People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care
Theodore Roosevelt
As a local entrepreneur, you are always looking for ways to improve and grow your business. You are also always fractioning out ways to motivate yourself and inspire your team. One way to do this is by reading motivational quotes that will stir up your adrenalin. However, the following are five of the best motivational quotes, curated from top business mentors, to help local entrepreneurs like you stay high-spirited:
1. Hector Quintanilla, Founder at BeBusinessSmart.com
MOTIVATION IS A FEELING
As an entrepreneur, I don’t believe in motivation. Why? Motivation is a feeling, it comes and goes, for that reason, I can’t rely on my future based on “how I feel.” Motivation very rarely leads to success — vision, passion and sheer determination to make it happen will do. It takes MORE than motivation to grow a business. Entrepreneurship is a result of the heart — NOT of the mind.
2. Asim Qureshi, CEO Jibble, and Former Vice President at Morgan Stanley (company)
ENTREPRENEURS ARE MOTIVATED PRIMARILY BY MONEY
I don’t buy what most CEOs claim to be their motivator – to solve the problem. And the proof is in the pudding – can you name one entrepreneur that has carried on working in a business, unless they had to, once they sold their equity in that business? Just one? It’s like from the moment they’ve signed on the dotted line to sell their equity their passion for the business suddenly drops to zero. Suddenly, they’re not willing to devote an hour a week, to solving the problem, forgetting the 100+ hours they were devoting before. There are, in fact, exceptions. But very very few.
Entrepreneurs are motivated primarily by money, but there are other reasons. James Caan, a British entrepreneur, wanted to prove his dad wrong after a fallout, according to his biography. I know others that had seen their families live through poverty and wanted an end to it. It can be rivalry. It can be insecurity. Plenty of reasons, most of them deep and dark.
3. Shriya Garg, Partner at ContentNinja.in
INDEPENDENCE AND CONTINUITY
Entrepreneurs make sucky employees. I have held jobs before and hated being accountable to someone else, being bound by the arbitrary, rigid rules made ages ago that made no sense. I hated the idea of doing the same thing 9–5 and hated not having control. Of being a follower. Of being at the mercy of someone else’s whims. Not having complete ownership. Predictability. Of not being scared to death about what tomorrow will bring.
What motivates me is that if my company ever shuts down, I am going to have a helluva time finding a job I will enjoy just as much.
4. Michael Brooks, CEO/Founder at goLance (company)
BUSINESS GROWTH SPARK UP MOTIVATION
As you grow and evolve on your business journey, so does your motivation. In the beginning, my biggest motivation as an entrepreneur was to make a better life for my family. Then, the happiness of my first team became my motivation. I started two companies, and my employees’ motivation became my motivation too. The longer every team member stayed working with me, the better I felt about myself and my businesses.
All entrepreneurs feel good about making more money, creating new companies, and hiring new people. I realized that as your business grows, your motivation grows too. It takes more to make you happy. More importantly, your motivation goes beyond the “material boundaries.” I work around the clock. That’s nothing unusual to any entrepreneur out there. It’s impossible to stay in business if you aren’t motivated. Now, the catch is where to find powerful sources of motivation.
This is one of my favourite motivational quotes. I always find the time to read our user reviews. There’s someone on the other side of the globe, and your remote work platform helped them change and improve their lives. Great reviews are addictive. You just can’t get enough of them, can you?
Bad reviews motivate me even more. I don’t see them as complaints, but rather as calls for help. Whenever possible, I work with my support team shoulder-to-shoulder to resolve some issues or improve some features. Receiving positive feedback that the problems are solved and the next level of trust and commitment is achieved motivates me to work even harder.
5. Balaji Viswanathan, CEO of Invento Robotics.
CHALLENGES ARE RECIPE FOR GROWTH
- Challenge – Many people who like to start up want it for a challenge. They are problem solvers and want to disrupt the status quo. They have a vision (“I want to aggregate the world’s information” or “I want to put a PC on every desk”) and want to constantly be challenged. For such people, the typical job in a big corp. is not challenging enough and too boring to be worth it.
- Creativity – Running your own business lets you be more creative. For instance, you can experiment with a new website design, new marketing strategy, create innovative products that attacks a known problem in a different way, create new packaging and new advertising campaigns. You have an infinite room to bring in your creativity in a small business that you found.
- Control – Many guys who start up a business don’t want to be pushed around and work in a product/company in which they have no way to shape the destiny. They want to work at their own time, own pace, location of their choice, employees of their choice and have an active role in deciding the direction of the company.
- Curiosity – Successful Entrepreneurs are always curious and ask – “what if we do X this way?”. They want to understand the customer’s minds, markets and competitors. They are constantly curious to see how their particular theory (“people want to do X with Y”) works. In this aspect, they are no different from a researcher who is searching for the truth.
- Cash – The final part is the cash. Many non-entrepreneurs think cash comes first for entrepreneurs. That is never really true. If that were the case, there is no reason for an Ellison or Gates to keep pursuing their business aggressively after they have made a billion dollars (which could get them almost everything a person could want). However, cash (and multi-million dollar exits) do play a part in motivation to run a business. Just that if it is the primary motivation, it is quite likely that the business would either fail or have a premature exit.
CONCLUSION
These five motivational quotes stir your spirit as a local entrepreneur. They encourage you to be persistent, find your niche and persevere in facing difficulties. Like, follow, comment and share this article if you found it helpful.
