Starting Entrepreneurship Quotes

People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe

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

You have to work on the business first before it works for you.

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

Opportunities will come and go, but if you do nothing about them, so will you.

Simplicity is complex. It's never simple to keep things simple. Simple solutions require the most advanced thinking.

It is an acceptance of being uncomfortable that drives change.

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

If everyone waited to become an expert before starting, no one would become an expert. To become an EXPERT, you must have EXPERIENCE. To get EXPERIENCE, you must EXPERIMENT! Stop waiting. Start stuff.

To crush fear doesn't mean you eliminate it; crushing fear means you literally crush it down into smaller, more manageable parts and tackle one piece at a time.

You can overcome your circumstances or you can let your circumstances overcome you.

It all starts with a tiny, stupid idea, then one thing leads to another, and suddenly, you find something amazing: yourself.

Starting a business is risky. But with every risk, there are substantial rewards. Successful entrepreneurs learn to keep their minds focused on the rewards.

Today it is cheaper to start a business than tomorrow.

It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by 'new at it,' I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction...Give it a minute.

Rebels revel in rewriting reality's restrictions.

How can we tell people "never give up" when some haven't even started yet.

Never fear starting. Fear never starting.

The true start-up of a business is what happens before you start-up.

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship.

IP is an intangible asset—an idea converted into transferable personal property rights through patents, trademarks, copyrights, service marks, and trade secrets. IP covers every famous animated character you’ve ever heard of, the logos on your clothing. IP covers products and services you use every day—from flashlights to mobile phones, packaging to cars, food and beverage products, to smart thermostats. IP is not only for big businesses. Most start-ups and event microbusinesses have IP of some kind. 

If someone thinks your ideas, the dreams bubbling up inside of you, are stupid, welcome to the Club.

Remember, the most common thing about common sense is how uncommon it is.

Sell the results, not the nuts and bolts.

To be humble is to be teachable. Meek, not weak. The most humble people are the most aggressive leaders. Aggressive because to be truly taught, is to sincerely do. To lead. To start. To achieve. Willingly and urgently doing the work to make change.

A 2006 Harvard University study shows that entrepreneurs who have failed in their previous enterprise have an almost one-in-five chance of success in their next start-up

Entrepreneurs see the "no diving" sign and back-up to get a running start.

Try it out yourself. Test your idea with an experimental project. See what works and what doesn't. Then move forward or move on.

Perfectionism is a disease. Procrastination is a disease. ACTION is the cure.

Perfection is born of imperfection.

In the end, every startup is different. But in the beginning every startup is the same.

You cannot begin, until you begin.

There is only one way to bridge the perceived gap between a person and his or her greatest dreams, and that is to begin.

Most people master the art of postponing the start.

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

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

With the world now a global village, your vision has to transcend different races and faces in different places around the world.

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

Writing and achieving your goals is not failure, not having a goal to write in the first place is the start of failure.

Not having a recognised brand & trying to stand out in the market is like going to the market without any goods.

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

Entrepreneur, your last 20 tweets has to be about your brain, brand and business.

Stupid is the New Smart.

Always consider who you’re learning from. Don’t listen to people who are not experiencing the success you want.

When you think of quitting, remember why you started!

It's called entrepreneurSHIP, not entrepreneurSTAY. Don't wait. Just ship.

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

I built success in business when I stopped focusing on me and started focusing on helping others.

Time doesn’t change things. It’s how we use our time that makes the difference.

If you're an entrepreneur, I encourage you to have meaningful conversations with other entrepreneurs and with all kinds of people working in all kinds of industries. With time, this will give you greater clarity about how the world works and you'll start to have more of an eye for business opportunities.

Gamblers take blind risks. Entrepreneurs take risks while visually impaired and feel their way up and out.

Transforming the complex to the simple is pure genius.

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

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

Normal is where innovation goes to die.

Start local, think global & constantly raise the bar of excellence.

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

Dreams don’t get done until they are due.

Selling is a sacred trust between buyer and seller.

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

Just get on with starting, the worst and the most surprising thing to ever expect is short term failure.

In looking at waste as an entirely modern, man-made idea, I stopped viewing garbage as garbage and instead slowly started to see it as a commodity.

The clearest indication that something is not going well is when you can't say what is on your mind to your co-founder

To succeed in business, you have to be willing to accomplish your goal by any moral means necessary.

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

Ideas are meaningless without a masterful execution.

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

Starting a business with brother either ends business or ends brotherhood.

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

if you begin, you win.

Act NOW on those ideas! As they say, you snooze you lose. Or as I say, if you BEGIN you WIN.

According to Aman Mehndiratta, Persuasion of the idea and planning the strategy is the key activity for every business not only for the entrepreneurial business. But there goes an extra emphasis on the business started as an entrepreneurship. As here, everything including decisions, responsibilities, failures, success, appreciation, and criticism belongs to you only. Proper strategy and planning are necessary if one wants to avoid the future risks.

It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by 'new at it,' I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction.

Nobody wants a sales pitch. So instead of trying a hard sell, focus on telling a story that captivates your audience by painting a vivid picture of your vision. When you get good at storytelling, people want to be part of that story, and they’ll want to help others become part of that story too.

It’s one thing if a mistake occurs because of circumstance or a miscalculation or the unexpected or inexperience; it’s another if it’s part of a pattern of carelessness or ineptitude or laziness. Then it becomes a choice.

Innovations had better be capable of being started small, requiring at first little money, few people, and only a small and limited market. Otherwise, there is not enough time to make the adjustments and changes that are almost always needed for an innovation to succeed. Initially innovations rarely are more than ‘almost right’. The necessary changes can be made only if the scale is small and the requirements for people and money fairly modest.

People buy perceived value. It’s not just about having a good product or service, it’s also about making sure your potential customers perceive the value your product or service can provide them. And you do this by communicating its value effectively.

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal. If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, "We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie.

If you're an entrepreneur and you've started a business that you're growing from the ground up, just know that its okay to get a job somewhere else while you build up the business. For probably most entrepreneurs, that's just part of the journey. There's no shame in that.

4. Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing. It may be to enable a moving vehicle to draw electric power while it runs along rails – the innovation that made possible the electric streetcar. Or it may be as elementary as putting the same number of matches into a matchbox (it used to be fifty), which made possible the automatic filling of matchboxes and gave the Swedish originators of the idea a world monopoly on matches for almost half a century. Grandiose ideas, plans that aim at ‘revolutionizing an industry’, are unlikely to work.

Some of our successes, or possessions, have pushed some people into starting their own businesses … and some into ending their own lives.

Doing, not learning to do, is the essence of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs pay the price of a road less traveled, while everyone else takes the freeway and perpetually misses their own exit.

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

When you're thinking about where is the best place to start a business, there's a lot to consider - It's about culture, it's about physical infrastructure, it's about how educated the people are, it's about the housing, it's about the natural ecosystem, it's about the regulatory and legal frameworks, it's about the local transportation system and the efficiency of all the other systems that are there. But location matters.

<...> I think we didn't know what we were doing. I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is that you're not really going to build one specific company. The goal—at least the way I think about entrepreneur- ship—is you realize one day that you can't really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what that thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.

The future of work will not be work. It will be play. The human psyche is wired for survival. Entrepreneurship is modern-day survival. But most people have a twisted view of entrepreneurship. It’s not about starting the next billion-dollar company. It’s about leveraging your stack of skills, unique story, and finite focus to create a life of meaning. Everyone is an entrepreneur. Some just get paid for the value they cultivate outside of the conditioned path.

In the next chapters I will deal with factors that have helped make this happen, including better leaders, a revival of African entrepreneurship, the return of the great diaspora and a hungry, innovative young population—the largest demographic of young people in the world. But I will start with what I believe has been the most important factor of all. Despite Africa’s size and the great drama of her story—colonialism, war, famine, disease, dictatorship, corruption, hundreds of billions of dollars in wasted aid—it is astonishing to me that the thing that has probably helped us more than anything else is a tiny little device that can fit in your pocket. It’s called a cell phone—and it’s been a game changer.

Above all, we know that an entrepreneurial strategy has more chance of success the more it starts out with the users – their utilities, their values, their realities. An innovation is a change in market or society. It produces a greater yield for the user, greater wealth-producing capacity for society, higher value or greater satisfaction. The test of an innovation is always what it does for the user. Hence, entrepreneurship always needs to be market-focused, indeed, market-driven.

The wisest course of action is to take your best shot with a prototype, immediately get it to market, and iterate quickly. If you wait for ideal circumstances in which you have all the information you need (which is impossible), the market will pass you by.

On the need to create waste-free production. The truth is that if entrepreneurs do not start to show social responsibility today, terrifying scenarios of environmental disasters, perceived as events of the distant future, will become a reality. So we need to act now.

Each one of us has to start somewhere and age should not be a factor in our decision. Often, we may stop ourselves from doing things we may enjoy because we may feel we are past the age of doing so or are too young, but it is more important that we give ourselves the chance to succeed.

It’s hard to describe the feeling that comes with starting your own business. It really is so much work in the beginning that you lose yourself in it. You lose your sense of time, and you can’t believe how quickly the days go by because there’s no time to focus on much of anything else. But then you open the doors, and it’s like you’ve given birth to this new thing that didn’t exist before. Then when it starts to flourish, well, that’s just icing on the cake. To get to see it live and breathe and to know that this thing you created out of thin air can put a smile on other people’s faces is such a blessing.

No matter what your reason for wanting to start your own business, developing the foundation is the same. Laying a solid foundation for you business will provide you with a road map to follow as you build your business. As you work through the Start a Business Step-by-Step Workbook you will define the company’s mission, decide what business entity is right for your business, name your business, determine the pricing for your products or services, formulate your financial projections, define your competitors, survey consumers regarding your products or services, determine the marketing methods right for your business and more.

You are always self-employed. You are always the president of your own personal services corporation, no matter where you might be working at the moment. When you see yourself as self-employed, you develop the entrepreneur mentality. The mentality of the highly independent, self-responsible, self-starting individual. Instead of waiting for things to happen, you make things happen. You see yourself as the boss of your own life. You see yourself as completely in charge of your physical health, your financial well-being, your career, your relationships, your home, your car, and every element of your existence. This is the mindset of the truly excellent person.

great. This is a good description of Rovio, which was around for six years and underwent layoffs before the “instant” success of the Angry Birds video game franchise. In the case of the Five Guys restaurant chain, the founders spent fifteen years tweaking their original handful of restaurants in Virginia, finding the right bun bakery, the right number of times to shake the french fries before serving, how best to assemble a burger, and where to source their potatoes before expanding nationwide. Most businesses require a complex network of relationships to function, and these relationships take time to build. In many instances you have to be around for a few years to receive consistent recognition. It takes time to develop connections with investors, suppliers, and vendors. And it takes time for staff and founders to gain effectiveness in their roles and become a strong team.* So, yes, the bar is high when you want to start a company. You’ll have the chance to work on something you own and care about from day to day. You’ll be 100 percent engaged and motivated, and doing something you believe in. You can lead an integrated life, as opposed to a compartmentalized one in which you play a role in an office and then try to forget about it when you get home. You can define an organization, not the other way around. But even if you quit your job, hunker down for years, work hard for uncertain reward, and ask everyone you know for help, there’s still a great chance that your new business will not succeed. Over 50 percent of companies fail within their first three years.2 There’s a quote I like from an unknown source: “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.

After 5 years of college, I got a degree. Right out of the gate, I was at the top of my field, earning a solid mid 5-figure salary. There was no upward mobility. I started at the top, at age 23. I did that for 3 years. With free info from the Internet and one $299 course, I learned everything I needed to know to make 3x that salary in a year and a half. In another 5 years, that meager college-degree salary will be so far in the rear view mirror that I won't even remember what life was like to make so little. The Internet has largely rendered college, and education in general, irrelevant. For those that want to learn anything, open your browser and get to it.41a

The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer. The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right. The Struggle is when food loses its taste. The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred. The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The Struggle. The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is unhappiness. The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse. The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy. The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood. The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak. Most people are not strong enough. Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through The Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is The Struggle. The Struggle is where greatness comes from.

The whole group was derailed by the same two fears: FEAR OF STARTING. At some point people are told entrepreneurship is a huge risk, and you believed it. You figured more preparation, more planning, and more talking to friends would help you overcome your insecurities. But that inaction only breeds more doubt and fear. In actuality, the best way to learn what we need to know—and become who we want to be—is by just getting started. Small EXPERIMENTS, repeated over time, are the recipe for transformation in business, and life. FEAR OF ASKING. Soon after starting, the fear of rejection emerges. You have some impressive skills, an amazing product, every advantage in the world, and you’ll never sell a thing if you can’t face another person and ask for what you want. Whether you want them to buy what you’re selling or help in another way, you have to be able to ask in order to get. Once you reframe rejection as something desirable, the act of asking becomes a power all its own.

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.