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.
I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.
If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
Innovation is not born from the dream, innovation is born from the struggle
To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.
Most innovative things are not obvious to other people at the time. You have to believe in yourself. If you've got a good idea, follow it even though others tell you it's not.
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