You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire or wait until these quotes for entrepreneurs are collected in a blog post at the end of each month. Enter your E-mail address if you would like have new blog posts sent to you.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in November 2013
+ + +
“There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.”
Charles Dickens
+ + +
“People may or may not say what they mean, but they always say something designed to get what they want.”
David Mamet (@DailyMamet)
+ + +
“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order–willed, faked, and so brought into being.”
Anne Dillard in “The Writing Life“
I blogged about “Annie Dillard on the Appreciation of Grace and Beauty” in December of 2010.
+ + +
“Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often for the wise.”
Jerome K. Jerome
+ + +
“Value is determined by the customer in the act of paying for a product. That payment may be in terms of cash, their time spent, private data freely given, or any other means, but payment is the ultimate arbiter of value.”
Tristan Kromer (@TriKro) in “Lean Startup In the Enterprise Anti-Pattern: Lean Waterfall“
+ + +
“Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.”
Bill Watterson
+ + +
“Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.”
Somerset Maugham
+ + +
“The two chief things that give a man reputation in counsel, are the opinion of his honesty, and the opinion of his wisdom; the authority of those two will persuade.”
Ben Jonson
+ + +
“It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.”
Erma Bombeck
+ + +
“We’re lending money
we don’t have,
to kids who will never be able to pay it back,
for jobs that no longer exist.”
Mike Rowe on “The Worst Advice in the History of the World“
+ + +
“Wisdom comes with winters.”
Oscar Wilde
+ + +
“They didn’t want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.”
Robert Heinlein
h/t Kevin Murphy
+ + +
“I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.”
Georgia O’Keeffe
+ + +
“One half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.”
Sidney Howard
+ + +
“Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him.”
Lord Chesterfield
+ + +
“Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before–consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.”
George Eliot in Adam Bede (1859)
+ + +
“Take from the altar of the past the fire, not the ashes.”
Jean Juares
+ + +
“You don’t make your character in a crisis, you exhibit it.”
Oren Arnold
+ + +
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
Virginia Woolf
+ + +
“The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds.”
Claude Bernard
+ + +
“The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.”
Clay Shirky in “Healthcare.gov and the gap between planning and reality“
More context:
“Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.”
+ + +
“Collaboration apps have two marketing hurdles. You need to first convince one user, and second help them to convince their whole team to use it.”
Des Traynor (@DesTraynor)
+ + +
“Fear is static that prevents me from hearing my intuition.”
Hugh Prather
+ + +
“Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation.”
David Weinberger in Chapter 5 “The Hyperlinked Organization” of “The ClueTrain Manifesto”
More context:
You see, the hyperlinks that replace the org chart as the primary structure of the organization are in fact conversations. They are the paths talk takes. And a business is, more than anything else, the set of conversations going on.
Business is a conversation because the defining work of a business is conversation — literally. And “knowledge workers” are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations.
Conversations are where ideas happen and partnerships are formed.
+ + +
“It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is caused.”
William Cobbett
+ + +
“Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.”
G. K. Chesterton
+ + +
“If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.”
Louis L’Amour
Used as the opening quote for 7 Years & 1226 Blog Posts: Lessons Learned So Far
+ + +
“Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving.”
W. T. Purkiser
Used as opening quote for “Thanksgiving 2013”
+ + +
“Authenticity is the new bullshit.”
Hugh MacLeod
Used as a section break in 7 Years & 1226 Blog Posts: Lessons Learned So Far.
+ + +
“Much unhappiness results from our inability to remember the nice things that happen to us.”
W.N. Rieger
Used as closing quote in “Thanksgiving 2013”
+ + +
“This stuff is hard. That’s why it’s interesting.”
Hugh MacLeod
Used as a section break in 7 Years & 1226 Blog Posts: Lessons Learned So Far.
+ + +
“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”
Albert Schweitzer
Used as section break in “Thanksgiving 2013”
+ + +
“A man of genius may sometimes suffer a miserable sterility; but at other times he will feel himself the magician of thought. Luminous ideas will dart from the intellectual firmament, just as if the stars were falling around him; sometimes he must think by mental moonlight, but sometimes his ideas reflect the solar splendour.”
John Foster Journal
Used as a section break in 7 Years & 1226 Blog Posts: Lessons Learned So Far.
+ + +
“…to whom much is given much will be required…”
Luke 12:48
Full verse:
“But he who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, shall receive a light beating. Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required; and of him to whom men commit much they will demand the more.”
Luke 12:48 (Revised Standard Version)
Used as section break in “Thanksgiving 2013”
+ + +
“We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.”
Somerset Maugham
Used as the closing quote for 7 Years & 1226 Blog Posts: Lessons Learned So Far.
+ + +