1. “The worst way to educate is with methods based on authority, fear and force, because it destroys all trust and achieves nothing but false submission.”
That is why a style of business leadership built on an authority figure (the boss) and the fear of being fired only manages to bring fear into companies. It makes workers less creative and more inhibited about coming up with ideas, for fear of reprisals. The opposite is a committed team with a common goal, where the leader is not someone to be feared but someone who helps the team meet its objectives.
2. “Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb trees, it will spend its whole life thinking it is useless.”
Discover your talent and your strengths. Discover them in others, too. When everyone contributes what they excel at, great results follow. Don’t spend too much time doing things you neither enjoy nor are really good at.
3. “I never think about the future; it arrives soon enough.”
Avoid the anxiety that comes from imagining the future. Do whatever you do today as well as you possibly can, and the future will probably reward you, because future success is simply the result of work done well.
4. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Knowledge is what we know. In many cases it is knowledge we have learned from other people, and those people have already set limits. “Knowledge will take you as far as what you know. Imagination and creativity can take you anywhere.”
5. “A meeting in which everyone agreed with everything that was said, at every moment, is a completely useless meeting.”
As the saying goes, “in a circle where everyone thinks alike, it’s really because nobody in it thinks very much”. Exchanging opinions and being able to express your ideas openly is essential. However crazy they may be, in the end one of them may stop being crazy the moment someone turns it into reality.
6. “It has to be simple for it to be true. If it is too complex, we probably won’t be able to decipher it.”
In the age of innovation, everyone strives to come up with something extremely innovative and original, but in the end what works best is what is simplest. Remember: if you can’t explain your business idea or your product in under 60 seconds in a way that anyone can understand, whatever their level of education, you probably don’t have a business. If it isn’t easy to explain, it is very hard to sell.
7. “We have the destiny we have earned.”
Probably one of the truest of them all, because, as Bill Gates used to say, “being born poor is not your fault, but dying poor is”. Destiny is something we create with every step we take.
Further reading
- Ranking the best motivational quotes for entrepreneurs
- 50 quotes from successful businesspeople for entrepreneurs
- 11 Steve Jobs quotes that will go down in business history
- Bruce Lee’s philosophy applied to business
Featured image: Ferdinand Schmutzer / Adam Cuerden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
