📖 Dream Big and Win by Liz Elting

This book is very good. It is like a personal mentor, a valuable resource, and even a meditation book for anyone at any level of business. Especially for those who are just starting, or even thinking about starting their own business.

It is not a simple business book. Instead, Liz shares her own life, experiences, and perspectives on starting, growing, and exiting a business. She tells us what it takes to dream big and win, based on her own journey.

About the structure
The book starts with a chapter titled “Creating” and finishes with “Giving.” Each chapter has her life lesson quotes, as well as wisdom quotes of others.

I really wonder how she put all these things together in a book. How long did it take her to write this book?

I share some quotes from this book:

Some Liz’s life lessons

  • No one will value you if you don’t first value yourself.
  • If you want to go big, and I think the only way to go, then scale up as you perfect.
  • Tell your mom, not your client, that it’s your first sale.
  • The first million is by far the toughest.
  • When in doubt, list it out. Write down the pros and cons so you can see them side by side. Sometimes a visual cue can help your decision-making process.
  • Say it, set it, do it, and then do it again!
  • Attitude is just as important as aptitude, possibly even more so.
  • Choose sanity over vanity.
  • Ignoring it until it goes away is never a strategy.
  • No one can toot your own horn like you can.
  • Wait until you get to the lobby to call your mom.
  • Never forget that you are your own greatest resource. When you work harder than most, the world is there for the taking, and then the changing.
  • Hire slowly, fire quickly.

Words of Wisdom

Productivity is never an accident.
— Paul J. Meyer
Passion is the one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you are passionate about something, you’re more willing to take risks.
— Yo-Yo Ma
The harder you work, the luckier you get.
— Gary Player
You only do good work when you’re taking risks and pushing yourself.
— Sally Hawkins
You absolutely, positively have to innovate, if only to survive.
— Fred Smith
There are sins and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.
— John F. Kennedy
Without continual growth and progress, words such as improvement, achievement and success have no meaning.
— Benjamin Franklin
Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.
— Jim Rohn
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
— Henry David Thoreau
Some of us have great runways already built for us. If you have one, take off! But if you don’t have one, realize it is your responsibility to grab a shovel and build one for yourself and for those who will follow after you.
— Amelia Earhart
If you can dream it, you can do it.
— Walt Disney
Being an entrepreneur isn’t really about starting a business. It’s about a way of looking at the world: seeing opportunity where others see obstacles, taking risks when others see refuge.
— Michael Bloomberg
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
— Henry Ford
I never let my mistakes defeat or distract me, but I learn from them and move forward in a positive way.
— Lillian Vernon
Disasters will always come and go, leaving their victims either completely broken or steeled and better able to face the next crop of challenges that may occur.
— Nelson Mandela
If at first you don’t succeed, you’re running about average.
— M.H. Alderson
Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.
— Oprah Winfrey
Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.
— Sam Ewing
I think that if you love what you do, and the choice you’ve made in your life, somehow that drives you forward to enjoy it all. Even in the chaos, even in the exhaustion of it, and even when it seems out of balance.
— Angelina Jolie
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
— Ernest Hemingway
The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess.
— Eric Ries
We don’t have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.
— Warren Buffett
To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a big market. That’s the difference between Google and a barbershop. A barbershop doesn’t scale.
— Paul Graham
The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.
— Peter Drucker
Honesty is always the best policy, even when it’s not the trend.
— Stephen Covey
I get nervous when I don’t get nervous. If I’m nervous I know I’m going to have a good show.
— Beyoncé
If you have stage fright, it never goes away. But then I wonder: is the key to that magical performance because of the fear?
— Stevie Nicks
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum people together to collect wood and don’t assign them the tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionable integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures.
— Joseph Campbell
Do the jobs you like least first. It makes each successive job easier.
— Jim Henson
If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.
— DJ Quik
Change before you have to.
— Jack Welch
We learned about honesty and integrity, that the truth matters, that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules. And success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square.
— Michelle Obama
Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
— Jack Welch
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
— Thomas Edison
Realize that employees and the customers both have to be engaged, at the same time, to move your business forward for sustainable success.
— Robert G. Thompson
Start with good people, lay out the rules, communicate with your employees, motivate and reward them. If you do all these things effectively, you can’t miss.
— Lee Iacocca
It’s not the employees you don’t hire who give you ulcers. It’s the ones you do.
— Jack Daly
People don’t get promoted for doing their jobs really well. They get promoted for their potential to do more.
— Tara Jaye Frank
In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. If they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.
— Warren Buffett
A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
— Eric Ries
Pivoting is not the end of the disruption process, but the beginning of the next leg of your journey.
— Jay Samit
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
— Seneca (also Semisonic)
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
— Pablo Picasso

Thanks for reading 😊

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