6 Quotes by Ziad Abdelnour- Start-Up Saboteurs How Incompetence

My book is not for everyone in the venture capital and entrepreneurial world, and that’s okay. If you try to please everybody and worry about offending anybody, nothing is going to happen. You might make some money, but you certainly won’t create wealth.

To create real wealth you must abandon your limited thinking, eliminate boundaries, and stop defining the outcome. Most importantly it means not letting people motivated by jealousy, greed, and envy dictate what your limitations are. You have to take risks in life. Your actions are what count.

Today we tend to focus on the unemployment rate being low. But just creating jobs isn’t the point. Many of the jobs people have today don’t even pay a living wage. Our focus needs to be on creating wealth, not just jobs or earning a wage.

A major reason so many start-ups fail is the flawed assumption that if the product is good enough, consumers will find it, the Field of Dreams philosophy of Build it and they will come. Except a lot of times, they don’t. Founders can be overly optimistic when it comes to acquiring customers instead of better preparing for what is usually a time consuming and expensive aspect of growing a business.

If you make a mistake, don’t spend precious time and energy trying to deny it or point the finger at someone else. Be a leader and own it, then spend your time and energy fixing the problem. As I’ve already noted, start-ups often fail because founders want to be seen as the smartest person in the room, which means not being wrong. Making a mistake is going to happen. None of us is perfect. But the difference between success and failure is how you handle that mistake.

The government does not have a lot of answers, so the more we rely on the government, the more dependent we become, and the more we put our faith into the hands of others. I like the Chinese proverb that says you can give someone a fish or you can teach him how to fish. Enough of taking fish, it’s time to teach people how to fish, how to create their own wealth. This is my mantra.