Quotes About Risk-taking

You need to have tremendous confidence in your work, even a touch of arrogance, chutzpah. Many very fine researchers lack intellectual daring. It's human nature to want to be cozy, secure. But that can be a cul de sac.

Every successful businessman will have experienced set-backs and failures - they're lying if they say they haven't. Virgin has had some tremendously successful businesses and some that have not quite worked out. Virgin Cola springs to mind - the product wasn't distinct enough from Coca-Cola.

I love Alexa Chung, Diane Kruger and Kate Bosworth. They defy trends. They probably take more risks than I do but I would say my style is similar.

I started my first company when I was 18 and learned by trial through fire, having no formal education or entrepreneurial experience.

Our biggest obstacle to success is not the lack of opportunity but addiction to conformity.

It's time to stop tiptoeing around the pool and jump into the deep end, head first. It's time to think big, want more and achieve it all!

Being myself includes taking risks with myself, taking risks on new behavior, trying new ways of 'being myself', so that I can see who it is I want to be.

Entrepreneur is not a job title. It is a state of mind of people who want to alter the future.

Punishing honest mistakes stifles creativity. I want people moving and shaking the earth and they're going to make mistakes.

As a kid, when I got to the edge of a cliff I wanted to jump off. I didn't want to kill myself. I wanted to fly.

I don't ever want something that I didn't do because I was afraid of it or I didn't think I'd be good at it - within reason. Obviously I'm never going to be able to play the trumpet.

Instead of failure being the outcome, failure became not trying. And it forced me at a young age to want to push myself so much further out of my comfort zone.

When asked why a man sixty-nine years old, who had spent most of his life manufacturing and selling small household appliances, should suddenly at the end of his career fling himself into the construction of a major building, Mr. Clark replied, "To make money.

Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition--not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as unhindered as a karate chop.

Pessimists never go on a voyage of discovery, equally so they never leave the shoreline in search of new horizons.

By attempting to "write bad" for twenty minutes, they'd somehow managed to produce remarkable work. From AWP - The Writer's Notebook

Write down 10 things you would do in your life if you had absolutely no fear. Then pick one of them and do it.

In my 20s, I used to have a lot more energy! I was this skydiving, bungee-jumping adrenaline junkie. I don't know what happened to me! Now that I'm in my early 30s, I've put all that energy into my work, although I'm still a little ridiculous. In your 30s, you're sensible enough to know better, but still stupid enough to do stupid things.

When we started Skype, if you look at analyst reports, no one forecasted it as a big business. Also when Google started, it was not fashionable to be in search. It's not trying to do the obvious - that's the hard part.

Some people are serial entrepreneurs and want to just move on to the next thing. They just want to clean the slate and start from scratch. I feel that sometimes, too, and the way that we do that here is we build things inside Shutterstock: we launch new products all the time.

'A Death in the Gunj' is slightly off-beat in part, not financially lucrative as one would want. But that is a conscious choice that I have made.

I've run several of my own small businesses in my life.

I felt really lucky that 'Hairstyles Of The Damned' and 'The Boy Detective Fails' were both bestsellers, and I thought that donating the money from 'Demons' was a good way to respond to that. My favorite artists are the ones that are willing to experiment, even if it means a smaller audience.

I admire artists who really take risks and aren't afraid to do smaller movies and obscure, abstract things. It would be really cool if my career neared that.