You can follow @skmurphy to get them hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when these quotes for entrepreneurs are collected on the blog. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts to your inbox.
Quotes For Entrepreneurs May 2011
“Ever notice that ‘what the hell’ is always the right decision?”
Marilyn Monroe
h/t Bob Lewis
+ + +
“Be nice. The world is a small town.”
Austin Kleon “How To Steal Like An Artist“
+ + +
“You cannot be both fashionable and first rate.”
Logan Pearsall Smith
+ + +
“Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.”
Edward V. Berard
h/t Michael Ringgaard‘s collection “Quotations on Simplicity in Software Design”
+ + +
“If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Henry Ford
There is no source for this quote and based on other statements by Ford is very unlikely he actually said or thought this; see Entrepreneurial Passion and the Science of Startups for my analysis.
+ + +
“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
Thomas Jefferson
+ + +
“Empires build Death Stars, rebels build X-Wing fighters.”
Sean Murphy in “Finding a Co-Founder: 3 Months is a Long Time“
+ + +
“Let each man exercise the art he knows. ”
Aristophanes
hat tip to Patrick Vlaskovits
+ + +
“The only way to fight ignorance is to admit it.”
Wei-Cheng Sun
+ + +
“A month in the laboratory can often save an hour in the library.”
Frank H. Westheimer
I like this quote and have used it as a closing quote for “Customer Interviews: Spend an Hour On Research to Save a Minute in Conversation,” an interstitial quote in “Fish and the Bait,” and as an inline quote in “The Phoenix Checklist for Framing a Problem and Its Solution.”
+ + +
“An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.”
John Tukey
h/t Bill Mill and John Cook (this version is from “Super Freakonomics” page 224) the actual quote is:
“Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.”
John Tukey in “The future of data analysis.” Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33 (1), (1962), page 13.
I used the actual quote in “Early Markets Offer Fluid Opportunities”
+ + +
“Dare to be naive.”
Buckminster Fuller
+ + +
“A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved.”
Buckminster Fuller
+ + +
Startups see fluid opportunities in dynamic environments, but no certainties before opportunities pass or the “situation changes.”
Sean Murphy in “Early Markets Offer Fluid Opportunities“
+ + +
“Beware the fury of a patient man.”
John Dryden in “Absalom and Achitophel”
inspired by Furor fit laesa saepius patientia.
Patience when tested too often turns to anger.
Publilius Syrus
+ + +
“Stubborn genius” is a tautology, but “stubborn fool” is as well, alas.
Sean Murphy in “Giving Up Too Soon, Persisting Too Long“
+ + +
“It is wrong that Science Fiction is not on high school reading lists. The current reading lists adapt kids to live in the 1700’s.”
Nolan Bushnell (@NolanBushnell)
+ + +
“Knowledge workers outlive organizations, and they are mobile. The need to manage oneself is therefore creating a revolution in human affairs.”
Peter Drucker “Managing Oneself“
More context from the conclusion of the article:
“In effect, managing oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief executive officer. Further, the shift from manual workers who do as they are told to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves profoundly challenges social structure. Every existing society, even the most individualistic one, takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously: that organizations outlive workers, and that most people stay put.
But today the opposite is true. Knowledge workers outlive organizations, and they are mobile. The need to manage oneself is therefore creating a revolution in human affairs.
Peter Drucker “Managing Oneself”
Managing Oneself was the basis for the second meeting of the Book Club for Business Impact .
+ + +
“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.”
Walter Elliot