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.
Companies over-emphasize idea generation and under-emphasize idea execution when it comes to innovation.
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.
For a long time, I've ranted against naming your startup community 'Silicon Whatever.' Instead, I believe every startup community already has a name. The Boulder startup community is called Boulder. The L.A. startup community is called L.A. The Washington D.C. startup community is called Washington D.C.
If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
Creativity is every company's first driver. It's where everything starts, where energy and forward motion originate. Without that first charge of creativity, nothing else can take place.
The way innovating companies are designed leaves ambiguities, overlaps, decision conflicts or decision vacuums in some parts of the organisation. People rail at this, curse it-and invent innovative ways to overcome it.
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