Quotes for entrepreneurs curated in November 2024 on a theme of paying your dues and persevering in spite of boredom.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in November 2024
My theme for this month’s “Quotes for Entrepreneurs” is paying your dues and persevering in spite of boredom.
“Talent and potential mean nothing if you can’t consistently do the boring things when you don’t feel like doing them.”
Shane Parrish
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“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
Theodore Roosevelt
I originally curated this in twelve years ago in November 2012.
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“What I know about money, I learned the hard way — by having had it.”
Margaret Halsey in “The Folks at Home” (1952)
Entrepreneurs learn to manage a grow their startups in the same way: one mistake after another.
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“VI. Right and Wrong. It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, “Reflections and Remarks on Human Life” (1878)
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It don’t come easy
You know it don’t come easy
Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues
[…]
Open up your heart, let’s come together
[…]
Please, remember peace is how we make it
Here within your reach if you’re big enough to take it
I don’t ask for much, I only want trust
And you know it don’t come easy
Ringo Starr “It Don’t Come Easy” (selected verses)
This was my election day tweet because it mentioned “got to pay your dues” which is the theme for November 2024 quotes and of these lines which I viewed as a partial antidote to a very divided electorate. “Open up your heart, let’s come together. Please, remember peace is how we make it. Here within your reach if you’re big enough to take it: I don’t ask for much, I only want trust.”
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“Creativity is difficult. When you are being creative, you’re living by faith. You don’t know what’s next because the created, by definition, is what’s never been before. So you’re living at the edge of something in which you’re not very confident. You might fail: in fact, you almost certainly will fail a good part of the time. All the creative persons I know throw away most of the stuff they do.”
Eugene Peterson in “The Contemplative Pastor“
h/t John Cook in “Creativity and Faith.” Failing a good part of the time sounds like “paying your dues” to me.
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“Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.”
Samuel McChord Crothers
I think we recognize prior failures and are often able to avoid them on the second or third try.
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“Just in proportion as you recognize your ignorance, the road to greater knowledge will be opened.”
Charles Kettering (in “Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles F. Kettering” by T. A. Boyd).
I originally curated this in Sep-2016. I think paying your dues is often viewed as a hazing ritual by novices–that was frequently my perspective. But effective organizations put novices in situations that enable them to see their limits, stretch safely, and develop an experience base of requisite variety. I made a related point in “Orienting, Observing, Doing Homework, and Paying Dues”
“Paying dues–putting the time in not only to understand but master a problem or situation–is a critical element of success in many circumstances.”
Sean Murphy in “Orienting, Observing, Doing Homework, and Paying Dues“
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“Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work.”
Derek Sivers in “How to Live“
A thought-provoking book, see my 2023 review at “How to Live: Derekk Sivers Explores a Smorgasbord of Mindsets”
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“The school of hard knocks is an accelerated curriculum”
Menander
I cannot find a citation but his work survives only as fragments so it’s not surprising. This was too good not to post.
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"To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not rich. To study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages with open heart; To bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is my symphony."William Henry Channing in “My Symphony”
There are many versions of this in old books and publications with slightly different wording. This is my best effort at interpolating the original text. If someone has a definitive source, I welcome your suggestion. I like the image of the spiritual growing up through the common in the same way that experience and reflection lead to mastery and expertise over time.
Update Dec 2: This version was popularized by Arthur Brisbane who edited Chaning‘s April-15-1841 letter to Margaret Fuller:
“My scheme of life is so simple that it needs still sunshine, like a harvest field. To be a workingman, poor, humble; to perform without show or shunning menial services; to live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to have an oratory in my own heart, and present spotless sacrifices of dignified kindness in the temple of humanity; to spread no opinions glaringly out like show-plants, and yet leave the garden gate ever open for the chosen friend and the chance acquaintance; to make no pretenses to greatness; to seek no notoriety; to attempt no wide influence; to have no ambitious projects; to let my writings be the daily bubbling spring flowing through constancy, swelled by experiences, into the full, deep river of wisdom; to listen to stars and buds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never; . . . in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony. A pretty dream? A sober prophecy!”
From Memoir of William Henry Channing by Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1886, page 166. h/t Phil Bolsta in Symphony and GE Sources (under “William Henry Channing”).
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“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.”
Calvin Coolidge
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“What’s true for kings is true for presidents as well: success depends on producing an heir.”
Daniel McCarthy in “Leaderless“
Good advice for entrepreneurs and other business leaders who want to build enduring companies.
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“Some say opportunity knocks only once, That is not true. Opportunity knocks all the time, but you have to be ready for it. If the chance comes, you must have the equipment to take advantage of it.”
Louis L’Amour
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“Success is having a flair for the thing that you are doing, knowing that is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a sense of purpose.”
Margaret Thatcher
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“Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.”
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
This is how we look back on episodes where we paid our dues.
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“Luck? I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it, and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard work–and realizing what is opportunity and what isn’t.”
Lucille Ball
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“There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence–and in the end, you make it look like a quantum leap.”
James Dyson
Paying your dues for a breakthrough requires the patience to persevere and the creative insight to continue to try new things.
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“It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one’s earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.”
Ashley Montagu “The American Way of LIfe” (1967) Chapter “The Pursuit of Happiness”
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“Opportunity knocks at every man’s door once. On some men’s door it hammers till it breaks down the door and then it goes in and wakes him up if he’s asleep, and ever afterward it works for him as a night watchman.”
Finley Peter Dunne
This is widely attributed to Dunne but never with a citation. It reads like one of his “Mr. Dooley” sketches and is such a good perspective on how opportunity seems to bless some people that I wanted to include it. If you know the source please leave a comment or contact me.
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“Life is a hard and complicated thing; no interface can change that; anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and if you don’t like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.”
Neal Stephenson in “In the beginning was the command line” (last sentence).
This is an essay from 1999 originally published on his website and then as a book. I am a big fan of Stephenson and have blogged about his writing several times:
- Serious and Competent People
- The Wit to See and Understand Objective Reality
- Neal Stephenson on Christianity, Grace, Sincerity, and Seeing Things as They Are
- Neal Stephenson on Distinguishing Different Motives for Hypocrisy
- Neal Stephenson on the Importance of Culture
- Founder as Change Agent from Reamde
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“It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. The need for learning does not end at graduation: in the real world the tests are all open book and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market.”
Jonathan Rosenberg in “Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning” (2008)
This reminds me of
“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained.
To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there.
Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished.Education leads to a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.
Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.”
James Carse in “Finite and Infinite Games“
I incorporated this latter quote into “Buying a Map vs. Learning to Explore.”
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“I am Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.”
John Diefenbaker in Canadian House of Commons July 1, 1960
h/t Julie Ponesse; For some reason this reminds me of a quote engraved on the Canongate wall in the Scottish Parliament that I used to close Independence Day 2012 (originally curated in March 2009 and again in July 2012)
“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”
Alasdair Gray
The connection to “paying your dues” is the realization that sometimes as parents and grandparents we have to pay dues for our descendants–which then made me realize that so many paid many of my dues to allow me to grow up in freedom and security. There is bit of dialog in G. Michael Hopf‘s “Those Who Remain‘ where a grandfather talks to his grandson to explain the post-Apocalyptic devastation they find themselves in: ““Hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times, easy times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
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“AI won’t take your job, It is somebody using AI that will take your job.”
Jensen Huang
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“It’s hard for corporations to understand that creativity is not just about succeeding. It’s about experimenting and discovering.”
Gordon Mackenzie
This is a concluding thought to a longer passage:
“The biggest obstacle to creativity is attachment to outcome. As soon as you become attached to a specific outcome, you feel compelled to control and manipulate what you’re doing. And in the process you shut yourself off to other possibilities.
I got a call from someone who wanted me to lead a workshop on creativity. He needed to tell his management exactly what tools people would come away with. I told him I didn’t know. I couldn’t give him a promise, because then I’d become attached to an outcome — which would defeat the purpose of any creative workshop.’
It’s hard for corporations to understand that creativity is not just about succeeding. It’s about experimenting and discovering.”
quoted in How Is Your Company Like a Giant Hairball [Fast Company Paywall]
Via Gary Chou in “The Biggest Obstacle to Creativity is Attachment”
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“Nobody told me how hard and lonely change is.”
Joan Gilbertson
It’s often a lonely beginning ,but It does not have to be a lonely journey if you look for other stakeholders in the outcomes you seek and recruit them as co-conspirators. It’s always hard.
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“The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.”
Harry Golden
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“It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.”
Roger Von Oech in “A Kick in the Seat of the Pants”
I have read three books by Roger Von Oech and strongly recommend all of them to entrepreneurs: “Whack on the Side of the Head“, “A Kick in the Seat of the Pants“, and “Expect the Unexpected or You Won’t Find It”
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Ted Gioia’s Advice on Writing
- I found intrinsic rewards–solace, stimulation, and joy– in writing.
- I’ve always tried to write well, improve, and push myself outside my comfort zone.
- I care deeply about my reader, whom I think of as an individual and almost as a friend.
- The size of the audience is not important; I focus on my connection with the reader.
- I found other ways to pay my bills and became a better writer from my experiences outside of writing.
- It’s remarkable how much things work out in the long run if you are patient and persistent.
Edited and condensed from Ted Gioia’s (@TedGioia) Writing Advice”
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“Money in the bank is like toothpaste in the tube. Easy to take out, hard to put back.”
Earl Wilson
True for time as well, except that hours arrive one hour at a time, depart one hour a time, and cannot be stockpiled.
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“There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply.”
Josh Billings
Maybe it’s not paying our dues that’s difficult but extracting the right lessons from the dues we’ve already paid.
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“I fear the boredom that comes with not learning and not taking chances.”
Robert Fulghum