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Quotes For Entrepreneurs Collected in July 2011
“We improve ourselves by victories over our self. There must be contests and we must win.”
Edward Gibbon
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“Diogenes once begged alms of a statue. When asked why he replied, “To get practice in being refused.”
Diogenes Laertius
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“Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.”
Logan Pearsall Smith in “After Thoughts”
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“Quality is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for.”
Peter Drucker
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One of the books we highlighted in “Crucial Marketing Concepts for Entrepreneurs” was Doug Hall’s “Jumpstart your business Brain which contains these very useful rules of thumb:
Three Laws of Marketing Physics:
- Overt Benefit
- Real Reason to Believe.
- Dramatic Difference
Doug Hall in “Jumpstart Your Business Brain”
Longer version
The Three Laws of Marketing Physics
Your product must have:
- An Overt Benefit – what’s in it for the customer? What good thing – benefit – do they get from your product? You must be able to articulate this very clearly. You can’t depend on prospects to figure it out themselves, you have to tell them directly.
- A Real Reason to Believe – Persuasive credibility that your product can deliver what you’re promising with your Overt Benefit. Customer confidence is low, and distrust of vendors is high, especially nowadays. Your buyer may have as much or more knowledge as you do! You need highly credible and distinct evidence that the customer will gain the benefits you are promising.
- A Dramatic Difference – Of course you know you need to differentiate from your competitors to win. But you may not realize how dramatic the difference needs to be. See if you can make it ten times bigger than you think you need to. Focus it directly on the Overt Benefit and the Real Reason To Believe.
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“Reading a scientific article isn’t the same as reading a detective story. We want to know from the start that the butler did it.”
Oscar D. Ratnoff
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“Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
Alfred North Whitehead in An Introduction to Mathematics
quoted in Tony Schwartz’s “The Only Way to Get Important Things Done” via Attention Management blog. More context:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
Alfred North Whitehead in An Introduction to Mathematics
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“You’re competing against people in a state of flow, people who are truly committed, people who care deeply about the outcome.”
Seth Godin in “Texting While Working“
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“The brain processes meaning before detail.”
John Medina in “Brain Rules“
More context:
The brain processes meaning before detail. Providing the gist, the core concept, first was like giving a thirsty person a tall glass of water. And the brain likes hierarchy. Starting with general concepts naturally leads to explaining information in a hierarchical fashion. You have to do the general idea first. And then you will see that 40 percent improvement in understanding.
John Medina in “Brain Rules“
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“Attack the differentiation problem at the right layer, reinventing from the bottom may be more effort than is necessary.”
Sean Murphy
Discovered in an old e-mail.
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“Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament.”
Logan Pearsall Smith
One of the six quotes in “Six Afterthoughts for Entrepreneurs by Logan Pearsall Smith”
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“Best strategy used to be ready, aim, fire. Now the best strategy is ready, fire, steer.”
Paul Saffo in How To Mobilize The New Players on the Field by Richard Edelman
I used this quote in “Paul Saffo: Best Strategy is Ready Fire Steer”
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“Why would I invite my friends to sign-up, when I haven’t even tested it out first?”
Takara Swoopes Bullock in “I’ve Notice a Major Flaw in Coming Soon Pages“
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Permission marketing: anticipated, personal and relevant messages delivered to people who actually want to get them.
Seth Godin in “E-Mail Checklist, Maybe This Time It Will Work“
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What’s scarce? Good ideas, not just fast ones. Shipping the good ideas. Finding the spot where uncomfortable meets important.
Seth Godin “Has the Speed Shortage Been Averted?“
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Marketing encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of the customer.
Peter Drucker
More context (suggested in a comment from Brad Pierce on “The Deformation Professionelle of the Software Entrepreneur):
“Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of the final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must therefore permeate all areas of the enterprise.”
It’s from Drucker’s “The Practice of Management,” Pierce offered it as context for Drucker’s definition of the basic functions of a business in “Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, and Practices” :
“Because the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”