Being a successful entrepreneur frequently involves a series of missteps and mistakes before finally nailing the right idea or business.
The difference, for many, between giving up and persisting through the toughest times can be getting advice from people who have done it before — and being smart enough to listen.
From investor Mark Cuban's dad telling him that there are no shortcuts to Lululemon founder Chip Wilson's realization that people actually enjoy helping others, we asked 12 successful entrepreneurs to share the best advice they ever got, discovering the lessons that stick with them to this day.
Restaurateur Jon Taffer: See every detail of your business.
"Years ago when I was very young," recalls Taffer, the host of TV show "Bar Rescue" and a former business owner, in a recent interview with Business Insider, "a VP of Hyatt looked at me and said, 'You look, but you don’t see.'" Taffer learned to look not just at the big picture, but also at every place setting, light fixture, and customer exchange. "See every crack, every detail. I learned to really see and not just look at my business," he says.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams: Don’t give up.
"The best advice I got was before I was a syndicated cartoonist,"Adams tells Business Insider. "I asked advice of a professional cartoonist, Jack Cassady, who had a TV show called 'Funny Business' years ago on PBS. I wrote to him, and he gave me this advice: 'It’s a competitive business, but don’t give up.'"
"That sounds very non-profound, but let me fast forward the story," Adams continues. "I put some comics together and sent them to magazines — The New Yorker, Playboy — but they rejected them. So I said, 'Oh well, I tried.' A year later, I get a second letter from Cassady. He’d been cleaning his office and came across my original samples. He said he was just writing to me to make sure that I hadn’t given up. And I had. So I took out my art supplies, and I decided to raise my sights."
"I had to do one more thing for luck to find me," he says. "As it turns out, one of the perhaps six people on planet Earth who could have looked at my cartoon and said 'yes' was a woman married to a guy who was the spitting image of, and had the same job as, Dilbert. It required that one extra attempt, and that wouldn’t have happened without the best advice anybody ever gave me, which is don’t give up."
Advertising entrepreneur Sara Rotman: Being comfortable is the enemy.
"The best advice I ever received was from my first accountant when I was discussing the launch of my company," says Rotman, founder of ad agency MODCo, which has clients like Vera Wang, True Religion, and Tory Burch. "We were speaking about my business plan and how much money to borrow to launch. She wisely said, 'Only have enough cash on hand to barely survive; never so much that you are comfortable. It's important to stay scared in the beginning.'"
"While I prefer to describe that feeling as staying hungry rather than scared, I thought it was indeed great advice," she says. "I have found this hunger to be an incredibly important motivator during my entire career. Being comfortable is the enemy. Staying hungry forces you to push yourself to continue to survive, grow, and evolve."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider