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Courage is the counterpoint of fear. Courage appears when in war or business, one is indeed scared.
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Your energy, your passion, your ability to lose yourself in the entirety and the nitty-gritty of your venture to the exclusion of everything else is more important than capital. Thinking is the capital; enterprise is the way; hard work is the solution.
‘If you want to achieve liberation or moksha, you have to dissolve yourself in the ocean of transcendent reality.’
termites were attacking the coconut trees because the soil was like a clean concrete floor, offered them no nourishment.
If faced with something unfair don’t sit back and moan and wallow in melancholy; revolt and fight against it!
‘sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations’
that opportunities are lost if you don’t seize them.
I saw that people like Kasturi succeeded because they had the courage, the determination, the energy, relentless persistence, and hard work without despair, to do more and do better every day.
and a substantial part of the produce is lost due to poor storage which makes it imperative for the farmer to sell off the produce immediately after the harvest.
Happiness is a mirage if you look at it as a destination to arrive at. If you take joy in the everyday things of life, you will never need to embark on a journey towards an elusive destination. If work is your joy, you never need to toil at all in life!
Happiness is no pinnacle to be attained. It doesn’t exist as a destination and is meaningful only as a journey. What you want to be is a vision. It’s an ideal. If you have reached it, you may have reached a goal but a vision is something that drives you because it is almost impossible to achieve.
‘Often life is influenced by and steered by chance events.’ Life is driven by chance events. The direction it takes is often determined by simple decisions like taking one road or one turn at a corner rather than another. Sometimes a casual decision to watch a play and not go to the shopping mall might make a big difference. Chance events have the power to dictate our lives. If you call these events, fate or destiny, so be it.
Human beings need to work, but individuals need to reason and discover for themselves the unique secret of the kind of work that suits them, is productive, and makes them happy in the long-term. More people these days are unhappy at work than ever before. Most of our waking hours are spent at work. The majority looks at only one consequence of that work as the most worthwhile: money. Money is one or more steps removed from happiness.
People seem to be happy and enjoying life when on a buying or shopping spree at the mall, but for many if work does not offer challenges, it is not worthwhile.
my dreaming and my decision making were simultaneous.
Entrepreneurship has a lot to do with marketing. You have to get noticed to get started. You must stand out in the clutter of new products and services. You need to be in a space which is new, different, has no competition.
An entrepreneur is oft en defined as one who starts his own new and small business …. But not every new small business is entrepreneurial or represents entrepreneurship. The husband and wife who open another delicatessen or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before … but they create neither a new satisfaction nor a new consumer demand. But a true entrepreneur is one who creates wealth where it did not exist earlier by creating a new market and a new customer. They create something new,
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‘All great businesses involve only two things. One is having a great idea. Two is having great people around you.’
A lot of people come to me and say, ‘I have set up a business. My boss does not know. My company does not know. When the business succeeds, I will resign.’ My reply is, ‘That business will never succeed. Your business will succeed only when you can’t pay your rent, you can’t pay salaries, you can’t buy your wife a sari, and you can’t pay your children’s school fees. Then you will learn to innovate. You will be forced to improve. Nothing breeds invention like necessity. Necessity will ensure you do not become complacent. You will be unable to sleep because your business may go bankrupt. This is
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This is a good way to approach a project. When you decide that you won’t give up till it happens, then it happens. It is relentless pressure that creates the crack. If a bureaucrat is like a rock that won’t let the river flow, muster a will that is as powerful as the rapids that swirl, whirl and drill a hole through, bursting forth and rushing on unchecked. The river has only one purpose: to join the ocean. Your will has to be the metaphoric river rapids. You have only one purpose: to reach the goal. To achieve—that you just have to do it. When you start something you cannot give yourself a
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Great leaders, have an innate ability to create consensus. They led from the front and from behind: they went to the grass roots and carried everyone along.
There is another characteristic to leadership. It depends on your willingness to bring in people smarter than yourself.
If a smart manager surrounds himself or herself with poor talent, what they deliver will be of poor value and they will eventually be judged only on what is delivered.
Great leadership requires great humility and the vision to look beyond one’s own role and create value and sustainability without arrogance.
Most people fail because they give up at a time when they are unaware how close to success they are.
Many of us don’t get what we deserve because we do not ask for it.
Sorrow and self-pity consume enormous quantities of energy. If you only can desist from feeling victimized by fate and look for a new solution instead, not only would you conserve old energies but at the same time also feel the surge of the new. New hope is kindled in the process.
All battles are essentially fought in the mind, and it is what happens there that makes or breaks us. Action is another fantastic antidote to despair. I did not waste time in wasteful regret and sought an alternative opening; a new way out.
I saw people who got into this field quit in two or three years because they got the money or helicopter before setting up their company and team.
Within each of us there is an inner compass. It points to the final fact beyond which analysis cannot take you. You need to draw on that inner resource and follow it. ‘Fine, let me take the plunge,’ you must be willing to say.
‘Indecision is in itself grief.’
If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions.
‘When you have an iron will and an indomitable spirit, the gods themselves join in the combat and the universe conspires to help you succeed!’
It was like zeroing in on a daughter’s wedding. Unless a date is fixed it won’t happen. Once a date is set, you will die to ensure that your daughter gets married.
By not fixing the launch date, matters would drag on. The company would bleed to death.
This was the beginning of a pattern of behaviour I would begin to manifest each time I launched a new venture. I would fix a date and force myself and everyone else into a schedule we would have to meet. There was no going back. Beyond that date, I would say, I am a pauper. This I felt in my bones, my heart, my blood, and my cells. The one and only way to make anything work was to fix a date; make a commitment.
Once a resolution is made, whether for better or worse, the anxiety dissolves.
Any advertising professional worth his salt will agree to this.
The barman illustrates a point I have often tried to make. When people call you, be good to them. People may not use your service or product, but they are calling because they nurture some form of goodwill for you. They mean well for you. They could be your sales front, unpaid and entirely voluntary, all because they are curious about you.
I lived, breathed, ate, slept, and dreamt just one thing.
that it was a principle of war that it was not always canons but lightning speed that won battles.
In commerce there is no religion.
Innovation can apply to cost-cutting and to creating positive revenue streams.
If you are an entrepreneur with nothing but dreams, you start with what you have. Entrepreneurial soil is fertile. It sustains ideas and innovations.
There is great energy in the entrepreneurial seed. It germinates in acute conditions of stress and nutrient deprivation. It pushes through the hardest of sod and shoots sprout. The belief in oneself and the will to succeed are not measureable in terms of money.
They must make money on me in the long-term. If they won in the short-term, and I lost, both of us would lose. If in the long-term I won, they would win too. The long-term perspective was a win-win.
They dared to ask ‘Why?’ to customary practice and ‘Why not?’ to innovation.
Better risk and die, rather than die without taking a risk.
Everyone must be made to feel that what s/he does in his or her area of influence can change the company’s destiny. It is this conveyance and realization of a common dream that motivates people to raise the bar.
sales and marketing that millions followed Mao because of an idea, a dream. Millions followed Gandhi, Hitler, and Nelson Mandela. The followers believed, and were given to believe, they could make a difference.
