Entrepreneurship Facts Quotes

Blaming others is an act of refusing to take responsibility. When a person can’t accept the fact or the reality, they blamed another person or the situation instead of taking accountability.

Always be conscious of the fact that someone somewhere is learning a new lesson watching you live your life

When people tell you they're busy all the time, they are either very busy because they've not quite learned to master time, or they're not at all busy, but feel embarrassed about this fact.

The potential of controlling and living a successful life according to your terms depends on how you think. Your perception is your world. You can create the life you want and in fact, you can even shape the way you want it.

The potential of controlling and living a successful life according to your terms depends on how you think. Your perception is your world. You can create the life you want and in fact, you can even shape it the way you want it.

Fun fact: Elon Musk became the richest man on the same day Tesla had died seventy-eight years before, on January seventh!

True choice requires that a person have the ability to choose an option and not be prevented from choosing it by any external force, meaning that a system tending too far toward either extreme will limit People’s opportunities. Also, both extremes can produce additional problems in practice. Aside from the fact that a lack of “freedom to” can lead to privation, suffering, and death for those who can’t provide for themselves, it can also lead to a de facto plutocracy. The extremely wealthy can come to wield disproportionate power, enabling them to avoid punishment for illegal practices or to change the law itself in ways that perpetuate their advantages at the cost of others, a charge often levied against the “robber baron” industrialists of the late nineteenth century. A lack of “freedom from,” on the other hand, can encourage people to do less work than they’re capable of since they know their needs will be met, and it may stifle innovation and entrepreneurship because people receive few or no additional material benefits for exerting additional effort. Moreover, a government must have extensive power over its people to implement such a system, and as can be seen in the actions of the majority of communist governments in the past, power corrupts.

Some people say, "What difference does it make what color the winemaker is that made the wine? Judge the wines off their own merit." Like, of course. And I do believe that my wine is judged off its own merit. But the fact is that when you walk into places and people can't believe that you're the principal or you're the owner or you made the wine, it's mind-blowing to me some days. It's like, wow. That's why we need to continue talking about it.

Making popcorn is a reminder of the very valuable fact that very similar people who are given the very same opportunity in the very same environment at the very same time will not succeed or mature at the very same time, if they will manage to succeed or mature.

I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact, there could be no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions in reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it here to say, that a Custom-House officer, of long continuance, can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an honest one—is of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind. An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position—is, that, while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possess an unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world—may return to himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity,—that his tempered steel and elasticity are lost,—he for ever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support external to himself. His pervading and continual hope—a hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after death—is, that, finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This faith, more than any thing else, steals the pith and availability out of whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold—meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman—has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of the Devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character.

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

It's important to point out to the executive that when a company doubles in size, she has a new job. This means that doing the things that made her successful in her old job will not necessarily translate to success in the new job. In fact, the number-one way that executives fail is by continuing to do their old job rather than moving on to their new job.

So often, data is merely insurance against self-delusion. It won’t (and it shouldn’t) provide the green light. In fact, research too often ends up serving as a reason people give up before they start. Don’t let numbers hold you back when you know in your gut that you’re onto something, and don’t be afraid to go digging for the support you know in your heart must be out there somewhere.

Cultivate Level 5 Leadership Our research showed that having charismatic leadership doesn’t explain why some companies become great and others don’t. In fact, some of the most disastrous comparison cases had very strong, charismatic leadership in the very era that the companies fell or failed. Rather, our research found that the critical ingredient is Level 5 leadership. The essence of Level 5 leadership is a paradoxical combination of personal humility and indomitable will. The humility expressed at Level 5 isn’t a false humbleness; it’s a subjugation of personal ego in service to a cause beyond oneself. This humility is combined with the fierce resolve to do whatever it takes (no matter how difficult) to best serve that cause. Level 5 leaders are incredibly ambitious, but they channel their ambition into building a great team or organization and accomplishing a shared mission that’s ultimately not about them.

Here's a resume of crucial knowledge you should have in today's world but universities are not providing: Financial - Not just on management, but also on how to profit, how to manage and control flows of income; Linguistic - In today's world, speaking only a language is prove of lack of education. Knowing two languages is a basic necessity, and knowing three languages is essential, while knowing four is merely the ideal situation. Which four languages? Chinese, English, Spanish, and another of your choice, just for fun; Intellectual - It's not about what you know; it’s all about how you think about what you know. Therefore, it's ridiculous to think that there’s only one answer and one way to examine our life. Most students are extremely dumb because they lack the ability to educate themselves, despite their certificates or where they’ve studied. They never read with an intention in mind. And as they graduate, they become completely futile as individuals. This situation is the same all over the world. Millions are graduating every year, without any significant knowledge to live with. Their books are often outdated once they graduate and they're unable to learn by themselves and develop the necessary skills to adjust to the economic society in which we live. Maybe they can keep a job for 3 or 5 years of their life, but then are surprised to lose it and never finding a suitable job again. The world is changing very fast and most people can’t or are unwilling to recognize this fact.

Jews and Asians are only 7 percent of the total population, and between them they dominate in fields like medicine and engineering, not to mention entrepreneurship and academics. They rarely end up in prison or gangs (this is especially true of Jews). And while they are historically poor and persecuted, they have not allowed themselves to stay in that position. Take their story and compare it to black Americans and how can we explain the canyon that separates them? I’m sure the Jesse Jacksons of the world would sooner become Holocaust deniers than admit to the real answer: Family. Education. Ambition. Family. Education. Ambition. Whenever the plight of the minority in America is discussed, you’ll notice that Jews and Asians are left out of the conversation. In fact, many school systems are now trying to figure out how to get LESS of them in advanced placement courses and prestigious colleges. They’ve become too successful, apparently. But it’s not just their success that the race mongers hate, it’s HOW they accomplished it. Their men don’t father dozens of out-of-wedlock babies with dozens of women. Their households insist on discipline and academic success. They work hard, they are driven. Asians may now be at the point where they actually enjoy preferential bias. If I’m an employer and an Asian walks in to apply for a job, I’m going to assume he’s an achiever. That’s not a stereotype, that’s called a reputation. And they’ve freaking earned it. Family. Education. Ambition. These three things really are a recipe for success. If you don’t believe me, ask the next Asian or Jew you meet. And then make sure to take care of your co-pay on the way out.

Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed. Parloff didn’t end up using those quotes in his article, but the ringing endorsements he heard in interview after interview from the luminaries on Theranos’s board gave him confidence that Elizabeth was the real deal. He also liked to think of himself as a pretty good judge of character. After all, he’d dealt with his share of dishonest people over the years, having worked in a prison during law school and later writing at length about such fraudsters as the carpet-cleaning entrepreneur Barry Minkow and the lawyer Marc Dreier, both of whom went to prison for masterminding Ponzi schemes. Sure, Elizabeth had a secretive streak when it came to discussing certain specifics about her company, but he found her for the most part to be genuine and sincere. Since his angle was no longer the patent case, he didn’t bother to reach out to the Fuiszes. — WHEN PARLOFF’S COVER STORY was published in the June 12, 2014, issue of Fortune, it vaulted Elizabeth to instant stardom. Her Journal interview had gotten some notice and there had also been a piece in Wired, but there was nothing like a magazine cover to grab people’s attention. Especially when that cover featured an attractive young woman wearing a black turtleneck, dark mascara around her piercing blue eyes, and bright red lipstick next to the catchy headline “THIS CEO IS OUT FOR BLOOD.” The story disclosed Theranos’s valuation for the first time as well as the fact that Elizabeth owned more than half of the company. There was also the now-familiar comparison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This time it came not from George Shultz but from her old Stanford professor Channing Robertson. (Had Parloff read Robertson’s testimony in the Fuisz trial, he would have learned that Theranos was paying him $500,000 a year, ostensibly as a consultant.) Parloff also included a passage about Elizabeth’s phobia of needles—a detail that would be repeated over and over in the ensuing flurry of coverage his story unleashed and become central to her myth. When the editors at Forbes saw the Fortune article, they immediately assigned reporters to confirm the company’s valuation and the size of Elizabeth’s ownership stake and ran a story about her in their next issue. Under the headline “Bloody Amazing,” the article pronounced her “the youngest woman to become a self-made billionaire.” Two months later, she graced one of the covers of the magazine’s annual Forbes 400 issue on the richest people in America. More fawning stories followed in USA Today, Inc., Fast Company, and Glamour, along with segments on NPR, Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, and CBS News. With the explosion of media coverage came invitations to numerous conferences and a cascade of accolades. Elizabeth became the youngest person to win the Horatio Alger Award. Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. President Obama appointed her a U.S. ambassador for global entrepreneurship, and Harvard Medical School invited her to join its prestigious board of fellows.

Entrepreneurship is management. And yet, imagine a modern manager who is tasked with building a new product in the context of an established company. Imagine that she goes back to her company’s chief financial officer (CFO) a year later and says, “We have failed to meet the growth targets we predicted. In fact, we have almost no new customers and no new revenue. However, we have learned an incredible amount and are on the cusp of a breakthrough new line of business. All we need is another year.” Most of the time, this would be the last report this intrapreneur would give her employer. The reason is that in general management, a failure to deliver results is due to either a failure to plan adequately or a failure to execute properly. Both are significant lapses, yet new product development in our modern economy routinely requires exactly this kind of failure on the way to greatness. In the Lean Startup movement, we have come to realize that these internal innovators are actually entrepreneurs, too, and that entrepreneurial management can help them succeed;

Systems themselves are not bad or evil; in fact, God seems to love systems and works within organized and integrated networks! ... It is people who create a system for both good and evil purposes or take an inherently good system and change the rules to benefit only a few.

The same is true for you. You need to take inventory of who you are, what you’re built for, and what you’re chasing after. You have to look at your life and connect with your failures and shortcomings and the fact that you are built to reach greatness. Stop running in the wrong direction and take the time to be honest with yourself about where you are in life and whether your current path will lead you to your lighthouse.

Like a comic book superhero, your side hustle needs a history. Don't just give 'em the facts; tell them a story.

The mere fact the Tesla Model S exists at all is a testament to innovation and entrepreneurship, the very qualities that once made the American automobile industry the largest, richest, and most powerful in the world.

I've learned about this need for communication and connection with different departments from personal experience; in fact, this is one of the areas in this book where my knowledge comes not from my success, but from my failure. Fairly early in my career, I had the credit manager of our company come into my office with his hair on fire, wanting to know why I had just agreed to a distribution deal that had 120-day terms. If I'd been thinking further ahead and discussed it with him beforehand, this wouldn’t have been an issue. Fortunately, we talked it through and made it work, but it took some begging, genuine understanding, and empathy to make sure I could repair that relationship.

There is also a risk in some markets of a significant devaluation of the local currency. For example, if the country experiences a financial crisis and devalues its currency to the point that your goods are no longer competitively priced, you can lose your market position overnight. There are no easy answers when it comes to getting paid for international sales but planning in advance beats learning hard lessons after the fact. Choose the solutions that work best for your company and prepare for the implications of those choices. The best strategy is to do the due diligence on your new customers.

When most people decide they want to start a business, their first intuition is to learn more—read a book, take a course, seek out advice—and then take action after having carefully considered all the facts. After all, there are a ton of top-rated MBA programs, $10 Udemy courses, free YouTube videos, and entrepreneurship how-to books—so why wouldn’t you learn all you could? That’s got to be a whole lot safer, and it probably makes you a lot less likely to fail, right? Wrong. Overthinking seems like the “smart” way to launch, but it’s far less effective. Super-successful people do the opposite—they take action first, get real feedback, and learn from that, which is a million times more valuable than any book or course. And quicker!

True leadership only exists if people follow when they would otherwise have the freedom to not follow. Many business leaders think they’re leading when in fact they’re simply exercising power,

Always seek input from others to aide you in reaching the best possible decision for your business/start-up. This is due to entrepreneurship mostly being about taking calculated risks, and you will always create better strategies if more facts and information go into the decision-making process.

People always get exactly what they believe to deserve, despite the fact that they may be unhappy with what they have. We are 100% responsible for our destiny, and I would dare to say 200%, because we do create the conditions for the future we end up attracting to our lives. But, the challenge is in learning to see it, and noticing how we do this. Therefore, there's really nothing to regret about life.

People always get exactly what they believe to deserve, despite the fact that they may be unhappy with what they have. We are 100% responsible for our destiny, and I would dare to say 200%, because we do create the conditions for the future we end up attracting to our life. But the challenge is in learning to see it, and noticing how we do this. Therefore, there's really nothing to regret about life.

I watched the transformation in my father as he picked one winner after another, and I liked what I saw. As he watched the stock climb, he would break into a big, broad smile, until he was literally beaming. He was having a very good time. He was loosening up. He finally felt that he was getting ahead. This was why he had come to America, to make a life for his family. Often I would help him with his decisions. If he was interested in a particular company, I would research it for him, and we would discuss the possibility of buying a few shares. He treated me like an equal, like his partner. Together we learned about buying on margin, about options trading, about puts and calls. Before long I found myself leaping out of bed at the crack of dawn, pouring myself a bowl of cereal, and parking myself in front of the television. I had the morning newspaper to my left and a pad and pencil to my right. The fact is, anyone can do this. It’s just like homework, except it’s the real world. It takes time and effort to get an A, and the same rules apply here, but the difference is that this is worth taking very, very seriously. After all, we’re not talking about grades—we’re talking about serious money.

After he returned to London, we talked on the phone almost every day, and he got busy tinkering with the software. After I took a look at the finished version, I agreed to take the tracking system off his hands for $30,000. I sat down and wrote a simple agreement in which I outlined the general terms and conditions. I am not a lawyer, of course, but I thought I’d done a pretty good job of writing my first contract. And the way I did it was simplicity itself. I went online and did my homework. I looked at dozens of sample contracts, to try to get a handle on the way these things were written, and found everything I needed on the Web. (It’s even easier today; you can get a variety of contracts from various sites, at no charge.) The agreement stipulated that I would pay him in ninety days, once I had tested the program, but I already knew that it was working fine. The fact is, I needed those ninety days to generate enough income to pay him—though he didn’t need to know that. I also told him that if things worked out, I might want to hire him to run the software for me, on a month-to-month basis, when the company was up and running, and I mentioned the possibility of paying him $10,000 a month. I know that sounds like a huge number, and it was certainly a huge number to me, but I had been looking closely at my competition and at the staggering amounts of money that were being generated, and I knew that all I needed was one little deal to get my business off the ground.

In fact, entrepreneurship should be considered a viable career path for innovators inside large organizations.

We must avoid the caricature that science means formula or a lack of humanity in work. In fact, science is one of humanity’s most creative pursuits. I believe that applying it to entrepreneurship will unlock a vast storehouse of human potential.

He didn’t think that trying something entrepreneurial was an objective risk because I’d always be able to rejoin the work force if it didn’t work out. It seemed like a risky thing to do because it looked very likely to fail, but the real risk was not doing it. The objective risk was wasting years of my life stuck in something that appeared attractive but that I really didn’t enjoy. A lot of entrepreneurship and innovation seems perilous, but it’s not. And a lot of things that seem safe and comfortable are, in fact, profoundly risky. That’s subjective versus objective risk.

1. Don’t work for money; work to create assets that generate money. 2. Know the difference between an asset and a liability, and buy assets. Only buy another liability if you first buy or create an asset that generates enough cash to pay for it. 3. Make putting things in your asset column your first priority, before what your employer, government, and bank want. 4. Study accounting, investing, economics, and law. This will allow you to recognize opportunities and methods to successfully build wealth, such as the use of 1031 exchanges and corporate structures. 5. Most people buy packaged investments. The rich create investments by assembling a deal themselves – finding an opportunity, raising money, and organizing people. 6. Take a job only for the skills it will teach you, never for the money it pays you.

The choice is not between hands-on or hands-off. In our research, the entrepreneurs who led their companies from start-ups into some of the greatest corporations in history generally had both a hands-on style and an empowering style. No matter how big their companies became, they remained closely connected to their people, hyper-aware of facts on the ground, and directly engaged in strategic imperatives. If you lose your voracious curiosity about tactical details, if you lose passionate interest in people and how they are feeling, if you insulate yourself in the protective cocoon of executive comforts, you may well wake up one day to discover your company has already entered a doom loop of decline and self-destruction.

Do all creative innovations come from weird people? No, of course not. In fact, some of the most creative people we know come in fairly conservative packages. Yet, to have an innovative company, it’s also wise to have tolerance for a few unruly crazies. As Max De Pree of Herman Miller puts it, “If you want the best things to happen in corporate life, you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person.

Ethics & Prototypes (The Sonnet) Take morality out of science and, All you've left is one big conspiracy theory. Abundance of facts doesn't make something right, If it has no regard for the supreme fact of humanity. Just because we can innovate, doesn't mean we should, Science can no more be measured by the query of could. In future we'll be able to pre-edit a newborn baby, But just because we could, doesn't mean we should. Only a true scientist will realize the truth in this, A mind that can look past the pomp into the purpose, While counterfeit tech giants try to turn the world, Into a giant lifeless robot made of bolts and nuts. So better keep radical designs hidden from public eyes. Some prototypes must never ever be commercialized.

Level 5 leaders confront the brutal facts before they set vision and strategy, and they create a climate where the truth is heard. Failure to confront the brutal facts is a precursor to catastrophic decline, always.

Throwing even more fuel on this fire was Alibaba’s record-breaking 2014 debut on the New York Stock Exchange. A group of Taobao sellers rang the opening bell for Alibaba’s initial public offering on September 19, just nine days after Premier Li’s speech. When the dust settled on a furious round of trading, Alibaba had claimed the title of the largest IPO in history, and Jack Ma was crowned the richest man in China. But it was about more than just the money. Ma had become a national hero, but a very relatable one. Blessed with a goofy charisma, he seems like the boy next door. He didn’t attend an elite university and never learned how to code. He loves to tell crowds that when KFC set up shop in his hometown, he was the only one out of twenty-five applicants to be rejected for a job there. China’s other early internet giants often held Ph.D.s or had Silicon Valley experience in the United States. But Ma’s ascent to rock-star status gave a new meaning to “mass entrepreneurship”—in other words, this was something that anyone from the Chinese masses had a shot at. The government endorsement and Ma’s example of internet entrepreneurship were particularly effective at winning over some of the toughest customers: Chinese mothers. In the traditional Chinese mentality, entrepreneurship was still something for people who couldn’t land a real job. The “iron rice bowl” of lifetime employment in a government job remained the ultimate ambition for older generations who had lived through famines. In fact, when I had started Sinovation Ventures in 2009, many young people wanted to join the startups we funded but felt they couldn’t do so because of the steadfast opposition of their parents or spouses. To win these families over, I tried everything I could think of, including taking the parents out to nice dinners, writing them long letters by hand, and even running financial projections of how a startup could pay off. Eventually we were able to build strong teams at Sinovation, but every new recruit in those days was an uphill battle. By 2015, these people were beating down our door—in one case, literally breaking Sinovation’s front door—for the chance to work with us. That group included scrappy high school dropouts, brilliant graduates of top universities, former Facebook engineers, and more than a few people in questionable mental states. While I was out of town, the Sinovation headquarters received a visit from one would-be entrepreneur who refused to leave until I met with him. When the staff told him that I wouldn’t be returning any time soon, the man lay on the ground and stripped naked, pledging to lie right there until Kai-Fu Lee listened to his idea.

When a change in perception takes place, the facts do not change. Their meaning does.

Let’s take a break from Johnny’s learning for a moment, because this is where many entrepreneurs make the mistake of stopping. They take their assumptions (Johnny’s hypotheses) as fact. Some reckless entrepreneurs embrace this naïveté, having heard that “entrepreneurship is all about tenacity, so I’m going to barrel down this highway at one hundred miles per hour, because my Plan A is wonderful!” Their ventures are the wrecked cars you spot on the side of the road.

I think the fact that we could afford not to sell the company was the reason we were able to sell it. We had the power to say no at all times.

Respect for leaders often comes from the fact that people naturally respect those who know more than they do. That is one of the jobs of a powerful thinker, to be thinking ahead where no one has gone before.

I’m most endeared to the fact that they used gifts and talents that were taught to them by other enterprising women who looked just like them. These are gifts and talents they brought with them from Africa and other distant shores. These were gifts and talents women used to appease their owners, and make their lives comfortable. These were gifts and talents used to fuel economies and for building communities. In one book I read, nickels from the sale of chicken eggs paid the college tuition of three children.

Managements are paid for their judgment, but they are not being paid to be infallible. In fact, they are being paid to realize and admit that they have been wrong – especially when their admission opens up an opportunity. But this is by no means common.

5. But – and this is the final ‘do’ – a successful innovation aims at leadership. It does not aim necessarily at becoming eventually a ‘big business’; in fact, no one can foretell whether a given innovation will end up as a big business or a modest achievement. But if an innovation does not aim at leadership from the beginning, it is unlikely to be innovative enough, and therefore unlikely to be capable of establishing itself. Strategies (to be discussed in Chapters 16 to 19) vary greatly, from those that aim at dominance in an industry or a market to those that aim at finding and occupying a small ‘ecological niche’ in a process or market. But all entrepreneurial strategies, that is, all strategies aimed at exploiting an innovation, must achieve leadership within a given environment. Otherwise they will simply create an opportunity for the competition.

Does that photo of Elon Musk give you fuzzy feelings of balance? The fact is, balance is another SCRIPTED trap.

People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.

In fact, hyperactivity is the personality trait most strongly associated with entrepreneurship.

Sadly enough, while we all keep segregating ourselves into little tribes, passionately claiming our moral rights and neglected privileges to capital access, we overlook the fact that the real divide comes down to just two sides. Those of us with the desire and mental ability to build and innovate —or, as it's called in finance, the "sell-side." And then there's the "buy-side"—the folks who have some spare capital to invest. How did they get that extra capital in the first place? Good question—fair question.

The sad fact is that for the past few years, the grassland of startups has been overromanticized, bringing a striking gap between perception and reality. What we have now is that the actual number of new companies as a percentage of all firms has fallen by nearly half since the late seventies.

Today. We. Have. Everything. You see, we now live in an age where markets—especially those with high purchasing power—are overserved to the point of absurdity. Let’s start with the fact that we now have over 4 million apps for just about everything—from monitoring your health and tracking your pet’s habits to making harmonica sounds with an iPhone in your mouth or using the chat app Yo—which exists solely to send your friends the word "Yo." The latter, by the way, managed to raise $1 million in seed funding.

The saddest reality is that 30% of the clothes produced worldwide today are never sold. Now add to that the fact that up to 50% of food produced is never eaten—it simply gets thrown away. This should make you pause and reflect on one of the most disturbing examples of massive market inefficiency happening across every wealthy country—from the United States to Sweden (the home of H&M).

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In all seriousness—what is really happening (and I have plenty of brain-damaging data to prove it) is that finance has become a tool for getting money from productive businesses instead of getting money into them. If anyone is paying attention to the current stock market, you might reflect on the fact that margin debt is at a record high, and stock market capitalization stands at 176% of U.S. GDP

How can you be useful to the world if your main concern is how to become “fundable”? How can you create impactful products or meaningful services if, instead of focusing on market needs—rooted in social, economic, and environmental realities—you’re fixated on keeping investors happy, those who chase abnormal returns and easy exits? How did capital, once an instrument to address the world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges, become an end in itself—the most traded asset rather than the most transformative tool? When, in fact, it was meant to be the perfect resource for entrepreneurs to solve real problems and make our lives just a bit easier and healthier? If anything, problems aren’t stop signs—they’re wake-up calls for those with problem-solving skills. They also reflect the depth of our awareness and intelligence.

The world is changed by our example, not by our opinion or a constant stream of rants on social media—that’s my own mantra. Beyond the painfully obvious fact that too many of us are busy counting Facebook likes, just imagine how many of humanity’s problems could be solved if each of us started making small daily decisions based on that innate sense of rightness we humans are wired with.

Let me clearly say: presence has nothing to do with extroversion. Not only are introverts every bit as likely to demonstrate resonant presence, but research conducted in the last decade has also overwhelmingly shown us that introverts tend to have qualities that very effectively facilitate leadership and entrepreneurship, such as the capacity to focus for long periods of time; a greater resistance to the kinds of decision-making biases that doom entire organizations; less need for external validation of their self-concepts; and stronger listening, observing, and synthesizing skills. Susan Cain, Harvard Law School graduate and author of the culture-shifting bestseller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, explains, “By their nature, introverts tend to get passionate about one, two or three things in their life . . . [a]nd in the service of their passion for an idea they will go out and build alliances and networks and acquire expertise and do whatever it takes to make it happen.” One need not be loud or gregarious to be passionate and effective. In fact, a bit of quiet seems to go a long way toward being present.

A prediction about the direction of the stock market tells you nothing about where stocks are headed, but a whole lot about the person doing the predicting.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." – Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War II.