295 Entrepreneurs quotes

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.

Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it. It’s a message to both you and others about what you think is possible. Don’t put a ceiling on yourself.

My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long university education that I never had

You don’t need to have a -person company to develop that idea.

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently… A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.

It takes years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

I’ve been blessed to find people who are smarter than I am, and they help me to execute the vision I have.

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

A person who is quietly confident makes the best leader.

Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no one else.

After a while, you learn to ignore the names people call you and just trust who you are.

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA.

An entrepreneur is someone who has a vision for something and a want to create.

An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.

As a founder, lay all the possible scenarios

But as an entrepreneur, you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you’re confident that you’ll catch a bird flying by. It’s an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go play because the bird doesn’t come by, but a few times it does.

Entrepreneur is someone who has a vision for something and a want to create.

Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, it’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle. It defines you. Forget about vacations, about going home at pm – last thing at night you’ll send emails, first thing in the morning you’ll read emails, and you’’ wake up in the middle of the night. But it’s hugely rewarding as you’re fulfilling something for yourself.

The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.

The entrepreneur is essentially a visualizer and actualizer. He can visualize something, and when he visualizes it he sees exactly how to make it happen.

When times are bad is when the real entrepreneurs emerge.

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Play by the rules, but be ferocious.

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

Remain self-funded as long as possible.

Chase the vision, not the money; the money will end up following you.

Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Don’t take too much advice. Most people who have a lot of advice to give

Embrace what you don’t know, especially in the beginning, because what you don’t know can become your greatest asset. It ensures that you will absolutely be doing things different from everybody else.

Empower yourself and realize the importance of contributing to the world by living your talent. Work on what you love. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.

Find the smartest people you can and surround yourself with them.

Get big quietly, so you don’t tip off potential competitors.

Great men are not born great, they grow great.

Hire character. Train skill.

High expectations are the key to everything.

I try not to make any decisions that I’m not excited about.

If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.

If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.

Ignore the hype of the startups that you see in the press. Mostly, it’s a pack of lies. Half of these startups will be dead in a year. So, focus on building your business so you can be the one left standing.

It’s almost always harder to raise capital than you thought it would be, and it always takes longer. So plan for that.

Knowledge without action is meaningless

Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.

My best advice to entrepreneurs is this: Forget about making mistakes, just do it.

One of the most important things I have learned is that businesses don’t fail, entrepreneurs give up. Now sometimes, giving up is the right decision. But usually you just need to dig in and figure out how to make things better. Remember: Every day is a new opportunity to get up and do it better than yesterday!

People who succeed have momentum. The more they succeed, the more they want to succeed, and the more they find a way to succeed. Similarly, when someone is failing, the tendency is to get on a downward spiral that can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Show me a person who never made a mistake, and I will show you a person who never did anything.

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

Some days you’re smiling and thinking you’re going to make this thing rock. Then the next day a pipe breaks and your costs look too high. You have to learn to keep your eyes on an ultimate goal. If you lose sight of that goal, you have to get out.

The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.

The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

The things we fear the most in organizations- fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity.

The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.

The value of an idea lies in the using of it.

We are really competing against ourselves, we have no control over how other people perform.

When in doubt, bootstrap. Using your own personal resources is the easiest way to start a business. You don’t have to convince investors about the merits of your idea. You just have to convince yourself.

You just have to pay attention to what people need and what has not been done.

What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.

Only the paranoid survive.

Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Fortunes are built during the down market and collected in the upmarket.

I don’t look to jump over -foot bars

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.

Genius is % inspiration, and % perspiration.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.

If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

See things in the present, even if they are in the future.

Strive for authenticity over perfection.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

The question I ask myself almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’

The Ultimate Measure Of A Man Is Not Where He Stands In Moments Of Comfort And Convenience, But Where He Stands At Times Of Challenge And Controversy.

You can’t ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.

You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.

You only have to do a few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.

Openly share and talk to people about your idea. Use their lack of interest or doubt to fuel your motivation to make it happen.

If you look to lead, invest at least % of your time managing yourself – your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least % managing those with authority over you, and % managing your peers.

Don’t let anyone convince you that your dream, your vision to be an entrepreneur, is something that you shouldn’t do. What often happens is that people who are well meaning, who really care for us, are afraid for us and talk us out of it.

A dream does not become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.

Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.

Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.

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

Failure is just a resting place. It is an opportunity to begin again more intelligently.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’

I’ve missed more than shots in my career. I’ve lost almost games. Twenty

It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because all that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.

Lean forward into your life. Begin each day as if it were on purpose.

No more romanticizing about how cool it is to be an entrepreneur. It’s a struggle to save your company’s life – and your own skin – every day of the week.

Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

The most dangerous poison is the feeling of achievement. The antidote is to every evening think what can be done better tomorrow.

The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.

There is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others.

We May Encounter Many Defeats But We Must Not Be Defeated.

What good is an idea if it remains an idea? Try. Experiment. Iterate. Fail. Try again. Change the world.

Winners never quit and quitters never win.

You have to believe in yourself when no one else does

You have to believe it before you see it.

Nobody is gonna hit as hard as life, but it ain’t how hard you can hit. It’s how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. It’s how much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.

Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.

It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.

A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

Before dreaming about the future or making plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you – as entrepreneurs do.

Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.

Diligence is the mother of good luck.

Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined and connected to one another. And, when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.

If something is important enough, or you believe something is important enough, even if you are scared, you will keep going.

If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.

If you can dream it, you can do it.

If you can push through that feeling of being scared, that feeling of taking a risk, really amazing things can happen.

If you can’t fly then run. If you can’t run, then walk. And, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.

If you know too much before the start, then you will get overwhelmed. Come up with an original idea, and don’t copy because there will be no passion. You need that otherworldly passion. Just start.

If you’re starting something on your own, you better have a passion for it, because this is hard work.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

In carrying out e-commerce, the most important thing is to keep doing what you are doing right now with passion, to keep it up.

It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.

Make your team feel respected, empowered and genuinely excited about the company’s mission.

Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.

No great achiever – even those who made it seem easy – ever succeeded without hard work.

Passion, creativity, and resilience are the most crucial skills in business. If you’ve got those, you’re ready to embark on the journey.

Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical.

Strength shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.

The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it.

The Team! The Team! The Team!

There are lots of bad reasons to start a company. But there’s only one good, legitimate reason, and I think you know what it is: it’s to change the world.

There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there’s life, there is hope.

To win without risk is to triumph without glory.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

When you cease to dream you cease to live.

You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can’t, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don’t give up.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Being a woman in business doesn’t come without challenges. My advice? Surround yourself with other supportive women that encourage you, share ideas, and get you motivated.

Build your business success around something that you love

Don’t worry about being successful but work toward being significant and the success will naturally follow.

Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It’s the mastery of fear. It’s about getting up one more time than we fall down.

Follow your passion

I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity.

I wake up every morning and think to myself, ‘How far can I push the company forward in the next hours?’

I want every little girl who’s been told she’s bossy to be told again she has leadership skills.

If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.

In whatever you do, you’re not going to stand out unless you think big and have ideas that are truly original. That comes from tapping into your own creativity, not obsessing over what everyone else is doing.

Life-fulfilling work is never about the money

Nobody talks about entrepreneurship as a survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. Running that first shop taught me business is not financial science; it’s about trading: buying and selling.

One of the greatest skills of leadership is being unflappable. Anytime you do anything in the world; there’s going to be criticism.

Step out of the history that is holding you back. Step into the new story you are willing to create.

The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.

The difference between skill and talent: A skill is something you learn. Talent is what you can’t help doing.

Screw it, let’s do it.

Remember why you started.

Don’t assume that borrowing lots of money can make your startup fly. There are many things to the business other than investors, and it’s possible to succeed with your startup without breaking the bank.

Don’t worry about funding if you don’t need it. Today it’s cheaper to start a business than ever.

Get a mentor in the applicable field if you’re at all unsure of what you’re looking for.

How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.

If Plan A doesn’t work, the alphabet has more letters.

If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

If you are working on a product that’s going to be consumer-facing, then feedback is invaluable. You should be out there being brave and talking to people and asking for feedback as much as possible.

If you can offer a free tier that provides a lot of value, it will naturally help your product to spread much more rapidly.

If you’re interested in the living heart of what you do, focus on building things rather than talking about them.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

It’s necessary to find a mentor who can invest time to know your personal capabilities and business model.

Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.

Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.

Most of us want to tell our coworkers or friends, or husbands or wives, our ideas. For what reason? We want validation. But I feel ideas are most vulnerable in their infancy. Out of love and concern, friends and family give all the reasons or objections on why [you] shouldn’t do it. I didn’t want to risk that.

Nothing works better than just improving your product.

What is not started will never get finished

Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right!

You can’t make anything viral, but you can make something good.

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.

Age is something that doesn’t matter, unless you are a cheese.

Always look for the fool in the deal. If you don’t find one, it’s you.

Best startups generally come from somebody needing to scratch an itch.

If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.

If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a room with a mosquito.

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.

No matter how many customers you have, each is an individual. The day you start thinking of them as this amorphous ‘collection’ and stop thinking of them as people is the day you start going out of business.

Someday is not a day of the week.

The first one gets the oyster, the second gets the shell.

There’s no shortage of remarkable ideas, what’s missing is the will to execute them.

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.

We all have things we must do that we don’t really care to do and things we must do that we don’t mind doing, then there’s the goofing off.

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team

I stand up on my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.

I can name dozens of failures that we had over the years. Yet, with all these failures, we still managed to build Appster into one of the largest, and best companies in our industry. So, remember every time you fail, remind yourself these words: ‘Life won’t always go my way, but I will always find a way’.

Have the end in mind and every day make sure you’re working towards it.

Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.

Do not let the memories of your past limit the potential of your future. There are no limits to what you can achieve on your journey through life, except in your mind.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

Almost everything worthwhile carries with it some sort of risk, whether it’s starting a new business, whether it’s leaving home, whether it’s getting married, or whether it’s flying into space.

Always think outside the box and embrace opportunities that appear, wherever they might be.

As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.

Be nicer to your customers than your competitors.

Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender, it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.

Don’t be afraid to assert yourself, have confidence in your abilities and don’t let the bastards get you down.

Don’t be cocky. Don’t be flashy. There’s always someone better than you.

Don’t play games that you don’t understand, even if you see lots of other people making money from them.

Don’t risk more than you can afford to lose!

Don’t try to do everything by yourself, but try to connect with people and resources. Having that discipline and perseverance is really important.

Don’t worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.

Don’t worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop.

Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

Five days a week, I read my goals before I go to sleep and when I wake up. There are goals around health, family and business with expiration dates, and I update them every six months.

Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it.

If we are going to be part of the solution, we have to engage the problems.

If we tried to think of a good idea, we wouldn’t have been able to think of a good idea. You just have to find the solution for a problem in your own life.

If you are not getting traction on your idea, you try few things. You try pushing harder, cleaning up something, building up to something aggressively

If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.

If you start thinking you are good at something, that’s often the day you stop trying to be better and open the back door for someone to come after you. That’s why we always aim higher. We never feel like we’re done.

I’m always tweaking, always trying to make it better, constantly moving the levers and dials.

It’s more effective to do something valuable than to hope a logo or name will say it for you.

Listen, smile, agree, and then do whatever you were gonna do anyway.

Live each day as if your life had just begun.

My advice is to focus on the importance of forging a long-term relationship, whether with colleagues, partners, or customers. It is often easy to get caught up in short-term decisions.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

When you find an idea that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

Selling is not a pushy, winner-takes-all, macho act. It is an empathy-led, process-driven, and knowledge-intensive discipline. Because, in the end, people buy from people.

The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new.

Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Your ability to attract, evaluate, and forge strong working relationships with co-founders, early employees, and investors often mean the difference between failure and success.

You have to get good at ceding control and not taking things personally. Even seasoned entrepreneurs have struggled with that. I think it’s about not taking failures personally and also not taking successes personally.

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.

Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.

There is simply no substitute for hard work when it comes to achieving success.

There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way.

There is no royal flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it, for whatever success I have attained has been the result of much hard work and many sleepless nights.

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.

The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking spaces.

The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.

The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.

The elevator to success is out of order. You’ll have to use the stairs… one step at a time.

Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.

Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.

Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.

Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

Success is the sum of small efforts – repeated day in and day out.

Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.

Success is not what you have, but who you are.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

Success is not in what you have, but who you are.

Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

Success depends on employees. For me knowing and connecting with my employees is very important.

Starting a company extracts so much energy and conviction that not having a clear-cut goal and meaningful mission can hamper your success. This is why, at Virta, our mission was clearly defined: reverse early type- diabetes in million people by .

Some people dream of success, while other people get up every morning and make it happen.

Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.

Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

It’s very important for entrepreneurs to look for people in the company who are not afraid of failures, for example, intrapreneurs. They make a business more successful by thinking like an entrepreneur

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

If you’re passionate about something and you work hard, then I think you will be successful.

If you tune it so that you have zero chance of failure, you usually also have zero chance of success. The key is to look at ways for when you get to your failure checkpoint, you know to stop.

If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

If hard work is the key to success, most people would rather pick the lock.

I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Failure is success if we learn from it.

Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired and success achieved.

Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful men and women keep moving. They make mistakes but they don’t quit.

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.