A Quote by Paul Hawken

Seeing the world around you clearly is a critical step in developing an idea for a business, carrying out that idea, and then thriving with an ongoing concern. Through choice, predilection, lack of education, impatience, or other causes, the entrepreneur lives, in a way, outside the mainstream.
Basically I'm in the idea business -- whether it's a musical idea or a spoken idea ... If you wind up with a political system that wants to put idea men out of business, then you have worry on your hands.
What is the most powerful force in the world? And I think you would agree that is a big idea if it is in the hands of an entrepreneur who is actually going to make the idea not only happen, but spread all across society. And we understand that in business but we have need for entrepreneurship just as much in education, human rights, health, and the environment as we do in hotels and steel.
A mistake I've made is investing in my idea rather than the entrepreneur's. Sometimes I'm excited about an idea that is similar to the entrepreneur's idea - but not the same. A smart entrepreneur will convince me it is the same, until I write a check!
The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives.
You can be entrepreneurial even if you don’t want to be in business. You can be a social entrepreneur focused on the not-for-profit sector. You can be an agriculture entrepreneur if you want to change how people think about farming. You can be a policy entrepreneur if you want to go into government. The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.
Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even get the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth... we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.
The Oneida Perfectionists, along with some of the others, believed that feminism, and abolitionism, and other causes that they pursued in their own way without participating with other people outside of their communities, were all piecemeal reforms. That's what makes a utopian a utopian, this idea that they were going to create a whole new world from scratch.
The way to get to the top of the heap in terms of developing original research is to be a fool, because only fools keep trying. You have idea number 1, you get excited, and it flops. Then you have idea number 2, you get excited, and it flops. Then you have idea number 99, you get excited, and it flops. Only a fool would be excited by the 100th idea, but it might take 100 ideas before one really pays off. Unless you're foolish enough to be continually excited, you won't have the motivation, you won't have the energy to carry it through. God rewards fools.
It will take time for the idea of decentralized trust through computation to become a part of mainstream consciousness, and until then, the idea creates cognitive dissonance for those accustomed to centralized trust systems.
Giving education away for free is a really good idea, but it can't be the future of education. There has to be a business model around it that actually works.
A lot of people will tell you the first step to starting something new is to have an idea. But to me the first step starts long before that. The first step to acting like an entrepreneur is to look not at the writing on the wall but at the spaces between the writing. It's in the gap between what's being said and what's not being said that entrepreneurs thrive. The way to get going is to find the courage to take your dream out of your head and put it to the test in the real world. Don't just think it; act on it.
Maybe it's good to be traumatized in your youth, to make you think differently and step outside the box. Anybody can be comfortable, but if you get your world rocked, shaken as it were, then maybe it causes you to really go to a whole other level in a different way.
The danger facing us comes not from lack of resources, but from people who insist that we have run out of resources. If you embrace their idea of a world where there is only so much to go around, then you are endorsing a program of genocide and a war of all against all.
A good idea is not enough. It must be the fit of a particular idea for a particular entrepreneur and, ideally, unfair advantages in why said particular entrepreneur is going to address said particular idea.
I think the very idea of character, of developing not just grit, but empathy and curiosity, emotional intelligence - you know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop - the idea that we're going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.
You must find a way to express your ideas and compel your audience to react through the idea itself, and then figuring out what the best representative of that idea may be, and bringing it to life.
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