had a right to share in the company. Without them, the company would not have been so prosperous (and I am certain that Xansa would never have reached anything like the financial heights it eventually did if it hadn’t been powered by the fuel of staff ownership). But while I never doubted that aspect of the transfer, I did sometimes struggle with a more abstract issue: the fact that transferring ownership also means, ultimately, transferring control. That was the real challenge: surrendering power. Anyone can adjust to having a bit less money; ceding control of an enterprise that really matters to you is, by contrast, painfully counterintuitive. Who in their right mind would entrust an organisation that they have built up against all the odds, through years of tears, toil and sweat, to someone else? What if they mess it up? What if they don’t really understand what it is that you have created? What if they take it in some dangerous new direction, or manage it in a less idealistic way? Yet without that surrender, the most important part of the transaction is lost. A feudal grandee can be as generous as he likes with his wealth and property, but as long as he remains the grandee then his dependants are not empowered: they are merely well-fed. Empowering them means letting go: in other words, ceasing to be the grandee. I have struggled all my life with an instinct to hang on to the things that matter most to me, to control and protect them myself. Yet the art of surrender is, I am convinced, a key to many kinds of success - and fulfilment. And many lives are limited by a failure to master it.

For pretty much my whole life, I thought I was living to better myself, to create the best life possible. About a year ago, that mindset changed. I now believe I’m here to create the best world possible. This shift from me to everyone is what altered my entire understanding of passion, and my purpose. Ben Horowitz is one of my digital mentors (meaning I follow his blog). I find him very insightful. Whenever he says (or writes about) anything, I inevitably start nodding my head until my neck is sore. Here’s an excerpt from the commencement speech he gave at Columbia, his alma mater: “Following your passion is a very me centered view of the world, and as you go through life, what you’ll find is that what you take out of the world over time—be it…money, cars, stuff, accolades—is much less important than what you put into the world. And so my recommendation would be to follow your contribution. Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better. That is the thing to follow." Most of the time, if you follow your contribution, it’s either already a passion, or likely to become one. Doing something you’re good at is intoxicating, as is contributing to the world. Writing and launching The Connection Algorithm was a full year of hard work. It was the result of countless hours of reflection, deeply philosophical thinking, and brutal honesty. Throughout the entire process, I felt driven, passionate, and motivated. At first, I thought this was because I was doing it on my own. But I’ve come to realize it was something else—something far more profound. Shortly after the book was released, I began receiving emails from people who had read the book and been deeply impacted by it. A highschooler in Miami. An entrepreneur in Amsterdam. A small business owner in the midwest. People were also leaving reviews on Amazon—people I didn’t know, saying the book helped them live a better life. And on my Kindle, I could see passages that people were highlighting. People weren’t just reading my book, they were taking notes on useful things to remember. The craft of writing has been unbelievably fulfilling for me. And so I’m continuing the pursuit. My motivation is no longer to make a buck, or “win at life.” Rather, I’m working to improve the world. I think of myself as an inventor, creating a new piece of art for the world to discover. When you make the world better, you get rewarded. So find your craft, and then determine the best contribution you can make with it.

Stock up on your emotional capital. Prior to starting our business, my partners and I spent a lot of time calculating our expenses and financial burn rate before we thought we would become profitable. However, when starting a business, the real burn rate is emotional. Be prepared for disappointments and emotional letdowns, and make sure you have partners who are emotionally prepared for the uncertainties associated with any startup.

An entrepreneur sells his thoughts and ideas as a packaged product.

The thought, ‘I can’t’ is a lie. We use it to excuse ourselves from trying.” @DarrenHardy

Nevertheless, critiques of karma often center on this notion of individual responsibility and suggest it produces an unsympathetic attitude toward others and leads to a dubious tendency to blame. The poor are blamed for being poor, and so on. Buddhism is said, falsely, to assign fault to individuals for all their circumstances and to deny agency. If we are poor, for instance, it might be thought, more or less automatically, that we will stay that way until our karmic debt runs out, and then, after we die, we may then be reborn in fortunate circumstances, becoming a wealthy entrepreneur perhaps. This type of thinking cannot be reconciled with Buddhism’s emphasis on the interconnectedness of all things though, which fully acknowledges the fertile complexity of influences on persons, including their environment.

Never mix negative thinking with negative people. Multiplying negatives, in this instance, won't make a positive.

You are going to fail many times, if you’re good. You are going to have two or three really painful failures. Sometimes it will be your fault, and many times it won’t be. In all cases, though, you are going to feel bad. Many of your peers and people you thought were your friends are going to be unavailable. The first time this happens will be devastating to you. But

With our combined experience of over 30 years, One Small Child are excited to make it our own and still honor what his mom (quite the amazing entrepreneur) started. Purely masculine, this simple short romper of shantung is the perfect dresses to wear to a christening and understated, ideal for warm weather celebrations.Our luxuriously soft interlock rib-knit fabric has a blissful feel and an angelic appearance, making this sweet romper the perfect christening outfits for boys fall and winter events. Our customer research shows that the most christening gifts for girls are those that are thoughtful, personalized and well, just a little bit different.

The best way I know to remind myself that even in the bleakest of circumstances that I have a choice is to write down my thoughts.  Your thoughts often couch your beliefs. The