one thing i have seen since becoming self-employed: there is a certain sort of serendipity which occurs for many - they follow their interests for years, become skilled at something, keep going, and then a company identities that value and is willing to pay a lot for it

I became an entrepreneur by mistake. Ever since then I've gone into business, not to make money, but because I think I can do it better than it's been done elsewhere. And, quite often, just out of personal frustration about the way it's been done by other people.

Self publishing is just entrepreneurship

I wasn't satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement.

There’s a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Being self-employed feels like freedom until you realize that if you take time off, your business crumbles. To be a true business owner, make it so that you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left.

a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Being self-employed feels like freedom until you realize that if you take time off, your business crumbles. To be a true business owner, make it so that you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left.

I spent my entire career in business, and was fortunate to experience success. Essential to my success, however, was the fact that I was engaged in the larger world around me as a curious person who wanted to learn. I did not rely only on business perspectives. In fact, it was a drive to understand and enjoy life -- and be connected to something larger than myself in my love of reading, learning, and in my case, studying and learning about Judaism -- that allows me, at 84, to see my life as fully rounded.

I figured out how to set myself apart and create my own name and really figure out what that meant.

I love entrepreneurship because it allows you to apply anything you learn.

At school, you’re told what to learn. At a job, you’re told what to work on, and you only learn until you are good enough to do the job (unless you self-educate out of genuine interest, but being honest, an abysmally low amount of people do that, because those who do realize that in order to learn they must grow, and you can’t grow in someone else’s box).

When you do your own thing, the only way to survive is to do something you’ve never done before, which requires you to learn what can’t be taught in school.

✓There are many spokes on the wheel of life. First, we're here to explore new possibilities
✓I did it to myself. It wasn't society... it wasn't a pusher, it wasn't being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.

I told myself, ‘just go out there and express yourself.’

I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.

Although I had once pinned all my hopes on putting myself through school, believing that I could thereby make something of myself, I now realized the futility of this all too clearly. No amount of struggling for an education is going to help one get ahead in this world. And what does it mean to get ahead anyway? Is there any more worthless lot than the so-called great people of this world? What is so admirable about being looked up to by others? I do not live for others. What I had to achieve was my own freedom, my own satisfaction. I had to be myself. I had been the slave of too many people, the plaything of too many men. I had never lived for myself. I had to do my own work; but what was it? I wanted so badly to find it and to set about accomplishing it.

I told her that I flat-out didn’t want to work for someone else. I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.