Sergio F. Rodriguez Weblog

I recently read a quote that inspired me and thought, “Why not share it with others?” Here’s a list of quotes from entrepreneurs and other quotes that are relevant to entrepreneurship. Skip and I also included our own at the bottom of the post. I hope one of these quotes inspires you as well.

1. I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work - Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist
2. The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary - Vidal Sassoon, entrepreneur
3. Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t - Anonymous
4. A good idea is ten percent implementation and hard work, and luck is 90 percent -€“ Guy Kawasaki, entrepreneur, investor, author
5. Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph; a beginning, a struggle and a victory - Mahatma Gandhi, political and spiritual leader
6. Failure defeats losers, failure inspires winners - Robert T. Kiyosaki, author, entrepreneur, investor
7. Entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before final success. What sets the successful ones apart is their amazing persistence - Lisa M. Amos
8. Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life - John F. Kennedy, U.S. President
9. In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable - Dwight E. Eisenhower, U.S. President
10. The greatest reward in becoming a millionaire is not the amount of money that you earn. It is the kind of person that you have to become to become a millionaire in the first place - Jim Rohn
11. Some people dream of great accomplishments, while others stay awake and do them - Anonymous
12. Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make - Donald Trump, real estate and entertainment mogul
13. The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. The entrepreneur in us is more concerned with discriminating between opportunities than he or she is with failing to see the opportunities -€“ Michael Gerber, author, entrepreneur
14. An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it - Roy Ash, co-founder of Litton Industries
15. The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer - Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s
16. I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful - Warren Buffet, investor and billionaire
17. I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent - Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist
18. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover - Mark Twain, author
19. There is a tide in the affairs of men
    Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
    Omitted, all the voyage of their life
    Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
    On such a full sea are now afloat;
    And we must take the current when it serves,
    Or lose the ventures before us - William Shakespeare, author
20. Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration - Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist
    

Here are our quotes:

Being an entrepreneur is a lot like playing poker -€“ you can fold, limp in, or go for it - Yasmine Mustafa

If you kick it around enough, it starts to look like a ball - Skip Shuda

What’s your favorite quote?

What fabled 1980s rock trio’s reunion is a cross-generational, cross-national pop phenomenon, filling stadiums with fans who range from 40-somethings nostalgic for the music of their wild youth to teenagers hungry to hear ultra-cool legends performing live for the first time?

No, it’s not The Police.

It’s Soda Stereo, the legendary Argentine group that largely launched rock en español in the 1980s, and whose tour 10 years after an acrimonious split is lighting up Latin America in a way that surpasses the popularity of their heyday. The band plays Miami’s AmericanAirlines Arena Tuesday and Wednesday.

Guitarist, lead vocalist and songwriter Gustavo Cerati, bassist Zeta Bosio and drummer Charly Alberti kicked off the tour in October with five sold-out shows at Buenos Aires’ 70,000-seat River Plate Stadium (they return for a record-breaking sixth appearance later this month) and have played for more huge crowds in Mexico (180,000 at four shows), Chile (130,000 at two shows), Colombia (52,000 at one concert) and Ecuador (41,000).

Their Miami concerts are drawing fans from the Caribbean, South America, Central Florida, New York and Canada, startling arena officials who’d never before heard of the band. By the tour’s end just before Christmas, Soda Stereo will have played to more than a million people in nine countries.

The reaction has astonished even Cerati, Bosio and Alberti, who, speaking in Spanish, gave their only group interview to The Miami Herald just before a Panama concert a few days ago.

”We’re breaking records in all these countries,” Alberti says. “It’s really a crazy thing.”

”I don’t know what it is. Something magical,” Cerati says. He attributes the excitement to a longing for the optimistic, rebellious era when rock en español was born, when music and scenes weren’t framed by marketing campaigns. “Maybe it’s that music has become so manufactured and so huge and so planned, and maybe the mystique of those years when things weren’t so marketineadas gives it a special spirit.”

In fact, Bosio says, marketing isn’t even a factor. “This is the power between an artist and his people, and this naturally transfers from one generation to another.”

Formed in Buenos Aires in 1982, Soda Stereo issued its eponymous first album in 1984, and the group’s catchy pop-rock captured Argentina’s optimism as it emerged from a brutal military dictatorship. Initially slick, light new wave, the group’s music darkened over the years, becoming more complex and powerful.

CROSSED BORDERS

Drawing from the country’s strong rock scene, the first on the continent that didn’t simply mimic English-language music, and a sort of national self-assurance (its first hit was Why Can’t I Be in the Jet Set?), Soda Stereo rapidly became the first Latin American rock band to cross national borders.

In the 1980s, other groups in Latin America’s fledgling rock scene were known only within their own countries. Soda Stereo’s music went beyond nationalism to embody the wildness, intensity and romance of rock ‘n’ roll, with the same quality and attitude of the U.S. and English bands admired by a new generation of Latin American kids longing to be part of an international scene. With Soda, they had a band singing in their language that was as cool as any in the world.

”They have a charisma that nobody has had before or after,” says Alvaro Pzevoznik, 35, who lives in Miami but flew home to Argentina with a group of friends to see the band he had fallen in love with at 13. “It was huge for me, being again in the same place 10 years after, with the same group of friends, in front of the same three guys. It was like `wow’.”

Before the split in 1997, Soda Stereo made seven studio albums and sold more than seven million records. The group inspired a generation of rockeros, and its success paved the way for Latin rock across the continent.

NO COPY

”They were not a copy of something in the States or Europe,” says Juan Rozas, the Argentina-born singer and leader of the Miami rock band Tereso. “They were always very fresh, very original, very good.”

”It was almost like the British invasion in the U.S. They were coming from the South, and nothing would stop them,” says Kike Posada, a pillar of Miami’s Latin rock scene who was in college in Bogota in the mid-’80s when he fell in love with Soda Stereo, the first Latin band he equated with such groups as The Cure and U2.

”I said this is it; there’s nothing better,” Posada remembers. “These were the ones everyone was imitating and emulating.”

PASSION PERSISTS

Twenty years later, the passion Soda aroused across Latin America is evident in the crowds they’ve drawn outside their homeland.

”I think people identify with the music beyond its being something that belongs to a particular country,” Cerati says. “It seems like they feel it’s theirs.”

Posada launched Boom!, his Latin rock magazine, to celebrate Soda’s 1996 show, the group’s last in Miami, at the 4,700-seat James L. Knight Center. It’s a measure of the excitement over the reunion, and the growth of the genre Soda helped inspire, that they’re now playing two nights at an arena more than twice the size.

”They’re selling more tickets now than when they were at the top of their game,” says veteran rock-concert producer Phil Rodriguez who, as head of Water Brother Productions, is producing the Miami show.

Still, by the time the band split up ”we couldn’t stand each other,” Alberti says. “We were exhausted. It’s like any relationship when you start really young and spend a lot of years together. Not everyone grows the same way, and it’s hard to control your emotions.”

But the animosity softened over the years. Cerati, Bosio and Alberti began running into each other, then inviting each other to birthdays and concerts. Alberti says that by the time they got the reunion-tour offer, their interest in playing together again was the chief reason they said yes.

”It’s much better now than in the last few years we were together,” Cerati says. “There’s just a ton of emotions. The first thing is to enjoy ourselves and put the differences aside. But I think what’s happening now is really good.”

Better than good. Cerati and his compañeros, all in their late 40s, are having the time of their lives. ”For me the success of the show is because we’re still playing as if we’d never split up,” he says. “I feel very young. It seems like the difference between being 23, 24 — which is how old I was when I started with Soda — is that now I can enjoy it better. I’m still as intense, but the maturity of years makes me able to see the big picture better.”

That picture now includes fans as young as Cerati was when he started. Pzevoznik says that at Soda’s River Plate concert he saw lots of teens and twenty-somethings singing along with hits from the ’90s as enthusiastically as older fans — sometimes their parents — sang the songs from the ’80s.

”I think the attitude of musicians now is to go for something safe, and this makes everything very predictable,” Bosio says. “We were used to taking more risks, and this surprises people.”

The ultimate surprise would be if this tour yields a more permanent reunion. But no one is rushing things.

”We’ve only had time to remember the songs and put them in context,” Cerati says. “It’s really nice to get back, to have those feelings. But also there’s a door left open for these relationships in the future.”