Inspiration from 7 Legendary Business Titans
Starting and running your own business can be
a risky venture, to say the least. Not only will you be devoting a lot of time
and energy to it, but you may also be sinking every cent you have into it with
the hopes that everything will turn out right. If you’ve never run a business
before, you will probably feel completely out of your element, at least at the
start.
Once you do get your business underway, and
often even before you start, you will most likely get a ton of advice (often
unsolicited) from your friends, your family, your associates and just about
everybody you come across. Sometimes their advice is helpful but, more often
than not, it’s just some rhetoric that you’ve probably heard a hundred times
already.
Steve Jobs -- co-founder of Apple
Computers.
“When you grow up, you tend to get told
the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the
world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have
fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader
once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was
made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can
influence it, and you can build your own things that other people can use. Once
you learn that, you'll never be the same again.” Steve
Jobs' from Vision of the World.
Much too often we get into the mindset that we
can’t really be better. We are often taught that this is all there is to life,
to raise a family and maybe save a little money -- while having as much fun as
we can. When you try to do things differently, there will be naysayers who will
insist you can’t change things, you have no influence, you aren’t smart enough
or talented enough -- but you have to remember that you are just as capable of
making big changes as you are with small ones. All you really need is the
desire and the drive and the belief that you can do anything you put your mind
to.
Bill Gates -- co-founder of Microsoft.
"If we weren't still hiring great people
and pushing ahead, it would be easy to fall behind and become a mediocre
company. Fear should guide you, but it should be latent. I consider failure on
a regular basis." Bill Gates in a 1994 interview.
This basic concept advises that you should
allow fear to be a compass, but not an overwhelming factor in your business
decision. If you aren’t "afraid" of being mediocre, you will remain
stagnant. If you don’t consider failure on a regular basis, then you’ll never
see it coming.
Mark Zuckerberg – founder of Facebook.
“I always think that you should start with the
problem that you're trying to solve in the world and not start with deciding
that you want to build a company. And the best companies that get built are
things that are trying to drive some kind of social change even if it's just
local in one place more than starting out because you want to make a bunch of
money or have a lot of people working for you or build some company in some
way” -- How to Build the Future with Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg discovered early on how to
build a successful business and that, according to him, is by not trying to
build a successful business, so to speak. If you want to make something
successful, look for a problem and then solve the problem. If you start out
seeking to make a lot of money, you’ll probably fail -- but if you start out
looking for a solution to a problem, the rest will take care of itself.
Dennis Crowley -- co-founder of
FourSquare.
“The best piece of advice that we’ve
figured out from building FourSquare is not to let other people distract what
you’re doing. There’s always haters that say ‘Your idea is stupid… this idea is
never going to work… don’t even bother doing that because somebody is going to
do it before you do’. If we listened to all the negative feedback, we would
never have built things.” -- Dennis
Crowley's Best Advice: Ignore The Haters.
Don’t listen to what people say you can’t do.
You’ll always have the naysayers or the haters who try to convince you that
‘it’s not going to work’ or that your idea is stupid. Don’t listen to those
people. Believe in yourself and in your idea and go about making it work,
regardless of what anybody says.
Jeff Bezos -- CEO of Amazon.com.
“When we’re at our best, we don’t wait for
external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding
benefits and features, before we have to. We lower prices and increase value
for customers before we have to. We invent before we have to. These investments
are motivated by customer focus rather than by reaction to competition.”
-- 2012 Letter to Shareholders.
One of the biggest mistakes small businesses
and startups make is trying to ‘predict current trends’ and adjust their
business model. The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, doesn’t believe in predicting
trends, they see the whole customer base, they see what needs to be done, by
doing what nobody else is doing. When others are raising their prices, Amazon
looks to how it can lower prices. While other businesses are happy with the
status quo, Amazon is always reinventing itself, finding ways to make
themselves better, to better serve their customers and clients. They focus on
the customers and pay little attention to what their competition is doing.
That, according to Jeff Bezos, is why they are always one step ahead of the
competition.
Brad Smith -- CEO of Intuit.
“Have the courage to take risks and grow by
learning from your successes and failures. My favorite quote is from Winston
Churchill who once noted that 'success is the ability to move from failure to
failure with no loss of enthusiasm.' Let’s face it, our greatest lessons often
come from those things that didn’t work. Don’t hide the experience -- embrace
it!” -- Intuit's Brad Smith: How to Succeed in a Bad Economy.
Never let failure hold you back. While it’s
always great to succeed, we learn much more from what doesn’t work than from
what does. You cannot allow failure to keep you from bettering
yourself/business; never give up because of failure. On the contrary, use your
failures as a springboard to success, by embracing them and learning from them.
Larry Page -- co-founder of Google.
“You know what it’s like to wake up in the
middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don’t have a
pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning.
Sometimes it’s important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great
dream shows up, grab it.” -- 20 Things I’ve Learned from Larry Page – James Altucher
This last quote is an analogy that you need to
take into the real world. I’ve learned to always carry a pen and notepad
around, so when an idea comes along, I write it down. No matter how far-fetched
or how crazy it might seem at the time. You can sit there and just wish you
could do this, or wish you could do that, and then just forget about it and go
on with your life, or you can take those dreams and ideas to the next level,
review them and decide which ones are worth going after. You will never make
your dreams real if you just sleep on them, you need to wake up and grab that
dream with both hands, don’t let it go.
Via Entrepreneur
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