Robert Kiyosaki Reveals Why Entrepreneurs Should NEVER Quit – Even When It Feels Impossible!

Good morning, Believe Nation! It's Evan. My one word is believe. I believe in you, and I want to see that awesome thing that you have inside you explode out into the universe to have a major impact. So to help you on your journey, today's message is don't quit. Over to you, Robert Kiyosaki. Is there a time to bail out on a project, though? I mean, when— I don't— that's not in my vocabulary.

Yeah.

Look, I have an unfair advantage. I went to war. And at war, I'm alive because other guys died for me. When you see stuff like that, how can I quit? Most guys are just wimps, pussies, cowards. They don't have it. So they should get a job. Most people quit too soon on their ideas. And it's why you keep hearing so many people on this channel, and I've Mark said it too, you can't quit, never quit, don't quit. But there are some times when you need to quit. And let me just explain a little bit more. I think the reason why so many people share that message of don't quit is because too often entrepreneurs will start and stop and start and stop and never actually see any of their ideas through. And so if you have this passion for what you're doing and you give up on it too soon, as soon as you hit some kind of financial break or some other obstacle that's in your way, you get some kind of rejection, most people will quit, say it's too hard, I'm not gonna do that anymore, I'm gonna stop, I'm gonna give up, I'm gonna go find something else, and they quit. If that's the case, you should not quit, right? That's why so many people have that message for you. But sometimes people quit too late as well. Sometimes I've seen it happen to a lot of entrepreneurs, you've lost the passion for it, and you know, you've had some success with this business, or you just don't wanna, you just don't wanna feel like a failure. And so you don't wanna quit, but you hang on too long to this thing that you shouldn't be doing. Maybe that relationship you're in, you should quit on. Like, maybe that's not a healthy relationship for you. Maybe that business that you're in is not right for you. Don't hang on to it just because you don't want to feel like a failure. Failure is normal. Failure is part of the process. So how do you know when you should quit and when you shouldn't quit? The answer comes down to when you're passionate or not. If you are passionate about your business, if your heart is still in it, if you want to build this amazing thing up and you have this dream, then you can't quit on it. That's when you have to keep going. If you have the passion, you have to keep going. Even if it doesn't make sense, even if there's no clear path, you will find the path eventually if you keep going. For me, when I started doing this, helping entrepreneurs, I had 3 people show up to a free event. It was free and only 3 people showed up. Like, logically, how are you going to make money off of this? How will this ever become a business? It doesn't make any sense. But it didn't matter if it made sense because I loved it and I had to find a way to keep going and doing it. Even if I never made a way to make money out of it. And it's one of the most common messages that come up, not just on this channel, but when you study successful people, is you need to follow your passion. You got to do the thing that you're so insanely passionate about. How many times have you heard that message on this channel, like, from the people we profiled? It keeps coming up over and over and over again, and there's a reason, because it's one of the single most important ingredients to success. So as long as you still have that passion for your business, then you have to keep going. You have to keep following through. You can't quit because you will regret it at some point. You'll regret quitting because you'll be looking back on your life in 5 years, 10 years, 50 years and saying, "I could have done more, you know. I could have, I could have. What if I just gave it another 3 months? What if I just give it another 6 months? What if I just tried a little bit harder?" You'll always have that piece eating at you, gnawing at you for the rest of your life. It can turn you bitter and angry and complaining for the rest of your life because you could have done more. And so if you still have that passion, you have to find a way to keep going, even if it means taking a job, doing something else, supporting yourself in other ways. You have to find a way to keep going every day consistently. Don't quit. But if you've lost the passion for it, it just feels like a grind, it just feels like work, it just feels boring, it feels uncomplicated, it feels just like you've got this huge boulder on your head every time you have to go and think about work, then you should quit and either sell the business if it's built up to the point where you can sell it to somebody, or just stop and go do something else. Because you will create insane value when you're doing work that you love and you enjoy, right? Not every minute, not every minute's amazing, but net, like you're doing something that is worthy. If you feel like you're doing work that is worthy, you will pour your heart into it and make something amazing. You do that consistently, you're going to become the best in the world at it and you will get paid eventually. Everybody's road looks like that. You know, it's not like it's an instant success for most people. It's years of struggle and then they hit it by continuing to hone their craft. But if you're walking in the work with this boulder on your head and you can't stand being there and you feel like the work you're doing sucks, and has no meaning, you're just wasting your time. You're counting down until the clock hits whatever time when you're gonna go home. You're wasting your time and you'll never create anything amazing. For those people there, don't let that fear of being labeled a quitter or labeled a failure keep you in something, in a relationship, in a business, in an opportunity that isn't right for you. If you don't have the passion, then you should quit. If you still have the passion, You can't quit. You got to find a way to keep going. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, for those of you who have a deep passion for your business, what is the thing that is keeping you in this company? Maybe you've had a lot of success, maybe you haven't hit your stride yet, but what is the thing that is forcing you to stay in this company and not quit? What does that mean to you? Hopefully by writing it down, it ignites a fire within yourself. And can also inspire the other people watching. Share your thoughts down in the comments below. I also want to give a quick shout out to Miko Salcolati from salcolati.com. Miko, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. I really, really appreciate it, and I hope you're enjoying the read. Thank you guys again for watching. I hope you have an amazing day. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of inspresso. I wake up every morning Expresso, keep me going.

See, unfortunately, a lot of people stand in front of the stove of life and they say, "Now, stove, you give me some heat, then I'll put some wood in you." That ain't the way it works. You got to put something in before you can get anything out. So many times, you know, the employee goes to the employer and say, "Give me a raise, then I'll start coming to work on time." Or so many times they will come to him and say, "Make me the boss." "Now, I know I haven't been here very long, don't really deserve to be the boss, but I just function better when I am in charge of the thing. You reward me now and then I promise you I'll learn what this business is all about later on. Reward me now and I'll produce later." It doesn't work that way. Can't you just see a youngster in school saying, "Teacher, if I take a failing grade home, my parents are going to skin me alive. Pass me on this quarter and next time I'll study more than anybody else. Reward me now, I'll produce later." It doesn't work that way. Can't you just see an old farmer standing standing out in the fields in October and saying, "Lord, I know I didn't plant a thing this year, but if you'll give me a big crop this year, I'll plant more than anybody next year." It ain't that way, folks. You got to put something in before you can expect to get anything out. Well, he's just a pumping away. You know, that's hot. It's August. I mean, uh, the question is just how much pumping are you going to do for a drink of water? And finally, old Bernard said, "You know, Jimmy, I don't believe it's any water down there." Jimmy said, "Yeah, it is, Bernard." You know, in South Alabama, the wells are deep, and oh, we're glad they're deep because the deeper the well, the cooler, the cleaner, the sweeter, the purer, the better tasting the water. And isn't that true of life? Isn't it true that if you could become an MD by 6 weeks of summer school that the rewards would be almost minimal or nothing, and how many patients would you have? Isn't it true that if you become a sales expert in 3 days of a training school that the rate of pay would go down rather radically? Isn't it true that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly? Until you can learn to do it well. We'll never know how many kids have missed a college scholarship because they didn't study an average of 10 more minutes a day. We will never know how we come so close to promotion but we grew discouraged and quit too soon. We'll never know how much more success we would have had had we just had a little more pumping in there and pump and pump and pump and pump. Well, finally, old Bernard just got disgusted. He threw up his hands. Water down there. Jimmy said, don't stop, Barnard, don't stop. If you stop, the water's going to go all the way back down, and then you're going to have to start all over. The reality is, folks, and I'm totally convinced of this, this is the story of America. This is your story. This is a story of success. This is the story of life. I believe with all of my heart that if you would pump long enough and hard enough and enthusiastically enough, that eventually the reward is going to follow the effort. And then once that water starts to flow All you got to do is just keep a little easy, steady pressure on it, and you're going to get more water than you can possibly use. The basic problem is this: so many times people get involved in something and they'll say, "Well, I'll give it a try, and if it works out, that'll be good, and if it doesn't work out, I mean, hey, I ain't gonna kill myself." You know what I mean, Brother Lee? Well, I got to tell you something, folks. You're going to pump forever like that before anything happens. When you get into something, grab that sucker and get with it! And then once the water starts to flow, then ladies and gentlemen, that's what Strategies for Success is all about.

Now here's an important point. Nothing works the first time. When you try something new, it probably won't work. When you try something new several times, it probably won't work. And the turning point in my life came when I would hear good ideas and I was so eager to be successful in selling, I would run out and try the ideas and they wouldn't work. I'd try a way of getting an appointment or answering an objection or closing a sale. It wouldn't work. And my natural response, ah, and I think just to be disappointed. And then I realized nothing works, at least the first few times. So I decided I would try a new idea 5 or 10 times before I passed judgment on it. I would not just try it once and quit like most people do. And that changed my whole life. It was a turning point in my life because I realized from then on, if you've got a good idea and you've got a good goal and you want to double your income and improve the quality of your life, and you have to try new things in order to get new results, It's not going to work the first time. So you say, well, that didn't work. Try something else and try something else and try something else. Now, if you try, only two things can happen. What are they? Succeed or fail. If you succeed, you do more of it. If you fail, you learn from it, get smarter, and try it again. So you cannot lose by taking action. You can only lose by not taking action.

But why did you still believe in the company? I mean, I have to think that at any point in Silicon Valley history, there's a lot of people that at that point they're just like, this isn't going to work, market's changed, this isn't a viable concept anymore?

Well, you know, I don't know how much belief I had, but I knew that I had kind of gotten everybody into the boat with me. So it wasn't so much that I didn't want to quit. I wanted to quit every day I was in that job. I felt like throwing up when I woke up in the morning.

So you know what it's like having a baby now.

Yeah, exactly. Like, I felt like I was pregnant. But I'd hired every employee, and they all trusted me. I'd raised all the money. I talked every investor into putting their money in. I had given stock to my friends and relatives, and they were all excited about the prospects for the company. When it went public, a lot of my friends from high school bought the stock because I was running the company. And so I felt like I could die, but I couldn't quit. And one of the horrible things about being founder CEO is it's the one job you really can't quit. Or if you do quit, you're a punk. So I didn't want to be a punk. So I just kept pedaling. But it was rough. I mean, running LoudCloud— and it didn't stop there. That was LoudCloud.

Yeah.

LoudCloud, by the time LoudCloud was 2 and a half years old, I had sold the LoudCloud part of the business. And I had to change it into another business. So the next thing that happened was LoudCloud was going to go bankrupt. So I raised $160 million in the IPO. But we burned through that and we couldn't stop the burn because the customers kept going out of business. And so we were headed towards bankruptcy. So then I had to— I sold the services part of the business and all the cash burned to EDS. And then I had to lay off probably another third of the employees. And then I kept the remaining 80 employees and we became a software company, a public publicly traded software company with no customers and no revenue, which was another trip.

And that's when you became Opsware.

That's when we became Opsware, yeah. So that was hard. But it was good. That kind of stuff, it makes you strong. Eventually, 5 years later, we sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion.

Not a bad exit.

Which was like, still, I'm still shocked by That whole thing. I still wake up in the middle of the night going, "Are we going to run out of money?" Let me give you the one word secret to happiness.

One word. This is all you need to be happy. The most important word ever. If you had to think of one word that's most important to you or that sums you up or that would be kind of like a little beacon. Hey, Believe Nation. If you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.