Treat failure as a lesson on how not to approach achieving a goal, and then use that learning to improve your chances of success when you try again. Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.
Richard BransonRead
At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?
Interpretation
Entrepreneurs and inventors can solve complex problems, including climate change.
In this quote, Richard Branson emphasizes the significant role of entrepreneurs and inventors in addressing challenging issues, such as climate change. He suggests that just as they have found solutions to various problems in the past, they have the potential to innovate and tackle the pressing environmental crisis we face today.
In practice
During a conference on sustainability, one might use this quote to inspire innovation in combating climate change.
Treat failure as a lesson on how not to approach achieving a goal, and then use that learning to improve your chances of success when you try again. Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.
It's a common misconception that money is every entrepreneur's metric for success. It's not, and nor should it be.
Some 80% of your life is spent working. You want to have fun at home; why shouldn't you have fun at work?
Values cannot be speedily forgotten if it is inconvenient or commercially expedient. Values have to have meaning and longevity; otherwise they are valueless. You cannot embrace innovation up to a point or only sometimes. Branding demands commitment; commitment to continual re-invention; striking cords with people to stir their emotions; and commitment to imagination. It is easy to be cynical about such things, much harder to be successful.
Please don’t get hung up on this question of whether you need to have experience in an industry before you launch your startup.
What's the most critical factor in any business decision you'll ever have to make? Basically, it boils down to this question: If this all crashes, will it bring the whole house tumbling down like a pack of cards? One business matra remains embedded in my brain - protect the downside.
As in nature, all is ebb and tide, all is wave motion, so it seems that in all branches of industry, alternating currents - electric wave motion - will have the sway.
As a member of both the energy and environment committees, I am constantly astounded by how many of my colleagues prefer to focus on what the government can do for the nuclear or coal industries rather than why the government should support clean and sustainable energy.
My ambition was to bring to bear on medicine a chemical approach. I did that by chemical manipulation of viruses and chemical ways of thinking in biomedical research.
It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.
I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.
I suggest that going to Mars means permanence on the planet - a mission by which we are building up a confidence level to become a two-planet species.
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