Quotes About Risk-taking

The young are right to be fearless, she reminded herself. Remember yourself at that age.

live boldly. Push yourself. Don't settle.

Esquire magazine: "Great ideas can't be tested. Only mediocre ideas can be tested." It sums up how I feel about trying to measure radical ideas. You simply can't. You can't apply data to see if you should do a radical idea. You do the radical idea, and then you measure how it worked.

To be human is necessarily to be a vulnerable risk-taker; to be a courageous human is to be good at it

I've probably earned the right to screw up a few times. I don't want the fear of failure to stop me from doing what I really care about.

I'm good at exploring roofs. You never know when that kind of thing comes in useful.

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an 'A' pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that's not how it works.

Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.

We do everything wrong: instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it's ready. And we charge money for it. After securing initial customers, we change the product constantly—much too fast by traditional standards—shipping new versions of our product dozens of times every single day.

We do everything wrong: instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it's ready.

They are fast. They embrace new thinking. They are geared for disruption and innovation through uncertainty.

Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don't have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry.

Startups have to focus on the big experiments that lead to validated learning.

Entrepreneurs are different in many ways, whether starting their own small company or inventing new products and businesses within a company like GE. But they also share certain traits. They are fast. They embrace new thinking. They are geared for disruption and innovation through uncertainty. One

Bit by bit, system by system, those small investments added up to a robust product development process that allowed all our employees to work more creatively, with greatly reduced fear.

I've made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally. None of these things are fun, but they also don't matter. What matters is that companies that don't continue to experiment or embrace failure eventually get in the position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence. I don't believe in bet-the-company bets.

The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.

The Double Cross idea had always been based on lateral thinking without boundaries, a willingness to contemplate plans that others would dismiss as unworkable or, frankly, barmy.

In other words, the world will face the threat of financial crises as long as risk-taking and maturity transformation remain central to finance, and as long as humans remain human. Unfortunately, disaster will always be possible.

I don't like to hold back, because that's how you hurt yourself.

A subset of CEOs is that of entrepreneurs. And the classical definition of an entrepreneur is an individual who pursues opportunity without regard to the resources currently controlled. That sounds like a very different person than one might expect an analytical investment manager to be.

I think I play with no fear: I run at players regardless of who they are and try to make a difference.

It used to be the case that studio executives like Robert Evans, Darryl Zanuck, and David Selznick would put aside money for what they wanted to be great movies regardless of whether they would perform well with the box office.