Miscellaneous advice and lessons from my early startup years

This post is a compilation of advice and lessons I got during my super early years of entrepreneurship back in 2017.

1. Don’t stop until your offering becomes the synonym of the product or service.
2. Don’t wait for inspiration. Become it.
3. Be Yourself is perhaps the worst advice ever given. More prescriptive societal silliness. THE TRUTH: If you live as yourself, you will live a limited life with endless insecurities, self-consciousness, and imposter syndromes. Always be a better version of yourself.
4. Take care of your health. You can’t create a billion-dollar business by sitting on the hospital bed.
5. It’s not the load that breaks you down. It’s the way you carry it.
6. The ones who say “you can’t” and “you won’t” are probably the ones scared that “you will.”
7. One bad chapter doesn’t mean your story is over.
8. Winning takes care of everything… almost everything.
9. Success is not about how fast you run or how high you climb but how well you bounce.
10. Your biggest risk will be the one you don’t take.
11. Your network creates your net worth.
12. The greatest challenge you have to overcome is the person you used to be.
13. Critics have 99 reasons why your plan won’t work but not one Bentley in the garage.
14. You can. End of the story.
15. Don’t let your bark be bigger than your bite.
16. “If at first the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.” – Einstein
17. Work until your idols become your rivals.
18. People don’t want a guarantee of success, but a guarantee of adventure.
19. Whenever you feel like giving up, think of all the people that would love to see you fail.
20. Tell me I can’t, and then watch me work twice as hard to prove you wrong.
21. I don’t care who is the biggest fish in the pond, I’m a whole different animal.
22. You have to fight some of the bad days to earn some of the best days of your life.
23. “Somebody somewhere already had your idea. Don’t waste too much time thinking you’re a genius.”
24. Never start with a blank page. Find all the things closest to what you want to be possible and use those ideas as starting points to find the next generation of possible.
25. The most confused and complex mind is the most innovative mind.
26. Impossible just means that it hasn’t been done yet.
27. You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.
28. Anything in life worth doing is worth overdoing.
29. Anger is a punishment we give ourselves for someone else’s mistakes.
30. Luck is planning you don’t see.