How I Built This Quotes

“Failing is scary. Wasting your life is dangerous.”
― Guy Raz, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs

“The only difference between them and you, at this moment, is that when opportunity presented itself, they went into the phone booth and put on the cape. They took the leap. That’s basically it.”
― Guy Raz, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs

“In my situation,” he said, it was “staying at BCG that was dangerous but not scary. The danger was continuing to do something that didn’t make me happy and getting to sixty-five years old and looking back and going, ‘Oh my God, I wasted my life.’” Failing is scary. Wasting your life is dangerous.”
― Guy Raz, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs

“a hero has a crazy idea; people doubt her; she leaves the village to pursue her vision, faces untold obstacles, falls into an abyss, barely escapes death, but manages to come out the other side with whatever she was looking for and continues on her journey to an eventual triumphant return.”
― Guy Raz, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs

“Walt Disney is often quoted as saying, “Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.” That, to me, is the unifying characteristic of every founder I’ve met who counts positive word of mouth among the principal reasons for their success. Each of them made something really great, really special. They were so good that they became the signal that broke out from the noise of their competition and reached farther than they could have ever imagined.”
― Guy Raz, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs

“pulled”
― Guy Raz, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs

“1979, Ron Shaich, the future CEO of Panera Bread, left his job as regional manager for the Original Cookie Company, a shopping mall–based cookie conglomerate, to start an “urban cookie store” in Boston, where he’d gone to school, that would take advantage of all the foot traffic that downtown city streets get on a daily basis. Ron had $25,000 to get started, but that wasn’t nearly enough to open a storefront in a major American city. “I had no credibility. I had no real money. I had no balance sheet to sign a lease,” he said. “So I went to my dad and said, ‘I want my inheritance, whatever it’s going to be. I want the opportunity to use it.’” And his father agreed. He gave Ron $75,000, and with that combined $100,000 Ron opened a 400-square-foot cookie store. He called it the Cookie Jar, and within two years he had folded it into the bakery and café chain we know today as Au Bon Pain.”
― Guy Raz, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs

“It was a great job for a while,” Jim said with trademark understatement. For a while? At Jim’s salary, with the stock options still ahead of him, he was closing in on “pay off your parents’ mortgage and start a foundation” territory. What more could one person possibly want from a job? Well, for Jim Koch, it wasn’t about more; it was about different. In the beginning at BCG, Jim was being paid to learn about business strategy, product categories, organizational issues, and business problems. But once he entered management, his job became . . . well . . . boring. He was selling BCG’s services rather than diving into problems and finding solutions. “The learning stopped,” he said. “And then I had this epiphany. I asked myself, ‘Do I want to do this the rest of my life?’ And the answer came back: ‘No.’ And the corollary to that was, ‘Well, if I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life, I probably don’t want to do it tomorrow.”
― Guy Raz, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs

“In 1984, the creator of Sam Adams beer, Jim Koch, was staring long and hard across the chasm. It was spring. It was the beginning of the baseball season in Boston, and it was about to be “morning in America.” Ronald Reagan was preparing for what would be a landslide reelection to the presidency, the economy had finally turned around after years in recession, the US Olympic team was about to run away from the competition at the Summer Games in Los Angeles, and Jim was in the middle of his sixth year as a management consultant for Boston Consulting Group (BCG), already earning $250,000 per year (that’s more than $600K in 2020 dollars) before his thirty-fifth birthday. By all accounts, Jim Koch had it made. His feet were planted securely on the terra firma of the business consulting world. “We flew first-class. You consulted with CEOs. Everyone treated you really well,” Jim recalled. These were interesting, heady times at BCG. The company had just become fully employee owned, complete with an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) that forged a real path to truly significant wealth for consultants like Jim. At the same time, he had already worked alongside a quartet of future luminaries:”
― Guy Raz, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs

“was in the middle of his sixth year as a management consultant for Boston Consulting Group (BCG), already earning $250,000 per year (that’s more than $600K in 2020 dollars) before his thirty-fifth birthday.”
― Guy Raz, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs