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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–June 2011
I keep reading books where I think, “This book would make a great article”
Paul Tyma (@paultyma)
And lately I think, “this article would have made for a pithy tweet.”
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“If you look closely at the origins of most major companies and you will find they started out building a solution to one problem but finding success by finding a better problem for their solution.”
Andrew Hargadon “Finding New Problems“
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“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
Arthur Ashe (see “Arthur Ashe Quotes“)
This is apparently based on a quote by Bill Widener “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”
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“Start where you are with what you have. Make something of it and never be satisfied.”
George Washington Carver
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“If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.”
Stanley Kubrick
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“The essence of management is not techniques and procedures. The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.”
Peter Drucker
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“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
Rumi
For some reason this reminds me of this quote:
“You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.”
Dag Hammarskjold
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“The greatest marketers do two things: they treat customers with respect and they measure.”
Seth Godin “Seth Godin’s Unforgivable Manifesto“
hat tip to Rajeev Kulkarni (@45ideas)
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I don’t care so much how much money you raised, or who you raised it from. I care a lot about who your customers are and why (or if) they’re happy.
Seth Godin “Getting Funded is Not the Same as Succeeding“
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“When my father died it was like a whole library burned down.”
Laurie Anderson “World Without End”
I used this as the to open my blog post on “Father’s Day 2011“, a series of reminiscences on all that I owe my father. I also used these quotes:
- “Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some resolution which it may never find.” Robert Anderson
- “Courage is the capacity to conduct oneself with restraint in times of prosperity and with courage and tenacity when things do not go well.” James V. Forrestal
- “Each person’s only hope for improving his lot rests on his recognizing the true nature of his basic personality, surrendering to it, and becoming who he is.” Sheldon Kopp
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“The real problem is usually when to make a decision, and not what the decision should be.”
George C. Marshall
I used this in “Fifteen Quotes on Negotiation.”
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“Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control.”
Howard Stevenson
I used this as the opening for “Fifteen Quotes on Negotiation.”
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“3-D negotiators shape the scope and sequence of negotiations to achieve the desired outcome.”
David Lax & James Sebenius in “3D Negotiation”
This quote was highlighted in our Book Club Business Impact webinar on “3D Negotiation”
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“We thought we’d learn how to pick winners. What we learned instead is that it’s impossible.”
Paul Graham on seed investment in Hackers News Item 2708039
Longer excerpt:
“We thought we’d learn how to pick winners. What we learned instead is that it’s impossible. Not just because luck is such a big factor, but because founders change.”
Paul Graham on seed investment in Hackers News Item 2708039
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“Even cowards can endure hardship; only the brave can endure suspense.”
Mignon McLaughlin
I think the suspense and ambiguity of the sales process is the hardest thing about entrepreneurship. I used this in “Success for a Bootstrapper“