{"id":9,"date":"2013-07-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/how-to-stay-inspired-and-keep-moving-forward\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T06:57:05","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T06:57:05","slug":"how-to-stay-inspired-and-keep-moving-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/how-to-stay-inspired-and-keep-moving-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Stay Inspired and keep moving forward"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stay Inspired and keep moving forward<\/strong><\/h2>\n

On Monday, I went out to the Mojave Desert to watch Virgin Galactic, our space tourism company, complete its first rocket-powered flight \u2014 it was a truly awesome sight. I treasure such moments, when my\u00a0team\u00a0and I find ways to make the impossible possible, inspiring ourselves and others to attempt even greater feats.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t seek out motivation and\u00a0inspiration, yet these qualities are essential to my work. I tend to have a lot of energy, so I often find it hard to stop myself from thinking about and talking about all the possibilities facing our businesses. When I was writing my autobiography,\u00a0Losing My Virginity<\/em>\u00a0(Virgin Hardbacks, 1998), I thought about calling it \u201cTalking Ahead of Myself,\u201d because whenever I come up with an exciting new idea or hear about a thrilling new proposal, I want to tell the world right away.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s partly because I find telling others about our ideas to be motivating: Even if some people think we\u2019re being unrealistic, the first step in making an idea a reality is often just sharing it. My talking publicly about our plans has sometimes sparked interest from potential investors and, in the case of international expansion, local partners, which gives our talented teams at Virgin extra incentive to forge ahead.<\/p>\n

Inspired<\/em> and moving forward<\/strong><\/p>\n

A lot of our best ideas for making the impossible possible and the impetus to pursue them have come from an unlikely source: our April Fools\u2019 Day jokes. Long ago, we embraced the annual tradition of playing elaborate pranks on our competitors, the media and the public. In the past we announced that we bought Pluto; we said that we were launching a company called Virgin Volcanic to explore the world\u2019s most active volcanoes; and in 1989 we even flew a UFO over London (it was actually a hot-air balloon built to look like a saucer).<\/p>\n

This year we announced that Virgin Atlantic was introducing new glass-bottomed planes that would fly between London and Aberdeen, Scotland. The concept captured people\u2019s imaginations, and many urged us to make it happen, so we set to work. Our team found that while building glass-bottomed planes probably wouldn\u2019t be practical since luggage is usually stored below, installing giant windows in the roofs of our planes for stargazing at night and so that passengers can view the beautiful vistas during the day may someday be possible, when someone develops a lighter type of glass. (We\u2019re discussing the possibilities with manufacturers and will keep people posted.)<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve found that there\u2019s real value in inspiring our customers, since it reminds them of our adventurous spirit and our commitment to disrupting stale industries. Because we\u2019re known to play pranks, sometimes people don\u2019t believe us when we\u2019re serious. In 2004, when we announced our plans to create Virgin Galactic, lots of people thought we were joking. But then in 2008, when we sent out an announcement about a new partnership with Google to launch Virgle, a business dedicated to creating a human settlement on Mars, some people, including some news agencies, took us at our word. Many in the Las Vegas audience, where we unveiled the joke, wanted to sign up.<\/p>\n

But be careful about playing pranks on your competitors \u2014 you may inspire<\/strong> them instead. In 1986, I played an April Fools\u2019 joke on the music industry, claiming that we had introduced a supercomputer called Music Box that would let people download any song, anywhere. Record label bosses from around the world called us up and pleaded with us not to kill their businesses. The joke was on us, though:\u00a0Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder, told me that the story helped to inspire<\/em> iTunes, the online music store that revolutionized the music industry \u2014 and brought our music retail business, Virgin Megastores, to its knees.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re an entrepreneur looking for a revolutionary idea, you will probably need to take inspiration from wherever you can find it, including rivals\u2019 products and services, fiction, and even your own childhood dreams. Or perhaps you need to inspire your team to reach for more ordinary goals like improving your business\u2019s profit margin or introducing a new product that\u2019s still at the prototype stage. The point is to get the discussion started: If you talk ahead, your team will understand your vision for the company, and you can start working toward it together.<\/p>\n

When you encounter naysayers, just keep forging ahead. After all, who would have thought that the company that brought you the Sex Pistols would go on to run a bank? Or that the guy who needed to borrow a secondhand plane to launch an airline would one day help to create the space tourism industry? As the great actress Audrey Hepburn said, \u201cNothing is impossible, the word itself says \u2018I\u2019m possible!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Stay Inspired<\/span><\/span> and keep moving forward<\/strong><\/h3>\n

BY\u00a0RICHARD BRANSON<\/p>\n

If your Inspired<\/u> to live a certain life style but work a 40hr or more a week job where you are scraping to make ends meet because that\u2019s all the Company will pay you, then it\u2019s time to get inspired to make your dreams a reality and quit making your boss RICH, join Empower Network<\/a> and we\u2019ll give you everything you need to build yourself a successful Online Business so you and your family can live a life of freedom and happiness. Join today and change your life forever!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stay Inspired and keep moving forward On Monday, I went out to the Mojave Desert to watch Virgin Galactic, our space tourism company, complete its first rocket-powered flight \u2014 it was a truly awesome sight. I treasure such moments, when my\u00a0team\u00a0and I find ways to make the impossible possible, inspiring ourselves and others to attempt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1451,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,55,56,57],"tags":[58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entrepreneurs","category-inspired","category-richard-branson","category-visualization","tag-adventurous-spirit","tag-awesome","tag-dreams","tag-embraced","tag-energy","tag-entrepreneur","tag-greater-feats","tag-how-to-stay-inspired","tag-im-possible","tag-ideas","tag-imaginations","tag-incentive","tag-inspiration","tag-inspired","tag-motivating"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1451"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/22"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/rikman57\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}