 While everyone agrees that reading books can help us learn and change our lives, more than once, I have found that a single quote has changed my life, or at least, the way I see things. And that's why, in today's video, I will be sharing with you some of the most inspiring quotations every entrepreneur should always have in mind. 1. The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing. Walt Disney Historically, entrepreneurs are doers. Imagine you were an entrepreneur 50 years ago. The only reason you could be qualified to have that title in the first place would be that you've done something, maybe a lot of things. In the past, there was no way anyone could have the title of entrepreneurship except they were doers. Still, now millions of people call themselves entrepreneurs on Facebook even though most of them have never really done anything significant. Entrepreneurship and talking alike night and day. You can't be an entrepreneur just by your mouth. You have to get to the field and get your hands dirty. You have to try, pursue and do. Stop talking, stop planning, start doing. 2. The credit belongs to the man who actually is in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and sweat, who strives valiantly, who errs and may fall again and again because there is no effort without error or shortcoming. 3. Theodore Roosevelt For many years, some of the most important relationships in my life went west. Nobody wanted to have me around. Nobody wanted to associate with me. Nobody wanted to call me their brother simply because I have failed and lost in the business world for many years. Our culture celebrates safe people, radical and neglect people who adhere big things and fail. But they are the real deal. They are the ones who are alive. They are the ones who own the credit. They are the ones who will inherit the world. As an entrepreneur, you will one day find yourself in a messy situation. You'll try and fail. Everyone will look at you as a failure. They will reject you and advise you to go get a job. Pain will make sense to them out of what you're doing. But you are the real deal and you must believe that. 3. A ship in the harbor is safe but that is not what ships are built for. John A. Shed Growing up as a young adult, I discovered there was nothing else I could do with my life but entrepreneurship. I don't know why that seemed to be the case but nothing else seemed appealing to me. Not even the highest paying job in my country. I just wanted to build something. I just loved to sell things and nothing else would make sense to me. Till today, I see entrepreneurship as a necessary evil. Yes, it's difficult, frustrating, especially at the beginning and could make your life really hard. Still, if you were created for it, nothing else will be appealing to you. Not even the safe jobs or anything like that. 4. Don't worry about failure. You'll only have to be right once. Drew Houston I read in a book about the year 2007 a statement that goes like this. When you start making money, you'll wonder where the money had been all these years. I didn't understand that statement until 9 years after when I had my first business breakthrough. Yes, it was just a single success but things started happening so fast, the speed of light seemed slow. Listen to me. It doesn't matter how many times you fail, all you need is a single success. It doesn't matter how many years you've been struggling as an entrepreneur, all you need is a unique idea and a single breakthrough. After this single success, the whole world will be open to you. Suddenly, people are willing to invest in my business. Suddenly it started making more money than most people in my country. And suddenly the second and third business successes came. Don't worry about failures. All you need is a single success and a thousand failures will not matter at all. 5. Knowledge without action is meaningless. A bullbaccar A few days ago I saw a book with someone and asked him, I think you have other books that teach the same thing you're holding. He answered in the affirmative. Okay, if you've read 3-5 books about the same business, have you ever tried to do something with what you learned? The answer was no. I simply couldn't understand. Why do people read books? What is the purpose of knowledge? To make your head bigger or to allow you to make a boost to your friends? Well, it's useless. The purpose of knowledge is not to know, it is to do. So, do. 6. It's not about ideas, it's about making ideas happen. Scott Belsky In my honest opinion, ideas are grossly overrated. People tend to believe that businesses that succeed do so because the owner came up with a great business idea. Well, MySpace and Facebook are about the same idea. And Google and Yahoo had the same mission in mind. What differentiates the men from boys in the business world is not an idea but execution. A good idea is needed for a successful business but not as much as a weapon which is required for war. A good idea is probably 5-10% of the whole game. Making that idea happen requires even more challenging tasks. 7. When I'm old and dying, I plan to look back at my life and say wow, that was an adventure. Not wow. I sure felt safe. Tom Preston Renner Today when I look back at my life and remember all the stupid things I've attempted and how they failed, it seems to me as though it gives me joy to know that there was never a point in my adult life when I said to myself, take it easy. My life has always been about getting out and making a fight. It has always been about daring things most people would not even consider achievable. And that has led me to burn my hands more than a few times. But guess what? Only a few people look back at their failed adventure a decade after and regret them. The real thing most people regret is how they played it safe. How they avoided pain. How they leave the comfortable life because of the fear of failures. 8. The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be. Read Hoffman Look around you when you will notice something really interesting and that is, well, birds of the same feather always hang together. People of similar mindsets are usually friends. People of similar goals are generally friends and even people of similar body weight are often friends. This happens so naturally that most people don't even know it's happening. Now, there's a twist to that. And that is, if you really want to be something other than what you are now, the smartest move you can make is to figure out one or two people who also want to be that thing and spend time with them. You don't even have to try to struggle just by being around the people who are traveling to the city you'd love to go, you'll gradually be on your way there. 9. You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over. Richard Branson In one of my recent unpublished books, I argue that the reason our present school system is stupid is that it uses a classroom to teach children. In my opinion, the classroom is one of the foolish things about education because the human mind doesn't learn anything by merely reciting it. We don't learn how to walk by sitting in a classroom. We don't learn how to speak by sitting in a classroom. You can't learn how to cook, drive or write by sitting in a classroom. There's only a single way humans learn and that is the way of doing. It's by doing we get feedback, call mistakes and then know how to do what we want to do in a better way. I've read more than 200 books about entrepreneurship and related subjects before I started out in the business world. Still, 6 months after I went entirely into the business world, I seemed to have learned more about entrepreneurship than what any book could have taught me. Don't sit down and read 300 books about a subject, read a few books and start doing. 10. Dear Entrepreneurs You can start a thousand businesses, launch 100 projects and take dozens of companies public. But you only have one shot at being part of your kid's childhood. Your kid doesn't care about your platform, they care about your presence. John Aikoff At the end of the day, most of us really want something more than money, fame and the success entrepreneurship offers. Some of us want a great marriage, some want children and some want relationships with other humans. One great temptation of entrepreneurship is that you can easily be carried away by your job. Let's build, let's sell, let's build even more. Almost everyone who leaves their entrepreneurial life building and selling gets to the end of their lives and regret never spending enough time with the people they love the most. Build and sell, but also make time for your family. I hope some of the above quotes make sense to you. 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