Noah Kagan Quotes

Become a Problem Seeker The best entrepreneurs are the most dissatisfied. They’re always thinking of how things can be better. Your frustrations — and the frustrations of others — are your business opportunities. Great ideas come from being a problem seeker. Analyze frustrations in your day, including the things that bother you at home, waste your time on your commute to work, or online. Here’s a list of things that bother me: What to make for breakfast that’s quick, healthy, and full of caffeine How to find a reliable house cleaner Where to go to dinner with my partner How to find my next therapist What kind of investment to make with some extra cash I received And these are just the problems I’ve encountered today. I could go on and on . . . and that’s the point! The number of things that can be better are endless — which is a gold mine for newbie entrepreneurs. The crucial first step toward entrepreneurship is to study your own unhappiness and to think of solutions (aka business opportunities) for you to sell.

Use the motto NOW, Not How. PRO TIP: Next time you are overthinking and not taking action, tell yourself to prioritize taking action NOW and don’t worry about the HOW. After you do this ONCE, you quickly get momentum and it becomes easier and more natural.

As my dad and I entered the tenth local shop that afternoon, I felt my muscles go tight with a full body cringe. He’d just asked to speak to the manager in an Israeli accent as thick as hummus. Sounding identical to Arnold Schwarzenegger. “I don’t get it.” His voice boomed enthusiastically after he was introduced to the store’s boss. “You live in greatest country in world, and you have greatest business in sector, but you still have a crappy copier. Why? I must help you. Here, I gave much better, let me show!” His pitch would be met with a rejection. And then another rejection. Countless rejections. Rinse and repeat. Every. Damn. Day. But then, invariably, inevitably, a hard-won success. This particular day was glorious, though. Absolutely glorious. He sold two copiers in one day! So Dad said let’s go celebrate and grab some burritos! “Why you look so sad, Noah?” he said as we sat down to eat. Although I should have been riding on the adrenaline of my dad’s glorious day, something felt wrong. Despite his ultimate success, the process of getting there felt demoralizing and pointless. I shook my head. “So many noes. No, no, no, no. All day. Doesn’t it make you want to quit?” I asked. My dad replied with something that would change my life: “Love rejections! Collect them like treasure! Set rejection goals. I shoot for a hundred rejections each week, because if you work that hard to get so many noes, my little Noah’le, in them you will find a few yeses, too.” Maybe that’s why he named me NO-ah, to remind me of this daily to keep going. Love rejections?! Set rejection goals?! My dad reframed rejection as something desirable — so you feel good when you get it. He was saying aim for rejection! It was suddenly clear to me why my dad was never afraid to ask anyone anything — and why he pushed for a hundred rejections a week: the upside of asking is unlimited and the downside is minimal. And he was right! “What’s the worst that can happen?” he’d say whenever I cringed at some

Most people never pick up the phone, most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You gotta act. And you gotta be willing to fail. — Steve Jobs

Then I remind myself of Rejection Goals: “This is going to suck. Let me aim to get at least twenty-five rejections.” That

Most people: Overthink first, act later. Every successful entrepreneur: Act first, figure it out later.

PRO TIP: Active communications — calls and texts — work a lot better than passive ones, like posting on Facebook or Twitter and waiting for replies. Try to Direct Message (DM) people, or whatever enables you to get the fastest response time possible.

Business is just a never-ending cycle of starting and trying new things, asking whether people will pay for those things, and then trying it again based on what you’ve learned. If you’re afraid to start or ask, you can’t experiment. And if you can’t experiment, you can’t do business. This isn’t about willpower or self-discipline. No one is going to nag, scold, or intimidate you into starting a business. My personal favorite way to approach starting a business is to have fun!

"Go see if your weaknesses are hindering you at your job...Fix them or move to another position. Also, constantly ask yourself, "how can I make the company more valuable?" You do that and you will never get fired."

PRO TIP: Presenting your offer as a comparison can make it easier for your customer to understand. “We are like X but Y.” For example, we are like your competitor but twice as cheap. Research shows we better understand the world when something is presented as a contrast with something else.

you have to decide your own self-worth versus letting others determine it.

The whole group was derailed by the same two fears: FEAR OF STARTING. At some point people are told entrepreneurship is a huge risk, and you believed it. You figured more preparation, more planning, and more talking to friends would help you overcome your insecurities. But that inaction only breeds more doubt and fear. In actuality, the best way to learn what we need to know — and become who we want to be — is by just getting started. Small EXPERIMENTS, repeated over time, are the recipe for transformation in business, and life. FEAR OF ASKING. Soon after starting, the fear of rejection emerges. You have some impressive skills, an amazing product, every advantage in the world, and you’ll never sell a thing if you can’t face another person and ask for what you want. Whether you want them to buy what you’re selling or help in another way, you have to be able to ask in order to get. Once you reframe rejection as something desirable, the act of asking becomes a power all its own.

The thing is, most people don’t ask for what they want. They wish for it, they make “suggestions” and drop hints, they hope. But the simple fact of business is that only by asking do you receive what you want. No ASK? No GET. That applies to every part of life. Seriously, every part.

When most people decide they want to start a business, their first intuition is to learn more — read a book, take a course, seek out advice — and then take action after having carefully considered all the facts. After all, there are a ton of top-rated MBA programs, $10 Udemy courses, free YouTube videos, and entrepreneurship how-to books — so why wouldn’t you learn all you could? That’s got to be a whole lot safer, and it probably makes you a lot less likely to fail, right? Wrong. Overthinking seems like the “smart” way to launch, but it’s far less effective. Super-successful people do the opposite — they take action first, get real feedback, and learn from that, which is a million times more valuable than any book or course. And quicker!

The secret to my father’s mastery of selling in a language he barely spoke is one word: chutzpah. It’s the Yiddish word for moxie, nerve, audacity; it’s a determined, give-no-f*cks approach to life. When Israelis say you have chutzpah, they mean you know what you want and go for it. They mean you have endless tenacity. They mean you’ll do what it takes.