Richard Branson Quotes

In business, experience is the big teacher.

You're not going to become a great manager overnight. You're not going to become a great public speaker or figure out how to raise money. These are the things you want to start the clock on as early as possible.

The day I left baseball, I became smart. When I was in baseball, I played for the love of the game. I'd sign any contract they gave me. But then I stopped playing and began doing interviews with the players at the ball park. I began to see the light.

I take away something from every role. I'm still learning and that's what life is about.

Not everyone is born to run a $4 billion company. There is no magic formula. I've learned, and I've grown by learning. That's why I've enjoyed being in business so much: It's stretched me.

I am personally interested in more than just business schools. However, life has been good to me, and it's been good to me through a business career. I think the chance to help strengthen the foundation of young people going into business, as I did, just appeals to me.

Just because you are CEO, don't think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization. I've never forgotten that.

Every job in a company is important. Unless you experience a wide range of those jobs, I don't think you are as well prepared to start and run a company as you could be.

I have to think my success in the VC business was due in no small part to seeing Larry Ellison in action back in the day.

I spent 26 years watching my dad, and I didn't know anything about the business until I started myself.

I often see people who I think could be really successful in business but they just don't realise they have the skills and they don't believe in themselves.

But you grow more knowledgeable during the time you play in the Premier League. Every new manager, new chapter, has been a learning curve.

Everything that I talk about, pretty much, are things that I learned or understood over the years.

Those lessons that I got along the way are the ones that have shaped my life for the last 20 years.

The years I would have spent at University, I spent building Student Magazine and Virgin Records. For me that was far more fun and satisfying. I have treated everyday as the University education I never had and think I learnt more about business and life than I would have at University in the process.

Experience is a valuable thing. It enables us to recognize mistakes when we repeat them.

The beauty of every experience you have is that hopefully you'll learn something from it.

Leadership development is a lifetime journey, not a quick trip.

Sometimes the harshest lessons were the most valuable.

If you can run one business well, you can run any business well.

I didn't know that my sister was really my mother until I was thirty-seven years old. But life has taught me that there have been a lot of things that I didn't know.

Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained

I believe that you go through your past and you learn what you learn for whatever reason. I'm just glad I'm not making fifteen-year-old mistakes at twenty-six - I got that out of the way.

One cannot live through a long stretch of years without forming some philosophy of life.