It's occasionally valuable to take some time to listen to the collective wisdom of entrepreneurs, great personalities, and leaders who have distilled their knowledge and experience into inspiring quotes.
If you are struggling to get a new venture off the ground, or keep your company on the path to growth and prosperity, take ten minutes to stop and read through this list - you might just find the motivation you need to keep going.
Almost all of the people quoted here had to overcome significant challenges in their own lives in order gain the knowledge and experience summed up in their saying. Food for thought...
For me this is one of the most important quotes about business. There is never a guarantee that you will succeed when you try something new or take a risk. But, there is a guarantee that you won't succeed if you don't.
Having self-confidence is vital. If you don't have faith in yourself there is no way you will be able to convince investors, partners, customers, employees, or anyone else to either.
In my experience business is a lot like this. The only real failure in life is if you stop trying altogether. Everything else is experience.
I spent a lot of time working feverishly (day and night) on exciting new ideas that I felt had the potential to be real game changers. The problem is that it is easy to burn out/go mad/get cabin fever if you don't take time to have a real life - family, social, adventure, etc.
It's so easy to look at stories of overnight success and be jealous. What you don't see are the10 years of backbreaking work, risk taking, and problem solving that went into achieving that success.
Given the continuous and rapid changes in technology it is pertinent to revisit Darwin because what he said applies to modern day entrepreneurs now more than ever.
You don't have to be big to succeed, but you do need to always stay ahead of the curve.
I think the important lesson in this quote is that knowledge becomes dated and redundant very quickly. If you always feel secure in your knowledge then it's likely you are living in blissful ignorance and that is not a good thing for an entrepreneur.
You can replace the word truth with the phrase business ideas in the above quote to make it apply perfectly to startup ideas. Sharing your ideas with friends and family might invite ridicule from them... right up until the moment you sell the business for millions.
I thought Twitter was the stupidest idea I ever came across (when I first heard about it). They do ok, so what do I know?
Tru dat Teddy. There is absolutely no use in complaining about others' privilege. Many successful people come from humble beginnings. If they can do it, so can you.
"If" by Rudyard Kipling is one of the most inspirational poems ever written. But the last few lines (quoted above) is where the real meat is. Use everything you have, for as long as you have it, and you can do anything.
So those are my top 10 inspirational quotes for business. What other sayings motivate you? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Here are some great ideas that incorporate free stuff (products and services) in order to generate trust, improve revenue and grow your business.
Most consumers like getting free stuff (especially online consumers), so giving away a valuable free offering can help to drive traffic, generate buzz, earn trust, and make money.
This article will give you five great ideas for free product and service offerings that you can integrate into an existing organization or use to help grow a startup.
Small retail businesses and eCommerce sites need to consistently choose the best products to sell in order to maximize their profits.
But trying to find this information is not always easy, and there are plenty of "silver bullet" sites (and con men) that will try to make a profit by advising you to stock products that give them commission.
It's far better to be able to do your own research into which products offer the best value for money for your own customers and clients. After all, you know your business best.
There's nothing worse than finding out your business website has been hacked and is being used to send out bulk emails, spam visitors, or spread malicious software.
If it hasn't happened to you, don't fall into the trap of thinking that this scenario is something that happens to other people. Spam hacks are absolutely rampant.
Fortunately, the business model of spammers requires them, more often than not, to automate their hacks to seek out vulnerable Web servers and sites, because they have to do things on a huge scale to turn a profit.
Recently I was fortunate enough to attend a meeting between my startup and one of the largest logistics companies in the country - so that we could pitch our new service.
The size of this client would almost be sufficient to reach sustainability and profitability in one go. Obviously landing a whale in your first pitch as a new startup is the ultimate dream come true, but it can be hard to turn it into reality.
The meeting went ok, but there were some hard lessons learned about how to pitch big corporate clients that my partners and I took away from the experience.
Being an entrepreneur is something that should be encouraged and nurtured in everyone from an early age - especially in a country like the U.S. where the economy relies on small business.
Every school and university should offer a range of courses designed to empower young people to take an idea and turn it into a profitable enterprise, with confidence and competence.
Sadly, most educational institutes seem intent on sticking to dry, academic curricula that might teach young minds how to think, but don't prepare them for the harsh realities of the real world.
Isn't it frustrating that some people just seem to have that entrepreneurial knack - business opportunities just seem to go their way again and again?
Use the best business software and services to help start and grow your company quickly and efficiently - with the least cost.
Organic search traffic from Google is so valuable that many businesses come to rely on it as their primary source of income.
And while it may seem that the sun will never set on high converting organic traffic from the search giant, you might want to think about what would happen to your enterprise if the flow dried up.
I've experienced both the frustration and despair of losing Google traffic to an unknown and unexplained penalty (only large, important businesses get the information they need to recover in a matter of days or weeks), but have also seen how other companies have thrived without Google entirely.
Find a great work from home job (with good pay) and benefit from a better quality of life with the freedom of flexible hours and the ability to work
In case you haven't already heard, there's a little kitty out there with feline dwarfism that earns more than you do.
Grumpy cat, according to Wikipedia, seems to be raking in millions of dollars, and this might strike you as odd given how difficult it is to start a successful enterprise these days.
Having access to a great tool like Google Trends means that it is easy to keep an eye on how important brands and
Selling online is getting easier and easier every day, from a technical point of view, because the technology to handle online transactions (like online
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Low hanging digital marketing fruit, with potentially huge payoffs.
