the intersection of personal passion and problem solving is where good ideas are born and lasting businesses are built. (Location 272)
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‘Well, you have to know that you’re passionate about what you do. If you’re not passionate about it, you will quit before you make any money.’ (Location 278)
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This is where so many aspiring entrepreneurs get tripped up when thinking about startup ideas. They forget about igniting this kind of passion in their customers and instead use only their own passion as the North Star for their search. Passion is important—you will never hear me say otherwise—but the trouble with passion by itself is that it can lead you down rabbit holes that only you care about, or to problems that only you have. (Location 292)
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customers don’t pay for passion. They pay for things they can use. (Location 306)
“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas,” Graham wrote. “It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself . . . It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.” (Location 310)
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There is a name for a person who creates something purely out of passion: hobbyist. There is a name for a person who creates something out of passion that solves a problem only they have: tinkerer. There is a name for a person who creates something out of passion that also solves a problem they share with lots of other people: entrepreneur. (Location 322)
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“you don’t need that much to live on if you’re really enjoying what you’re doing.” (Location 396)
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nothing is permanent and that you can always go back once a different path has run its course. (Location 397)
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“It is the difference in life between things that are scary and things that are dangerous. There are plenty of things that are scary but aren’t dangerous. And there are things that are dangerous but not scary. (Location 404)
“In my situation,” he said, it was “staying at BCG that was dangerous but not scary. The danger was continuing to do something that didn’t make me happy and getting to sixty-five years old and looking back and going, ‘Oh my God, I wasted my life.’” Failing is scary. Wasting your life is dangerous. (Location 415)
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while you can never fully know what you’re getting yourself into when it comes to building a business, you should at least know whether you can get yourself out of it if everything goes south. (Location 460)
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“Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.” (Location 496)
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