Mindset is everything. People that think differently can end up living in entirely different versions of reality.
While the cynic may see a world full of doom and gloom, a creative individual will view the very same problems as opportunities and challenge themselves to step up their game and make a difference.
It’s all a matter of perception.
Mastering The Creative Mindset
It is well-known in evolutionary psychology that humans have a negativity bias. We tend to pay more attention to our fears and the potential threats to our survival.
This is why most people spend their whole lives trying to be perfect by avoiding mistakes and rejection. Yet, what of importance in life doesn’t involve some kind of risk-taking or the possibility of rejection?
The biggest threat to your entrepreneurial dreams are the people who play it safe and try to talk you out of them. This can make creative entrepreneurship a hard and lonely path. That’s why you must listen to and surround yourself with the entrepreneurial individuals who start companies, solve meaningful problems, write books, inspire with their art, and aspire to change the world.
For the last few years, I’ve been saving my favorite inspirational quotes on entrepreneurship and the creative mindset in my Evernote and now I thought I would share them with our community.
Take their advice and just go for it. Start today if you haven’t already. Dedicate yourself to self-directed learning and sharing your creativity with others. Don’t settle. Only persistence guarantees that results are inevitable.
1. The Entrepreneurial Mindset:
“Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Autodidact & Inventor
“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.”
– Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari
“The only people who get paid enough, get paid what they’re worth are people who don’t follow the instruction book, who create art, who are innovative, who work without a map. That option is now available to everyone so take it.”
– Seth Godin, Author & Entrepreneur
“The reasonable (person) adapts herself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to change the world. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.”
– George Bernard Shaw, Author & Playwright
“Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the troublemaking individual.”
– Natalie Clifford Barney, Playwright
“Do. Or do not. There is no try.”
– Yoda, Jedi Master
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
– Chinese proverb
“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.”
– Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s
“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”
– Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX
2. Social Entrepreneurship:
“Here’s my advice: The first step to becoming a changemaker (the only secure job going forward) is to give oneself permission, i.e., to ignore — politely, of course — all those who say ‘Don’t do it.’”
– Bill Drayton, Founder of Ashoka
“I think one of the most exciting trends right now is the birth of the global citizen who is interested in not only improving his or her immediate neighborhood, but also helping his or her neighbors across the globe.”
– Kathy Calvin, United Nations Foundation
“There’s 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.”
– Phil Libin, Founder of Evernote
“Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.”
– Peter Drucker, Management Guru
“What business entrepreneurs are to the economy, social entrepreneurs are to social change. They are the driven, creative individuals who question the status quo, exploit new opportunities, refuse to give up, and remake the world for the better.”
– David Bornstein, Author
“One of the newest figures to emerge on the world stage in recent years is the social entrepreneur. This is usually someone who burns with desire to make a positive social impact on the world, but believes that the best way of doing it is, as the saying goes, not by giving poor people a fish and feeding them for a day, but by teaching them to fish, in hopes of feeding them for a lifetime. I have come to know several social entrepreneurs in recent years, and most combine a business school brain with a social worker’s heart. The triple convergence and the flattening of the world have been a godsend for them. Those who get it and are adapting to it have begun launching some very innovative projects.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Author
“Somehow I can’t believe that there are any heights that can’t be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four Cs. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.”
― Walt Disney, Founder of Disney
3. 21st Century Business:
“There’s a transformative shift in business, and what worked before is no longer an option. It’s time for evolved entrepreneurs, visionary creators, and changemakers to rewrite the rules of business for the 21st century.”
– Tony Hsieh, Founder of Zappos
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
– Clay Shirky, Author
“An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.
– Peter Drucker, Management Guru
“The world’s biggest problems are also the world’s biggest business opportunities. You want to become a billionaire? Help a billion people.”
– Peter Diamandis, Co-Founder of Singularity University
“The best companies are purpose-driven, they are a cause-based and a force for good. The companies that value people over profit are actually more profitable.”’
– Marc Benioff, Founder of Salesforce
“The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.”
– Marc Benioff, Founder of Salesforce
“We used to write this down by saying, ‘move fast and break things.’ And the idea was, unless you are breaking some stuff you are not moving fast enough.”
– Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook
“I think there’s probably something in that for other entrepreneurs to learn which is that making mistakes is okay. At the end of the day, the goal of building something is to build something, not to not make mistakes.”
– Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook
“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.”
— Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon
“Companies have to nurture creativity and motivation—and have to do it by building a compassionate yet performance-driven corporate culture. In the knowledge economy the traditional soft people side of our business has become the new hard side.”
— Gay Mitchell, Author
“The competitive advantages the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion. All of these attributes are choices, not talents, and all of them are available to you.”
– Seth Godin, Author & Entrepreneur
4. Changing The World:
“When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.”
— Muhammed Yunus, Founder of Grameen Bank
“When our grandchildren ask us where we were when the voiceless and the vulnerable in our era needed leaders of compassion and purpose, I hope we can say that we showed up, and that we showed up on time.”
– Gary Haugen, Founder of International Justice Mission
“If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.”
– Melinda Gates, Co-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
– Gandhi, Activist & Revolutionary
“The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference.”
― Steven Pressfield, Author
“All truth goes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. And lastly, it is accepted as self-evident.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher
We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
– John W. Gardner, Political Leader
“The communications revolution has given millions of people both a wider and more detailed understanding of the world. Because of technology, ordinary citizens enjoy access to information that formerly was available only to elites and nation-states. One consequence of this change is that citizens have become acutely conscious of environmental destruction, entrenched poverty, health catastrophes, human rights abuses, failing education systems, and escalating violence. Another consequence is that people possess powerful communication tools to coordinate efforts to attack those problems.”
– David Bornstein
5. Creativity Quotes:
“In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. Management cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman.”
– David Ogilvy, co-founder of Ogilvy & Mather
“When you’re one step ahead of the crowd you’re a genius. When you’re two steps ahead, you’re a crackpot.”
– Shlomo Riskin, Rabbi
“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.”
– Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon
“You can’t solve a problem on the same level on which it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level.”
– Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
“We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play.”
– Charles E. Schaefer, Psychologist
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Author
“I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning… Everyday I find something creative to do with my life.”
— Miles Davis, Artist
“The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out. Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture. Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.”
– Dee Hock, Founder of VISA
“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher & Naturalist
“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.”
– Edward de Bono, Author
“There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.”
– Edward de Bono, Author
It’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.
– Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX
“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”
– Nikola Tesla, Inventor
“A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do.”
– Seth Godin, Author & Entrepreneur
“If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”
– Vincent Van Gogh, Artist
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
– Isaac Newton, Philosopher
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, the just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while”
― Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple
“The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.”
– Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people”
– Leo Burnett, Advertising Innovator
“I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.”
– Buckminster Fuller, Autodidact & Inventor
“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
― Steven Pressfield, Author
“Fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”
― Steven Pressfield, Author
“Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in which we perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.”
― Jason Silva, Performance Artist and Futurist
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6. Passion and Purpose:
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
– Howard Thurman, Civil Rights Leader
“We should try to leave the world a better place than when we entered it. As individuals, we can make a difference, whether it is to probe the secrets of Nature, to clean up the environment and work for peace and social justice, or to nurture the inquisitive, vibrant spirit of the young by being a mentor and a guide.”
― Michio Kaku, Theoretical Physicist
“You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”
― Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple
“People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up. And that’s what happens to most people, actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up, you know, being “successful” in the eyes of society and the ones that didn’t, oftentimes, it’s the ones who were successful loved what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it quit because they’re sane, right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it?”
― Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple
“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.”
― Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple
“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.”
― Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple
“If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round. Unless we invert this equation, much of our capacity for intrinsic motivation starts to shut down. We lose touch with our passion and become less than what we could be and that feeling never really goes away.”
― Steven Kotler, Author & Entrepreneur
“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists…it is real…it is possible…it’s yours.”
– Ayn Rand, Author
“Why do you feel so powerless? Go spend an hour with ants. Each of those black specks you see is a life. One whole life that you can save, take, or affect in some way. You have the power to make so many lives better. It is within you. Don’t lose sight of that.”
― Kamand Kojouri, Author
“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.”
– Catharina Bruns, Author
“We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”
– Marie Curie, Scientist
The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it’s really a different kind of life.
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Autodidact & Inventor
7. Making Ideas Happen:
“There’s no good idea that cannot be improved on.”
― Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney
“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”
― Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance
“An idea is like a play. It needs a good producer and a good promoter even if it is a masterpiece. Otherwise the play may never open; or it may open but, for a lack of an audience, close after a week. Similarly, an idea will not move from the fringes to the mainstream simply because it is good; it must be skillfully marketed before it will actually shift people’s perceptions and behavior.”
― David Bornstein, Author
“Every improvement or innovation begins with an idea. But an idea is only a possibility — a small beginning that must be nurtured, developed, engineer, tinkered with, championed, tested, implemented and checked ideas have no value until they are implemented.”
– Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder, Authors
“Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it that makes a difference.”
– Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari
“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”
– Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”
– Linus Pauling, Scientist & Inventor
“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”
– Martin Luther King Jr, Civil Rights Leader
“One should never impose one’s views on a problem; one should rather study it, and in time a solution will reveal itself.”
– Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
“Creativity is the generation and initial development of new, useful ideas. Innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas in an organization. Thus, no innovation is possible without the creative processes that mark the front end of the process: identifying important problems and opportunities, gathering relevant information, generating new ideas, and exploring the validity of those ideas.”
– Teresa Amabile
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of old ones.”
– John Cage
“Many people still believe a better mousetrap is all it takes. But of the 2000+ mousetraps patented, only two have sold well, and they were both designed in the 19th century. A good idea doesn’t sell itself although most ‘lone inventors’ make the mistake of thinking it will.”
– Andrew Hargadon
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
– John Steinbeck, American Author
“There is only one thing stronger than all the armies of the world: and that is an idea whose time has come.”
– Victor Hugo, French Author
“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence, nor imagination, nor both together, go to the making of genius. Love, Love, Love. That is the soul of genius.”
– Mozart, Composer
8. Risk and Failure:
“Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
– Helen Keller, Author
Optimism, pessimism, f*** that; we’re going to make it happen. As God as my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.
– Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
– Sir Ken Robinson, Creativity Educator
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
– Thomas Edison, Inventor
“When risk is a challenge, fear becomes a compass—literally pointing people in the direction they need to go next.”
― Steven Kotler, Author & Entrepreneur
“Since flow is a fluid action state, making better decisions isn’t enough: we also have to act on those decisions. The problem is fear, which stands between us and all actions. Yet our fears are grounded in self, time, and space. With our sense of self out of the way we are liberated from doubt and insecurity. With time gone, there is no yesterday to regret or tomorrow to worry about. And when our sense of space disappears, so do physical consequences. But when all three vanish at once, something far more incredible occurs: our fear of death—that most fundamental of all fears—can no longer exist. Simply put: if you’re infinite and atemporal, you cannot die.”
― Steven Kotler, Author & Entrepreneur
“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
– Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
“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.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Civil Right Leader
“I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”
– Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon
“The only thing worse than starting something and failing… is not starting something.”
– Seth Godin, Author & Entrepreneur
“For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.”
– Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week
“Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.”
– Zig Ziglar
9. Creative Leadership:
“Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.”
— Dale Carnegie, Author
“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”
– Jack Welch, former CEO of GM
“’Restore connection’ is not just for devices, it is for people too. If we cannot disconnect, we cannot lead. Creating the culture of burnout is opposite to creating a culture of sustainable creativity. This is something that needs to be taught in business schools. This mentality needs to be introduced as a leadership and performance-enhancing tool.”
– Arianna Huffington, Founder of The Huffington Post
“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
– Ralph Nader, American Political Activist
10. Follow Your Curiosity:
“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious…and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
— Walt Disney, Founder of Disney
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.”
— Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
― Richard Feynman, Theoretical Physicist
“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.”
― Tony Schwartz, Author
“I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”
– Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
― Plutarch, Philosopher
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”
— Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
— Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
“Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one’s bridges because you’re never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Author
“Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear and superstition.”
― Bernard Beckett, Author
“Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.”
― Linus Pauling, Scientist & Inventor
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
― Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
“There are no foolish questions, and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.”
― Charles Proteus Steinmetz, Mathematician & Teacher
“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”
― Voltaire, Philosopher
“I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Psychologist
“Your time here 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.”
― Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple
“My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had ― everyday I’m learning something new.”
― Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin
11. Persistence:
“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.”
— Mark Twain, Author
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
– Nelson Mandela, Activist & Revolutionary
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game’s winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that’s why I succeed.”
– Michael Jordan, Basketball Legend
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
– Wayne Gretzky, Hockey Legend
“Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.”
– Guy Kawasaki, Author
“Never give in–never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
– Winston Churchill, Political Leader
“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
– Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple
“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.”
– Babe Ruth, Baseball Legend
“The media wants overnight successes (so they have someone to tear down). Ignore them. Ignore the early adopter critics that never have enough to play with. Ignore your investors that want proven tactics and predictable instant results. Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that’s how long it’s going to take, guys.”
– Seth Godin, Author & Entrepreneur
“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
– Martin Luther King Jr, Civil Rights Activist
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”
– Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
— Chuck Close, Artist
“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”
– Michelangelo, Artist
12. Technological Innovation:
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
— Peter Drucker, Management Guru
“The technological change we’ll see in the 21st Century will be 1,000 times greater than what we experienced in the 20th.”
— Ray Kurzwell, Inventor and Futurist
“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.”
— Sydney Harris, Journalist
“Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:
Increasing efficiency
Increasing opportunity
Increasing emergence
Increasing complexity
Increasing diversity
Increasing specialization
Increasing ubiquity
Increasing freedom
Increasing mutualism
Increasing beauty
Increasing sentience
Increasing structure
Increasing evolvability”
— Kevin Kelly, Author
We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
— Anais Nin
“Given that this is the first time in 4.5 billion years where it’s been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth, it seems like we’d be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time.”
– Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX
“In an environment of turbulent change, as de Geus famously wrote: “The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”
― Steven Kotler, Author & Entrepreneur
13. Collaboration and Teamwork:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
— Margaret Mead, Cultural Anthropologist
“Innovation — a talent we all had when we were young — can be relearned and pooled in a culture of innovation to confront and overcome competitive threats. The combined creative power of all employees pulling together in cross-functional teams can provide the spark to produce winning performance in the marketplace.”
– Stephen Shapiro, Author
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Author
“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
― Ralph Nader, Author & Political Activist
Have any more epic inspirational quotes from your favourite entrepreneurs or artist that I should add?
Please share them in the comments.
