A collection of quotes of interest and use to entrepreneurs: these quotes for entrepreneurs were identified in October 2010.
Quotes For Entrepreneurs–October 2010
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“No one is invincible. Finding and managing flaws is the secret to survival.”
Chris Kappler
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“I became increasingly convinced that it is not knowledge, but the means of gaining knowledge, which I have to teach.”
Arnold of Rugby
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“Social tools aren’t interesting until the technology becomes boring. The social effects are more important than how the technology works.”
Clay Shirky in an Apr-3-2008 interview with Stephen Colbert
Hat Tip to Jeff Nolan’s “The Technology Doesn’t Matter”
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“Take notes on the spot; a note is worth a cartload of recollection.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have written about the value of jotting your thoughts on 3×5 cards, but Emerson’s quote offers more encouragement
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“The greatest risk is not in the development of new products, but the development of customers and markets.”
Steve Blank in “The Four Steps to the Epiphany”
It’s the front quotation in Ash Maurya‘s new “Running Lean” book.
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“Thoughts only become decisions with action.”
Chris Hopf
Although a decision can result in inaction and inaction can become a decision by default
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“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”
Seneca
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“An unconference is to a conference what Wikipedia is to an encyclopedia.”
Dan Haugen in “Saving Innovation“
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“A startup turns you into both the lab rat struggling desperately to survive and the lab scientist standing back and measuring his performance. It gives you less patience with the ideologues telling you what the rat should have done.”
Glen Kelman “The Crazy Woman Speaks“
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“The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
Charles DuBois
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“Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work.”
David Grayson (pen name for Ray Stannard Baker) in”The Marsh Ditch”
“The Marsh Ditch” is collected in his “Adventures in Contentment” Here is a longer excerpt for context:
—I had another drink at the creek and went back somewhat reluctantly, I confess, to the work. It was hot, and the first joy of effort had worn off. But the ditch was to be dug and I went at it again. One becomes a sort of machine—unthinking, mechanical: and yet intense physical work, though making no immediate impression on the mind, often lingers in the consciousness. I find that sometimes I can remember and enjoy for long afterward every separate step in a task.
It is curious, hard physical labour! One actually stops thinking. I often work long without any thought whatever, so far as I know, save that connected with the monotonous repetition of the labour itself—down with the spade, out with it, up with it, over with it—and repeat. And yet sometimes—mostly in the forenoon when I am not at all tired—I will suddenly have a sense as of the world opening around me—a sense of its beauty and its meanings—giving me a peculiar deep happiness, that is near complete content—
Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work. It is one of the follies of men to imagine that they can enjoy mere thought, or emotion, or sentiment! As well try to eat beauty! For happiness must be tricked! She loves to see men at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice. She will be found not in palaces but lurking in cornfields and factories and hovering over littered desks: she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child. If you look up suddenly from hard work you will see her, but if you look too long she fades sorrowfully away.
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“Too much information” is freedom from necessity creating a surplus of free attention.”
Michael O’Malley in “Attention and Information“
More context:
So what appears to us as “too much information” could just be the freedom from necessity. I don’t have to worry about finding and cutting and storing firewood: I don’t even have to manage a coal furnace. That attention has been freed up for other things. What we see as “too much information” is probably something more like “a surplus of free attention.”
Michael O’Malley in “Attention and Information“
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