Shiva Ayyadurai Quotes

I made a penny for each paper delivered every day, plus 2 cents for Sunday papers. I had 120 customers. For a 10-year-old kid in the 1940s, that was a lot of money.

You worked your paper route, mowed the lawn, then played golf all day.

My parents worked harder than anyone I have ever met. They had so many businesses. There was the motel, but throughout my childhood, they also had a drive-through dairy, a gas station, a clothing store, a computer reselling business.

My dad, grew up poor in a copper-mining town in Arizona. The eleventh of 15 children, he learned to be resourceful and entrepreneurial at a young age, shining shoes at local bars and starting his own pinata business at the tender age of twelve.

If I was as rich as Rockefeller I'd be richer than Rockefeller, because I'd do a bit of window cleaning on the side.

Since I was 9 years old, I have been working, hustling to find my own projects - from telenovelas to record deals, etc. etc. Way before I met my husband.

I'm not a businessman. I could pack it in, but I like work. I don't want to sound like Catherine Cookson, but I've worked since I was eight, with a paper round and in a fruit and veg shop.

I come from a really big family, my father was a businessman and what he always instilled in us was to be your own boss. My father built up his business, and he was by no means a rich man, but he figured out how to work four-and-a-half days a week.

I started doing a paper round when I was about 10. I started earning 10 pounds a week and then I was obsessed with earning money until I was about 15.

I'd watch my parents work and think, 'Yeah, I'm going to do that.' It wasn't even a thing. It's the only thing I know how to do.

At an early age, I started my own paper route. Once I saw how you could service people and do a good job and get paid for it, I just wanted to be the best I could be in whatever I did.

My father's whole life was work. He had a retail store in Ossining, New York, and I mean, he was down there at 6:15 every morning. The store didn't open until 9, but he hadda be down there. That's all he knew.

I spent my entire childhood with my father. I started my first business at 16, and we became business partners. He's not just a mentor and somebody that I look up to, but he's also someone whom I took work ethic and determination and all of those qualities from.

If you're going to run a small business, you need to know what everyone is doing, be the first one in and the last one out, and work weekends.

I'm 85 years old. I've been in business since I was a teenager, practically; I was in grade school, and I even had a paper route. I always had a job so I could have money to spend on girls.

I've always been a workhorse, and I've been supporting myself since I was 15.

Every business decision I ever made I learned from my grandfather Papa Sam. He moved here from Russia when he was a boy. He worked his way up selling newspapers and ladies' handbags, and eventually, he became Cadillac Sam, one of the biggest car dealers in Chicago.

I've been working since I was a child. I worked cutting lawns, delivering newspapers; I was a telephone salesperson; I was a guitar repairman.

My dad took on every job he could get. He worked like mad. But then, at some point, he had saved up enough to open his first pub.

I was always a kid trying to make a buck. I borrowed a dollar from my dad, went to the penny candy store, bought a dollar's worth of candy, set up my booth, and sold candy for five cents apiece. Ate half my inventory, made $2.50, gave my dad back his dollar.

The restaurant business had a profound effect on my future and that of my two brothers. When we were able to stand on a stool to reach the sink, we washed dishes, and later, when we could see over the counter, we waited tables and managed the cash register.

I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, 'Well if you go out and save your money.' So I went and got - I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I'd bring whatever I made.

I'm really a self-made businesswoman.

I knew how to sell. I felt confident I could run a business. I was willing to outwork anyone. I wasn't afraid to live like a student on next to nothing. So that meant I had absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I did not have a lot of spare time after I was about eleven because in my youth, young people used to try to find ways of making money after school. From about age eleven on, I either shined shoes or did something such.