When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.
Interpretation
Innovation often leads to criticism and doubt from others.
Larry Ellison's quote emphasizes that creativity and innovation can be met with skepticism and criticism from society. When someone ventures into new ideas, they may encounter resistance and negativity from others who may not understand or appreciate their vision, but this is a part of the innovation process.
In practice
In a talk about entrepreneurial spirit, this quote can highlight the challenges faced by innovators.
All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can't worry about it, you can't panic when you look at the stock market's decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.
If you do everything that everyone else does in business, you're going to lose. The only way to really be ahead, is to 'be different'.
All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better
The things that caused problems for me in school are the same things that help me succeed in the world.
Both my mother and I were determined that we weren't going to stay on welfare. We always worked toward doing better, toward having a better life. We never had any doubts that we would.
Everyone thought the acquisition strategy was extremely risky because no one had ever done it successfully. In other words, it was innovative.
If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness.
Competition is one of the most important drivers of innovation because you have to stay in the race. You have to think of something new, and if you don't, well, of course you should leave the market.
Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
If every effect of any new products or methods were required to be known before they could be produced and marketed, they would not be true innovations - and thus not represent new knowledge of what people would like, if offered.
In Israel, a land lacking in natural resources, we learned to appreciate our greatest national advantage: our minds. Through creativity and innovation, we transformed barren deserts into flourishing fields and pioneered new frontiers in science and technology.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
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