Entrepreneurship Quotes: Donald Trump
Well, today we are going to start with this new section called "Entrepreneurship" where we will post 10 quotes of a wide range of leaders from different fields, we will review them and explain them to you so that they can serve as an inspirational source for many people. We will be talking about famous entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Henry Ford, Brian Tracy, Robert Kiyosaki...
We recommend reading these quotes and their explanations very carefully and thinking about them for a while. The quotes are extracted from different sources: books, tv, videos, speeches... If you find some of these quotes to be untrue or you think they have been said by other people, please let us know in the comments.
Ok, so now let's jump into the character of today: Donald Trump.
Donald Trump (1946) is nowadays very well known for becoming the 45th president of the United States of America, after winning the 2016 presidential elections. But before entering politics, he was a known businessman in real estate, besides having been the host of the tv reality show "The Apprentice", where a group of entrepreneurs competed against each other through different business challenges and tests. Founder of Trump Organization and Trump Entertainment Resort, he has written several books about entrepreneurship, such as "How to Get Rich", "Trump: The Art of the Deal" or "Think like a Billionaire".
10 Entrepreneurship Quotes of Donald Trump
1. Work at what you do best.
Focus on your strengths. Do not waste even one minute on your weaknesses. If you spend a lot of time working on your weak points, you won't have time to reinforce and amplify your main virtues. Successful people are people who have identified which are the areas where they stand out and after that, they direct all their forces towards those specific areas. The rest of the people avoid doing this by delegating or hiring someone else to do it. Successful people know how to say "No" to a lot of things, to focus on what really matters to them, on what they do best, being their own motto: "Be as good on what you do so that the others wouldn't be able to ignore you".
2. Give yourself the opportunity to be the person you would like to be
The worst thing in life is to regret; thinking about life as something that happens to us rather than something that we make happen. Despite what many people think, in life superheroes don't exist, they are only fictional characters. The people who reach goals have very clear what they want, work hard to get it, gain adequate knowledge and develop the required abilities, they don't lose the focus and they know how to wait patiently for the harvest without giving up when things turn bad. All of these things are in everyone's reach. Therefore, you can also be the person you would like to be if you follow the same patterns. Like Donald Trump says: "Think big. You will have to think anyway. Why not to think big?".
3. Good employees result in good management; good management results in good employees.
The personal relationships are always like a two-way road. Talent attracts talent, in both ways. The employees with talent want to work with the best executives, and the executives with talent want to work with the best employees. Talent feeds itself back. Therefore, creating high-performing work environments is the best guarantee to build a good employer branding to appeal and retain those people who could be the most ideal for an organization.
4. If you are not frank and direct, you are saying openly that you are an insecure person. Do not be elusive.
The great leaders are characterized because they do not deny the reality and they confront it as it is, especially in their social environments. They say what they have to say to whom must listen, no matter if they like it or not. The great leaders don't elude the difficult conversations and confront the conflicts as soon as possible, without any delays, face to face. An unattended conflict is the worst of the conflicts. However, being frank and direct doesn't mean overreacting or treating people without any respect. That can never be justified. Education and respect are not negotiable and they don't know about hierarchies or organization charts.
5. If you want to save money, hire the best. That doesn't mean to hire the ones who have a better curriculum, but those who have the best attitude. Look for the talent, not for the titles. Amazing academic records do not always mean good performance.
Knowledge must be practical, on the opposite, pure theoretical knowledge is just an intellectual ornamentation. Life is on the streets, not in the classrooms, and although technical knowledge is very important (especially in some works), the capacity to solve problems, communication skills, sales ability, emotional intelligence, as well as having a strong willingness to learn, grow and improve, are even more vital. A large part of success is there. With a good attitude, any deficiency is easier to be improved.
6. The person who believes he or she knows everything is losing opportunities.
The proudness and self-sufficiency always drive people to inefficiency. "I know" is the principle of knowing nothing. Instead of enlarging and broadening their horizons, they narrow them. That attitude only makes someone isolated giving place to an underutilization of complementarities and synergies which both enrich teamwork. Growing, learning and improving require always a specific attitude of humbleness to be open to ask and listen, to draw upon other opinions and different points of view, that is, to encourage and to create diversity.
7. Keep yourself focused on your business and on everything you do. It doesn't matter how good you are, it doesn't matter how good you think you know your business, you have to be constantly alert.
The self-complacency is always the beginning of the end. Accommodating always drives people to failure. When an organization lulls into complacency is not difficult to predict its future. It's not enough to have a competitive advantage, everyday one must see the way to improve it. You have to be very restless in that sense. You never have to stop thinking about how to improve the quality of the products you sell or the activities you do, because the competition is always approaching on your heels. It's one of the features that distinguish the winners from the losers: continuous improvement.
8. The winners look at the problems as an opportunity to challenge themselves. Problems are never true impediments. If you have no problems, then you have no business to run.
The worst thing in this life is to have no problems because it is a signal that you haven't abandoned your comfort zone, a signal that your life is a routine. If you have any problems, this means you are alive, there is activity going on. Running companies is, especially, about managing problems. Every interesting adventure implies overcoming inconveniences and contradictions of different kinds. It's not about avoiding it, but about discovering the way to dodge them or minimizing them. Every time an obstacle appears is a great opportunity to grow. If you avoid confronting them and you look at somewhere else, you will end up getting stuck.
9. You are the one that must define the standards. Do not wait for your employees to work harder than you.
In the end, organizations are always a reflection of their leading heads. The rhythm and the way of acting of the working teams are a reflection of the rhythm and the way of acting of their bosses. In this, coherence plays a very important role. Nothing is more discouraging to the teams than predicting one thing and doing the opposite: talking about austerity and then going to luxurious hotels, or giving speeches about quality and then accepting botches; or encouraging the improvement of the customer service, but then not willing to invest in formation. We are what we do, and the company directors are always being overseen by their teams to know what references to follow. Only exists one leadership, the modeling leadership: "to walk the talk".
10. Experience has taught me a few things. One is to listen to my own instincts, no matter how things look on paper.
Paper resists everything because the outputs obtained in every business plan always depend on the inputs introduced in the same. Therefore, one must be able to see beyond data and numbers. In doing this, intuition plays a very important role. The intuition is a shortcut to the wisdom obtained from previous hard work. Wised intuitions on unknown topics hardly exist. The intuition improves with the experience. The intuition is basically the quick link between all of that learned information, stored in the unconsciousness to which we never pay any attention, but it's useful in the same way. Whoever is able to access that interior voice, listen to it and give it a meaning, has already won a lot.
We recommend reading these quotes and their explanations very carefully and thinking about them for a while. The quotes are extracted from different sources: books, tv, videos, speeches... If you find some of these quotes to be untrue or you think they have been said by other people, please let us know in the comments.
Ok, so now let's jump into the character of today: Donald Trump.
Donald Trump (1946) is nowadays very well known for becoming the 45th president of the United States of America, after winning the 2016 presidential elections. But before entering politics, he was a known businessman in real estate, besides having been the host of the tv reality show "The Apprentice", where a group of entrepreneurs competed against each other through different business challenges and tests. Founder of Trump Organization and Trump Entertainment Resort, he has written several books about entrepreneurship, such as "How to Get Rich", "Trump: The Art of the Deal" or "Think like a Billionaire".
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| Donald J. Trump in the 1980's |
10 Entrepreneurship Quotes of Donald Trump
1. Work at what you do best.
Focus on your strengths. Do not waste even one minute on your weaknesses. If you spend a lot of time working on your weak points, you won't have time to reinforce and amplify your main virtues. Successful people are people who have identified which are the areas where they stand out and after that, they direct all their forces towards those specific areas. The rest of the people avoid doing this by delegating or hiring someone else to do it. Successful people know how to say "No" to a lot of things, to focus on what really matters to them, on what they do best, being their own motto: "Be as good on what you do so that the others wouldn't be able to ignore you".
2. Give yourself the opportunity to be the person you would like to be
The worst thing in life is to regret; thinking about life as something that happens to us rather than something that we make happen. Despite what many people think, in life superheroes don't exist, they are only fictional characters. The people who reach goals have very clear what they want, work hard to get it, gain adequate knowledge and develop the required abilities, they don't lose the focus and they know how to wait patiently for the harvest without giving up when things turn bad. All of these things are in everyone's reach. Therefore, you can also be the person you would like to be if you follow the same patterns. Like Donald Trump says: "Think big. You will have to think anyway. Why not to think big?".
3. Good employees result in good management; good management results in good employees.
The personal relationships are always like a two-way road. Talent attracts talent, in both ways. The employees with talent want to work with the best executives, and the executives with talent want to work with the best employees. Talent feeds itself back. Therefore, creating high-performing work environments is the best guarantee to build a good employer branding to appeal and retain those people who could be the most ideal for an organization.
4. If you are not frank and direct, you are saying openly that you are an insecure person. Do not be elusive.
The great leaders are characterized because they do not deny the reality and they confront it as it is, especially in their social environments. They say what they have to say to whom must listen, no matter if they like it or not. The great leaders don't elude the difficult conversations and confront the conflicts as soon as possible, without any delays, face to face. An unattended conflict is the worst of the conflicts. However, being frank and direct doesn't mean overreacting or treating people without any respect. That can never be justified. Education and respect are not negotiable and they don't know about hierarchies or organization charts.
5. If you want to save money, hire the best. That doesn't mean to hire the ones who have a better curriculum, but those who have the best attitude. Look for the talent, not for the titles. Amazing academic records do not always mean good performance.
Knowledge must be practical, on the opposite, pure theoretical knowledge is just an intellectual ornamentation. Life is on the streets, not in the classrooms, and although technical knowledge is very important (especially in some works), the capacity to solve problems, communication skills, sales ability, emotional intelligence, as well as having a strong willingness to learn, grow and improve, are even more vital. A large part of success is there. With a good attitude, any deficiency is easier to be improved.
6. The person who believes he or she knows everything is losing opportunities.
The proudness and self-sufficiency always drive people to inefficiency. "I know" is the principle of knowing nothing. Instead of enlarging and broadening their horizons, they narrow them. That attitude only makes someone isolated giving place to an underutilization of complementarities and synergies which both enrich teamwork. Growing, learning and improving require always a specific attitude of humbleness to be open to ask and listen, to draw upon other opinions and different points of view, that is, to encourage and to create diversity.
7. Keep yourself focused on your business and on everything you do. It doesn't matter how good you are, it doesn't matter how good you think you know your business, you have to be constantly alert.
The self-complacency is always the beginning of the end. Accommodating always drives people to failure. When an organization lulls into complacency is not difficult to predict its future. It's not enough to have a competitive advantage, everyday one must see the way to improve it. You have to be very restless in that sense. You never have to stop thinking about how to improve the quality of the products you sell or the activities you do, because the competition is always approaching on your heels. It's one of the features that distinguish the winners from the losers: continuous improvement.
8. The winners look at the problems as an opportunity to challenge themselves. Problems are never true impediments. If you have no problems, then you have no business to run.
The worst thing in this life is to have no problems because it is a signal that you haven't abandoned your comfort zone, a signal that your life is a routine. If you have any problems, this means you are alive, there is activity going on. Running companies is, especially, about managing problems. Every interesting adventure implies overcoming inconveniences and contradictions of different kinds. It's not about avoiding it, but about discovering the way to dodge them or minimizing them. Every time an obstacle appears is a great opportunity to grow. If you avoid confronting them and you look at somewhere else, you will end up getting stuck.
9. You are the one that must define the standards. Do not wait for your employees to work harder than you.
In the end, organizations are always a reflection of their leading heads. The rhythm and the way of acting of the working teams are a reflection of the rhythm and the way of acting of their bosses. In this, coherence plays a very important role. Nothing is more discouraging to the teams than predicting one thing and doing the opposite: talking about austerity and then going to luxurious hotels, or giving speeches about quality and then accepting botches; or encouraging the improvement of the customer service, but then not willing to invest in formation. We are what we do, and the company directors are always being overseen by their teams to know what references to follow. Only exists one leadership, the modeling leadership: "to walk the talk".
10. Experience has taught me a few things. One is to listen to my own instincts, no matter how things look on paper.
Paper resists everything because the outputs obtained in every business plan always depend on the inputs introduced in the same. Therefore, one must be able to see beyond data and numbers. In doing this, intuition plays a very important role. The intuition is a shortcut to the wisdom obtained from previous hard work. Wised intuitions on unknown topics hardly exist. The intuition improves with the experience. The intuition is basically the quick link between all of that learned information, stored in the unconsciousness to which we never pay any attention, but it's useful in the same way. Whoever is able to access that interior voice, listen to it and give it a meaning, has already won a lot.