A Quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing. — © Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.
Nobody does just one thing. But the real difference between being an entrepreneur and everyone else in the world is the ability to monetize. I am an entrepreneur in the classic mold.
You can't get anywhere without incredible passion, because if you're an entrepreneur, there's gonna be a lot of bumps in the road. A great artist has to do their art. There's nothing that can stop them from doing it. They just have to get it out there. It's the same thing for an entrepreneur. If you don't feel that way, then you're probably not really an entrepreneur.
Being an entrepreneur means the ability to think out of the box by putting away our fear of any risk, including financial.
This is the personal side of things. When I started going through some of those transitions in my mind, just as a human being versus as an artist, I tried to... Essentially, I did this thing called Landmark Forum. It's three days of mind-expanding, existential philosophy, like Jean-Paul Sartre for everyday living. In existential philosophy they talk about "Being and Nothingness," this idea of not putting meaning onto things, and that in that way you live more purely. In other words, we form reality from these stories that we make up about our lives.
People do not look at the music business as an entrepreneur business at all times, but everything in this business is entrepreneurship. It's one thing to have the money and not have the knowledge. A lot of times people have great ideas, but don't have a plan. The whole thing about being an entrepreneur is you have to have a plan.
I don't think it ever occurred to me that I wouldn't be an entrepreneur. My dad became a real estate developer, and that work is usually project-based. You attract investors for a project with a certain life cycle, and then you move on to the next thing. It's almost like being a serial entrepreneur, so I had that as an example.
Imagine the world of mobile based on Nokia and Motorola if Apple had not been restarted by a missionary entrepreneur named Steve Jobs who cared more for his vision than being tactical and financial.
Being an entrepreneur is probably the most lonely thing you can do.
"Why is the creative entrepreneur the riskiest type to be?" I asked. "Because being creative means you are often a pioneer. It is easy to copy a successful and proven product. It is also less risky. If you learn to innovate, create, or invent your way to success, you are an entrepreneur creating new value rather than an entrepreneur who wins by copying."
Being an entrepreneur is all about risk. Being an entrepreneur is like going to Vegas every day and shoving all of your chips into the middle of the table every single day.
I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.
You have to put time into the art to do it, and you have to know that what you'll get out of it is not a financial or a fame thing. It'll just be the pleasure of being an artist. And I'm cool with that.
I'm an entrepreneur. I'm married to an entrepreneur. So I haven't just sipped the entrepreneurship cool-aid, I bleed this stuff.
Being a startup entrepreneur is not for everybody and it’s not the only desirable career choice. I also know that many people have families and cost obligations that don’t allow the kinds of financial risks associated with starting a company. And for others the hours, stresses and sacrifices in personal relationships are not worth it.
Being an entrepreneur doesn't make you a rich tycoon and being an innovator doesn't mean that you're successful. It just means that you're interesting.
The entrepreneurial struggle is the same at basically every stage in the sense that there's maybe slightly less risk but strategic issues are generally always the same. Now there's so much existential risk from another company either being able to compete or to disrupt you in the same way you're disrupting somebody else, an entrepreneur needs a real steady partner who has the ability to start working with them in the Seed or the A and be credible and value-add with strategic advice, and just be backstopped by so much capital that you can do any growth round or even a public round.
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