Tag Archives: success

From the mouths of babes: What the young guns (under 21) have to say about success

Dan Tynan, for the standard, interviewed 10 entrepreneurs under 21 who have seem a bit of success. On his blog , he posted the Q & A with six of them.

What I found most interesting was his second to last question:

What advice do you have for other young people who may be looking to follow a similar path?

Or in other words — how can others be successful like you?

1. Anshul Samar, the 14-year-old founder and CEO of Alchemist Empire and inventor of the chemistry card game,

It took me two years with obstacles to get the product to where it is right now. There were times when I stopped doing it and then started again, but overall I have stuck to it. Don’t get discouraged — and keep on going. You should believe in yourself–that is all that matters.

It is also important to have a close mentor who has experience with the entrepreneur world, who can help you pick the right ideas.

2. Matt Wegrzyn, founder of domain parking site Bodis.com and a successful “domainer” (buyer and seller of domain names)

Don’t let others bring you down. Stay dedicated. Do what you know best. Keep your chin up. Never give up. If you can follow all of these standard rules, then you’ll have a fun life one day. I know, my weekends are very fun. Especially if you have money – you’ll have VERY fun weekends. But, really – it will pay off at the end. Imagine if you spend the next 3, 4 years buried under researching, developing, doing what you know best and trying to succeed, and then the next 20-40 years, you don’t even have to worry about work, or stress, or paying off debts. I mean, you really get to live your life the way it is meant to be. Life is all about having that good fun, and you can’t do that if you don’t play your cards right early enough. I mean, it’s never too late, but the sooner the better in my opinion.

TOT: What else might you want to say to our readers?

To be successful, you must have a good degree of dedication and hard work. Nothing in the world comes easy. And in order to do that, you have to stay motivated. Try to keep yourself motivated at all times. Remember where you can be and what you can have a few years down the road. Personally, I do that with music. I love music. Music keeps me motivated and keeps me working hard. It pumps me up when I’m tired (right now at 4:20 am). So find something that motivates you, and stick to it.

3.Ashley Qualls (AshBo to her friends) how it felt like to build a site to give away her MySpace designs and turn it into a thriving business. Whateverlife.com now pulls in more than $1 million a year in ad revenue

Don’t let others discourage you. It can be hard being young and wanting to jump and create your own business. It’s full of risks. If you have the passion, you can achieve. That’s my opinion. It is hard work, you have to know your audience and you have to relate to them, other wise, people will just walk away. Just don’t take no for an answer.

TOT: What else would you like to say to our readers?

Don’t ever give up. If people think running WhateverLife has always been easy, they are easily mistaken. There have been ups and downs and everywhere in betweens running this company. Luckily, I have always stuck everything through and made it as fun as I possibly could because after all, I love being creative and it has made it easier solving any issues that arise. Just because something goes wrong does NOT mean it can’t be fixed. Just don’t give up so easily.

4. Ben Casnocha, founder of Comcate, which makes software that allows local governments to track and respond to citizen complaints. It’s the third company he’s started since age 12. Casnocha has also written a book, My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley. He turns 20 in May and attends Claremont McKenna College in southern California.

Go do stuff, experiment, test, tinker. Best way to learn and find out what works and what doesn’t, what interests you and what doesn’t, is to try it, not talk about it or write about it or think about it.

5. Andrew Sutherland, the 18-year-old creator of Quizlet, an online study app that’s been used more than 12 million times.

The key to all this young entrepreneurial stuff is action. The best way to bypass low expectations from adults is to let your work speak for you. Ageism definitely exists in the business world, but people usually recognize talent when they see it, no matter where it came from

6. Catherine Cook, co-founder of myYearbook.com, the fastest growing social network on the planet and the number one destination for teens on the Net.

Really just to go for it and fulfill their dreams. So many people have great ideas, but let something else get in the way, or will for whatever reason think they’re incapable of making something great. They need to remember that getting the idea is the hard part, all they have to do is believe in themselves.

The secret of success (should I say now that I don’t have it either?)

I love how so many big mouths over the “blogosphere” get excited about these micro-debates. (I would link to some of these posts but I don’t want to provide even more trackbacks.)

I live in the real world — the one where those who don’t have time to bicker over useless topics for hours live. (And arguably the world in which real people make it possible for those pointless discussions to happen in the ’sphere.)

I love the internet — everybody wants to tear each other down and proclaim victory.

Ever heard of King of the Hill?

Pick up an Xbox (or if you’re cheap just go to Gamestop and play it there) and try a copy of the Halo series, link it to Xbox live, or battle with some friends, and you will see what I mean.

See when you have some virtual guns, grenades, and rocket launchers, its actually quite amazing.

But when all you have is a bunch of pretend know-it-alls running their fingers all over their keyboard proclaiming they have THE ONE SINGLE ANSWER.

Hilarious.

If they really did they probably wouldn’t be blogging, that’s for sure.

If it’s financial status you’re looking for — I haven’t read Bill Gates’ rant about workaholics (for or against) yet.

If it’s a solid family life you’re after — you’re family would much rather enjoy you then listen to you whine and complain about how “right” you are.

If it’s fame you’re looking for –keep blogging, because outside the tech world nobody knows or cares who you are — and they probably never will.

And if it’s beauty you’re after, well, suffice it to say that the sedentary lifestyle which this sort of mind-numbing useless, time-wasting calls for probably won’t allow beauty — but hey, it is possible.

I do really like one post (a positive post) and wanted to highlight one of my favorite excerpts of all time.

Former:

There is no secret formula or obvious path to success. Just one common trait…an indomitable desire to succeed against all adversity and doubt. Very few people have this drive and the leadership ability to attract great people to their cause. This drive is indefinable but we know it when we see it. It is sometimes misdiagnosed as being delusional and fanatical. The difference in diagnosis is success or failure. Succeed and you are a brilliant visionary. Fail and you are a delusional loser. The line between them is very fine.

Latter:

A well-regarded speaker spent several years compiling information on what makes a successful person. He was astounded by his results.

Of course, like most of us, I’d been brought up on the popular belief that the secret of success is hard work, but I’d seen so many men work hard without succeeding and so many men succeed without working hard that I had become convinced that hard work was not the real secret even though in most cases it might be one of the requirements. And so I set out on a voyage of discovery which carried me through biographies and autobiographies and all sorts of dissertations on success and the lives of successful men and women until I finally reached the point at which I realized that the secret I was trying to discover lay not only in what people did, but also in what made them do it! I realized further that the secret for which I was searching must not only apply to every definition of success, but since it must apply to everyone to whom it was offered, it must also apply to everyone who had ever been successful. In short, I was looking for the common denominator of success. And because that’s exactly what I was looking for, that’s exactly what I found.

He expected to find a correlation between gender, race, age, I.Q. or other hereditary factors out of human control; conversely, in his report titled “The common denominator of success” he found something entirely different: “The common denominator of success – the secret of success of every person who has ever been successful – lies in the fact that the person formed the habit of doing things that others don’t like to do…Because successful people have a purpose strong enough to make them form the habit of doing things they don’t like to do.”