I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon's advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.
Interpretation
Entrepreneurship often stems from the need to survive and provide for loved ones, sparking creativity in the process.
Anita Roddick's quote emphasizes that the essence of entrepreneurship is not just about profit but also about creating a means of survival, especially for those we care about. She reflects on her personal journey, where the need to sustain her family pushed her to establish The Body Shop with limited resources, underscoring that many successful ventures originate from necessity rather than mere ambition.
In practice
In a speech about starting a business from scratch during challenging times.
I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses and made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.
If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.
But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.
Quite apart from anything else, my experience is trying to change things for the better makes you feel better, healthier. Humans are communicative animals: when you do good in a community, the benefits eventually get back to you.
First, you have to have fun. Second, you have to put love where your labour is. Third, you have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else.
It is a critical job of any entrepreneur to maximize creativity, and to build the kind of atmosphere around you that encourages people to have ideas. That means open structures, so that accepted thinking can be challenged.
No matter what's going on in our lives, the victory is in refusing to quit.
Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls aren't there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show us how badly we want things.
If you would attract good fortune, you must get rid of doubt. As long as that stands between you and your ambition, it will be a bar that will cut you off. You must have faith. No man can make a fortune while he is convinced that he can't.
Intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out resources in people that they didn't know they had.
Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.
I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don't even know are available to us.
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