The thing that kills most startup is losing motivation to work on your startup. It can come from multiple sources such as your founders relationship doesn’t survive, you work on a problem you don’t really care about. The first thing to think about when choosing a problem is to hack your personal motivation. How can you pick up a set of problems or users that not only you’re fighting for today but when you’re really tired, frustrating, low on cash 10 years from now?...

You might have take listening for granted. We’re now too busy and distracted to explore the depths of other’s thoughts and feelings. People get lonely for lack of listening, not because they’re alone. They don’t have anyone to share their thoughts and feeling with and vice versa. That explains why joining a club, inviting people to dinner, going outside doesn’t work. Due to the lack of listening, people often feel lonely and empty in the presence of others....

Avoid these most common mistakes Don’t believe that you need an amazing idea to get started. It’s really easy to look at current successful companies today like Google and Facebook and think that they had such brilliant ideas when they started. The fact was, they were the 20th search engine and social media back then. They were only good initial ideas. Don’t work on the first idea that comes to mind without carefully deciding if it’s actually a good one....

Seek wealth, not money Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep: robots cranking out things, computer program serving customers, money that is reinvested into other assets and businesses. The purpose of wealth is freedom. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want anymore. You can get up or sleep whenever you want, live anywhere you want, pursue anything you want. Money is how we transfer wealth, not wealth itself....

We make decisions based on our unique experiences that make sense to us in a given moment. We all come from different generations, backgrounds and have our own unique experience with how the world works. What seems crazy to other people might make sense to you. For example: Stocks: If you were born in 1970, the S&P 500 increased almost 10-fold during your 20s. However, if you were born in 1950, the market had only about 0-2x returns in your 20s....

Startup is a way to compress your whole working life into a few years Imagine the stress of working as a software engineer for your whole life, and saving every penny of your salary, and retiring with a million dollars. In a startup, instead of working at a low intensity for 40 years, you compress all this stress, work as hard as you possibly can for 4 years. At the end of the day, to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars' worth of pain....

Solve your own problems The most common mistake startups make is to solve problems that no one has. Why? Because they try hard to think of startup ideas and fool themselves into working on them while paying no attention to the market or users. Now, in order to ensure that a problem exists, look within yourself, find problems that you have yourself and work on that. This way, you know that you, as an user, will use it and hopefully others will too....

Why market matters more than anything 3 important factors that are required for building a successful business are people, markets, and products. While different people weight each of these differently at different times, Don Valentine believes that the marketplace always comes first because you can’t change that, but you can change the people if needed to later on. Also, Rachleff observes that the most successful startups didn’t have the world’s best management teams in the very early days, but happened to have conceived an idea that addresses an amazing point of pain around which consumers where desperate for a solution....