6 Quotes That Will Help You Be a Better Entrepreneur

I was looking through my notes for ideas for something to write about (its currently 4:37 am) and I stumbled upon a couple of sticky notes on my laptop full of quotes. These are some of my favourite quotes — each addressing a different skill or attribute that could help you be a better entrepreneur!

1. Starting

Actually starting is one of the toughest challenges any entrepreneur faces. You’re always going to be riddled with self-doubt and inner turmoil about whether your product is good enough/whether you’re good enough/whether the team is good enough/whether the target audience is ready/and the list goes on and on. Chances are you will go through a lot of issues and maybe even pivot a couple of times. All you need to remember at the end of the day is that “you don’t need to be great to start, but you need to start to be great.”

2. Being Different

Very often people will dismiss your idea as being “too different” or “too niche” — don’t worry about that. If you’d use your product/app, chances are that there are at least a million other people who will, if not more. Don’t worry about what people say, just worry about executing your idea. Like Peter Shankman wisely said “because the majority of people out there are afraid to be different, it allows people like us to own the ball game”

3. Working Hard

One of my favourite quotes is from a letter Jeff Bezos wrote to the shareholders of Amazon in 1997 (that’s 20 years ago!) He said that when he interviews people for a job at Amazon, he tells them that “you can work hard, long, or smart, but at Amazon you can’t choose two out of three.” As an entrepreneur this should be your life motto. You have to work hard — for obvious reasons. You’re going to need to work long hours, often longer than is good for you, especially if you’re trying to start up while still continuing at your existing job. Additionally, as an entrepreneur you’re always going to have to work smart. You’re probably not going to have the resources/the time/multiple attempts to keep working on idea. You need to work hard, long, and smart to be successful.

4. Don’t Overthink

In my first and second year of law school, I was working on a startup. I had a majority of the work done, and could have launched at any time. However, I was never satisfied. I kept trying to make changes, until I finally said that I couldn’t do it at that point in my life and that’d I’d come back to it later at some point. It’s been almost two years since I’ve stopped working on it, and I very often wonder what could have been if I had just launched then — especially when I see startups with similar ideas doing well! You’re never going to be completely ready, and sometimes you just need to take the plunge. Like Fernando Alonso said/tweeted “when you aim for perfection, you discover it’s a moving target.”

5. First-Mover Advantage isn’t Everything

A common misconception entrepreneurs have is that if there’s someone already in the market with a similar idea/product to them, it doesn’t make sense to work on it anymore. If that were true Apple would never do as well as they currently do, especially with everyone always complaining that they don’t innovate or create anything new anymore. Like Drake correctly raps in one of his songs, “it ain’t about who did it first, it’s ‘bout who did it right.”

6. Meeting Investors

In a series of experiments conducted by Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, they found that it takes all of one-tenth of a second to form an impression of someone you’re meeting for the first time from their face, and that longer exposures don’t significantly alter those impressions. When you do meet investors, they will probably judge you based on a multitude of things, starting with your appearance, your handshake, and even the conviction with which you speak, among others. This often happens subconsciously, but it happens nonetheless. In his story The Anthology, Karan Mahajan wrote “first impressions are important — they are usually the last time we see a person clearly.” Ensure that you make a good first impression!

Thank you for reading! Would love to hear what you guys think about these quotes — and it would be great if you could share some of your favourite quotes in the responses! Do like and share this article, and check out www.startuphere.today for a series of articles, and a podcast, on everything related to entrepreneurship in India!