Nolan Bushnell Quotes

You know, being an entrepreneur is super hard work, and if you're not passionate about what you're doing, you're probably not going to succeed.

I don't really care about gossip. I care about building great businesses.

I should have been smart enough to stay happy. But my ambition ruled my life.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Well, you know, I was a human being before I became a businessman.

My greatest regret is selling my company.

The saddest thing in life is wasted talent and the choices you make will shape your life forever.

In our business, things look like a failure until they're not. It's pretty binary transitions.

Business is more exciting than any game.

A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.

The greatest failure in life is being successful in the wrong assignment.

I've met a lot of people and happened to inspire a lot of people who I'm in conversation with about business. It's just how things are going for me and it's great, but music is always going to be number one for me.

Success had gone to my head and I made stupid decisions.

LEARN FROM FAILURE. If you are an entrepreneur and your first venture wasn't a success, welcome to the club.

In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

We do choose how we shall live

I quickly learned that if I kept at it and plowed right through the rejections I would eventually get somebody to buy my wares.

Everybody wants to make something they think is a surefire winner, though nobody knows what a surefire winner is, in my opinion.

Without the right attitude, a business with everything going for it will fail.

There are three creativities: creativity in technology, in product planning, and in marketing. To have any one of these without the others is self defeating in business.

Some people spend their lives failing and never notice.

Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

I think people kind of come up and go, "Why hasn't that person busted out?" Almost always at the end of career, what you find out is that either consciously or subconsciously success hasn't happened because that person hasn't chosen for it to happen. Either through walking away because it wasn't the life they wanted or through self-sabotaging because they weren't ready.

Getting knocked down in life is a given. Getting up and moving forward is a choice.

Business is a sport and I want to win. I want to kick your ass. I may not win every game. But I certainly am going to try.