“Anticipating your opponent’s moves and responding to them by moving instantly from offensive to defensive tactics and from hard to gentle moves is the sign of a master martial artist.” – M.M. Ford

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Supplicate (verb) – To supplicate (SUP-lih-kate) is to make a humble and earnest entreaty or petition. As used by Gabriele D’Annunzio in The Child of Pleasure: “Andrea might writhe and supplicate and despair as he would – in vain.”

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How to Come Up With the Idea That Will Make You Millions

When people start a business for the first time, they often do so with an idea for a particular product that they believe to be both brand-new and also acutely needed – some sort of “better mousetrap” that will put their business on the cover of Inc. magazine.

Having a brand-new product idea may be the most common way to start a business, but it’s not always the best way.

Why?

Because brand-new products usually crash and burn.

They fail for a number of reasons – weak marketing, insufficient cash flow, poor product reviews. But the most common is this: The appetite for them is much smaller than the would-be entrepreneur has imagined.

When some enthusiastic young person comes to me with a “great” new idea, I always ask about the size and variety of competition. When they say “That’s the best part! There is none!” I have to explain why starting a business with a product for which there is no proven market is a big mistake.

You might not think so from everything you see in the business media. Journalists understand the power of a good story, and the best-loved stories about entrepreneurs are those that feature the lone and courageous person with a brand-new idea that he spends all and risks all to bring to the market, against huge doubt and even criticism, only to be proven right in the end with a huge success and the fortune to go with it.

But the reality of a successful start-up business is much more like this:  READ MORE

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Watch This: I’ve never done any serious reading about John D Rockefeller. I visited his home in New York a few years ago and that sparked an interest that I’ve maintained. As the professor her points out, he’s often remembered as a robber baron, but the truth is that he was as far from a robber baron as an industrialist could possibly be.

This little lecture hits the high points of his life as the person who could be said to have created America’s the middle class…

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