N. R. Narayana Murthy Quotes

I think the most important trait for an entrepreneur is persistence. When you try to do something new and difficult, you are more likely to fail than to succeed.

I admire the courage and self-reliance it takes to start your own business and make it succeed.

Who's more likely to succeed - someone with high skill and no ambition, or no skill and high ambition? If you're an entrepreneur, you can hire as many skilled people for your business as you want.

In the journey of an entrepreneur, the most important thing is self-belief and the ability to convert that belief into reality.

When I was coming up as an entrepreneur, I had to fight for everything I got, and there was no clear roadmap of how to be successful.

A good idea is about ten percent and implementation and hard work, and luck is 90 percent.

Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act.

I'm an optimist. You can't be an entrepreneur if you're not essentially an optimist, so I'm an optimist by nature.

I have a mother who never took no for an answer when it came to her creative pursuits. She started a hair salon in her spare bedroom and four years later had 30 employees.

Innovation is so hard and so frustrating; it takes the intersections of people with courage, vision, and resources.

I nearly failed when Virgin was in its infancy; I nearly failed in the early 1980s, and, of course, I have nearly died more than once trying to achieve a world record for boating or ballooning. But through a combination of luck and planning, both Virgin and I are still here.

Small business people are people with goals and values that can't be calculated on a profit and loss statement.

I think motivation and drive, coupled with raw talent, help make founders successful.

The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you've got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don't give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.

I just think a hustler's ambition is that I never stop. I start off hustling and said I'll never stop hustling. An ambitious hustler is the one to hustle the hustlers. When I grew up, my heroes were hustlers. Now I'm their hero.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish. I've always wished that for myself.

Fortune cannot aid those who do nothing.

If you have ideas, you have the main asset you need, and there isn't any limit to what you can do with your business and your life. Ideas are any man's greatest asset.

My formula for success is rise early, work late, and strike oil.

To be successful you have to be lucky, or a little mad, or very talented, or find yourself in a rapid growth field.

The greatest business people I've met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost.

We all have ambitions, but only the few achieve. A man thinks of a good thing and says: 'Now if I only had the money I'd put that through.' The word 'if' was a dent in his courage. With character fully established, his plan well thought out, he had only to go to those in command of capital and it would have been forthcoming.

Rockefeller once explained the secret of success. 'Get up early, work late - and strike oil.'

It's a fire, it's a passion to get out and to create and to innovate. And that I've always enjoyed and I've always been very proud of is that the people I've done business with, the people around me have always made money.

You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.