It is true that there is a fine line between entrepreneurship and insanity. Crazy people see and feel things that others don't. But you have to believe that everything is possible. If you believe it, those around you will believe it too.
Interpretation
Entrepreneurship often requires bold thinking that can seem irrational to others, but belief in possibilities can inspire those around you.
Anita Roddick suggests that entrepreneurship might be perceived as a fine line between creativity and madness, as it often involves ideas and visions that the average person may not comprehend. However, she emphasizes the importance of belief in potential, stating that if you hold a conviction that anything is achievable, you can motivate and influence others to share that vision, making the seemingly impossible a collective reality.
In practice
In a motivational speech to aspiring entrepreneurs, you could use this quote to inspire belief in their ideas.
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.
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.
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.
. . . But experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is instirring within us the will to aspire. That will, wherever it finally leads, does at least move you forward. And after a time you may recognize That the proper measure of success is not how much you've closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you've done today.
To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized
I won't say we have to win. I won't put that pressure. But we can't lose.
Unhappy failures need not apply.
How wonderful it is that we can start doing good at this very moment.
I don't want an epitaph on my gravestone that says, 'He would have pursued some big dreams in his life, but other people wouldn't let him.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.