The life of entrepreneur is never easy, It can be a long hard struggle that takes years to break even, let alone turn a profit. Entrepreneurs need to have passion, stubbornness, determination, persistency and tenacity as well as a great idea to achieve success.
Take British inventor and entrepreneurs Sir James Dyson it took thousands of attempts and 10 years before he successfully launched his breakthrough cyclone vacuum cleaner.
Here 27 thoughts, ideas and quotes from the Billionaire inventor to encourage you to keep going through the tough times, when it feels like giving up is the right thing to do.
"I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That's how I came up with a solution. So I don't mind failure."
"An inventor's path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches."
"Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I enjoy that."
"There's nothing wrong with things taking time."
"Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something."
"In business you will be wrong, by and large, 50 percent of the time. The trick is to recognize when you have gone wrong and correct the damage--not to worry, at the moment of making the decision, whether it is the right one."
"Everyone gets knocked back, no one rises smoothly to the top without hindrance. The ones who succeed are those who say, right, let's give it another go."
"It is said that to be an overnight success takes years of effort. So it has proved with me."
"As an engineer, I'm constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them."
"The key to success is failure... Success is made of 99 percent failure."
"When you can't compete on cost, compete on quality."
"Everyone has ideas. They may be too busy or lack the confidence or technical ability to carry them out. But I want to carry them out. It is a matter of getting up and doing it."
"You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant."
"I learned that the moment you want to slow down is the moment you should accelerate."
"When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had."
"We're taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven't, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that's very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It's exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a bit like a drug. You're on it, and you can't get off."
"Anyone can become an expert at anything in six months, whether it is hydrodynamics for boats or cyclonic systems for vacuum cleaners."
"Risk aversion is a hapless approach for a company that's hoping to develop new technology. It's tempting in a downturn. But long-term research and development, expensive and often filled with failure as it is, is the only route to discovering it. By taking the cautious path, companies risk a drought of ideas."
"If you want to do something different, you're going to come up against a lot of naysayers."
"Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success."
"You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer."
"If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way."
"If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment."
"What I often do is just think of a completely obtuse thing to do, almost the wrong thing to do. That often works because you start a different approach, something no one has tried."
"Stumbling upon the next great invention in an 'ah-ha!' moment is a myth."
"Anger is a good motivator."
"Don't listen to experts."