Sophia Amoruso Quotes

Look at the other side of things even if you know you’ll never agree. It creates empathy.

In an ideal world, you’d never have to do things that are below your position, but this isn’t an ideal world, and it’s never going to be.

Everyone does a style book, and I wanted to write a business book for people that didn’t think they would like a business book.

When you think about people, you give them power.

You can’t convince someone else – whether it’s a potential employer, a loan officer at the car dealership, or someone you’ve been crushing on – that you’re amazing and terrific if you don’t actually think you are.

Success is a scary concept because it assumes something kind of final. In the grand scheme of life, I don’t think there is some ultimate success.

I often say my naivete early on in my career worked in my favor.

I learned the hard way that taking shortcuts and living for free is not really living free.

I wrote ‘#GIRLBOSS’ while running a $100 million-plus revenue business.

I feel like there’s so many places to shop today that just feel like an Excel spreadsheet put between four walls.

Music is such a big part of my life.

I make money, and I don’t need money.

I’m not going to lie – it’s insulting to be praised for being a ‘woman’ with ‘no college degree.’

Compete with yourself, not with others.

It’s the beauty of the Web. You can pretend to be anything you want. But people figure out pretty quick if you don’t live up to it.

I’ve never seen someone work for a salary.

You don’t get taken seriously by asking someone to take you seriously. You’ve got to show up and own it.

There are secret opportunities hidden inside every failure.

I want to give other creatives the opportunity to find the entrepreneur inside themselves and teach them how to build their own platform.

I built a huge profitable business with no debt.

I want people to feel the freedom to be themselves.

A lot of people in my generation don’t seem to get that you have to work your way up. I don’t care if filing invoices is beneath you. If you don’t do it, who do you think is going to? Your boss? Nope. That’s why she hired you.

One of the best things about life—a reason not to go blindly after one goal and one goal only—is that sometimes it will take you to something that is way cooler than anything you would have consciously set out to do in the first place.

I’ve never worked in a retail store, but I did sell shoes at Gimme Shoes in San Francisco, a job I was fired from.

You can work for other people and still be a #GIRLBOSS; it’s more about a state of mind and knowing yourself well enough to know when you’re making decisions for yourself or because the world expects them of you. And guess what? It’s okay to do that sometimes, too.

A typical day for me involves a lot of meetings.

I would say I’m a boss who’s learning, and I hope people have the patience for the fact that I’m learning along the way because that’s a tough thing.

If this is a man’s world, who cares? I’m still really glad to be a girl in it.

There’s no ‘Chutes and Ladders’ in life.

It’s amazing how directly you can connect with people via social media.

I think I’ve just gotten really good at accessorizing personally. I’ve always been good at accessorizing other people, and intellectually, I’ve known how to accessorize, but I was pretty minimal personally – although I was wearing a ton of rings.

I love clothing and still shop a lot of vintage.

You create the world, blink by blink. It is entirely yours to discover and yours to create.

Sometimes in the world, there’s such pressure to follow a certain path that we forget the importance of learning as we go.

Abandon anything about your life and habits that might be holding you back

Chaos magic is the idea that a particular set of beliefs serves as an active force in the world. In other words, we choose what and how we believe, and our beliefs are tools that we then use to make things happen… or not.

I can be pretty reactive, and I’ve learned over time to be less reactive: to stop and think before I make decisions.

If you listen only to those around you, the chances of your dreams coming true are very small.

It’s a lot of work to sell one thing on the Internet.

If you look at my Instagram, girls are just beating down my door for tips or a job or mentorship. I can’t hire every single one of them. My story is one thing that gives them hope. It’s an unconventional story with anecdotes, commonsense advice and a big dose of permission to figure things out for yourself.

You combine hard work, creativity, and self-determination, and things start to happen.

Only the paranoid survive.

My days of being the tardy employee at the record store gave me a cultural and musical understanding that was more unique than if I’d just listened to garbage-y pop on the radio my entire life.

The best wisdom is earned through experience, particularly mistakes.

I am still a lover of paper books. One of my first jobs was in a bookstore, and I still like to be able to write in a margin and feel the paper. Once inside of a digital device, I end up losing things.

I work in silence.

You want to know what four words I probably hate the most? ‘That’s not my job.’

The last thing the world needs is another boring person or another boring brand, so embrace all the things that make you different. Alter your clothes all you want, but don’t you dare alter your inner freak – she’s got your back as much as I do.

It was my full intent as a teenager to smash capitalism and eat dumpster food.

Focus on the positive things in your life and you’ll be shocked at how many more positive things start happening

When I go through hundreds of applications from people who all have very similar-sounding experience, cover letters are the only glimpse I have into a person’s personality.

The time making money should be greater than the time that you are spending money.

Failure is your invention.

Selling $500 shoes when you make $12 an hour is just an awkward economic juxtaposition.

Don’t act like you’ve arrived when you’re just receiving the invitation.

Don’t you dare alter your inner freak.

It takes a lot more than just knowing how to put an outfit together to succeed in the fashion industry, so more power to you if this is where you want to be; just don’t expect it to be an extended trip to the mall.

I don’t want to spend too much time dwelling on what I’ve already done because there is still so much to do.

When your goal is to gain experience, perspective, and knowledge, failure is no longer a possibility

When you owe money to people, you’re always going to owe money to people, so you should take care of it as soon as possible. It doesn’t go away just because you ignore it.

Everyone is told to go to high school and get good grades and go to college and get good grades and then get a job and then get a better job. There’s no one really telling a story about how they totally blew it, and they figured it out.

My first job was as a sandwich artist at Subway.

The world loves to tell you how difficult things are, and the world’s not exaggerating. But difficult doesn’t mean impossible, and out of the bajillions of things in this universe that you can’t control, what you can control is how hard you try, and if or when to pack it in.

I don’t lead with an iron fist. I don’t yell at people. I have a way of making my opinion clear.

Work hard, no matter how much recognition you get.

I didn’t buy the Porsche for status. I hate that, and it’s actually kind of goofy now because in L.A., a Porsche is like a Honda. It was just that I could pay that much money for a car and drive it off the lot.

At the bare minimum, you need to be in your position for a year before you ask for a raise or title change.

When I was 22, I wasn’t too proud to do anything. I was taking out trash, buying stinky vintage clothes, and pulling gross Kleenex out of the pockets.

My philosophy is that you sell things for more than you bought them.

Create your own job. Become the master of what you do. Fully imerse yourself in your culter. Be humble. You are never above having to pack boxes. Never forget where you came from. And always be polite. Good old-fashioned manners can get you very far. -Jenne Lomardo

I’m a capitalist, I’m a CEO, I run a big business, I’m an employer.

Sometimes the expectation of being inspired in one specific way may close you off to the actual inspiration.

Nothing will teach you more about perceived value than taking something with literally no value and selling it in the auction format. It teaches you the beauty and power of presentation, and how you can make magic out of nothing.

It was easy for me in my bathrobe to provide really great customer service. As an introvert, it’s really much easier to do than when standing in a retail store.

The modern girl is less concerned with everything being a brand name.

The energy you’ll expend focusing on someone else’s life is better spent working on your own. Just be your own idol.