bootstrap

One promising strategy is known as the "bootstrap" approach.

From Science Daily ● May 19, 2026

In science-fiction scenarios of first contact with extraterrestrials, humans usually bootstrap a common language with mathematics, demonstrating that we know the digits of pi and so forth.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 9, 2026

SilverSneakers represents just a small slice of that — the costs are not broken out by MedPAC — but it’s significant enough that the bootstrap venture has turned into a big business.

From MarketWatch ● Nov. 5, 2025

I think she is deeply wrong to let the tobacco company bootstrap these gas stations onto their suit.

From Slate ● Jun. 20, 2025

A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices.

From "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith

“You should apply if you want to build yourself up while also building a startup society that bootstraps other startup societies,” its website said.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 1, 2026

“You’ve got to pick up the bootstraps of your state until your state finally cares for all of its families,” Becerra said.

From Seattle Times ● Feb. 27, 2024

I try to instill that in my daughter, but her generation does not accept this concept of pulling up from my bootstraps.

From Salon ● Oct. 26, 2023

Talking about the center, Mabon quoted the adage: “You can’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you don’t have boots.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 19, 2023

Teachers exhorted us to be like him, to lift ourselves from poverty by our bootstraps.

From "Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography" by Mark Mathabane

But he’s bootstrapped himself into intelligence and with savvy networking and know-how, he becomes indispensable to the British, volunteering as a major to survey land and negotiate treaties with the Native tribes and French army.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 2, 2026

He bootstrapped that company and sold it for over $100 million in 2021.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 4, 2026

The sale, announced last week, caps an impressive career by Ng, a scrappy, diminutive septuagenarian who used her bootstrapped community newspapers “to empower the Asian American community” as she put it this week.

From Seattle Times ● May 29, 2024

But many of these smaller livestream channels are more bootstrapped operations, adherent to the same grind culture their content facilitates.

From Slate ● Sep. 2, 2023

“They’ve always bootstrapped stuff,” yielding cars that were advanced and innovative and that punched above their weight, Mr. Robbins said.

From New York Times ● Apr. 21, 2022

Just like Donald Trump, also the son of a bootstrapping developer, the Kushner boys talk of visiting building sites as children with their father, Charlie.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 15, 2026

Culturally, this typically gets framed as alpha-male, gym-rat bluster about bootstrapping.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 20, 2026

In your discussion of cheating social death, you reference "bootstrapping," which you describe as “using the established part of an existing system to create a new one that serves a fundamentally different form or function.”

From Salon ● Nov. 10, 2024

It’s a quintessential American story, of bootstrapping from the humblest of origins to the literal highest of heights.

From Seattle Times ● Sep. 14, 2023

He had worked as a printer but was now bootstrapping his own print shop on a shoestring, and became entirely self-employed.

From How and When to Be Your Own Doctor by Steve Solomon