Quotes for Entrepreneurs–January 2014

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Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in 2014

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“It is never too late to become what you might have been.”
George Eliot

Used as opening quote for “Welcome to 2014”

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“Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it.”
Rumi

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“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”
Willa Cather

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“Talent develops in tranquility, character in the full current of human life.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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“The Information Age should be defined by the scarcity of context as much as it is the abundance of information.”
Andrew Sliwinski (@thisandagain)

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“It’s not enough to provide some positive benefit. It’s also important to ask whether there are other, better, less expensive and resource-intensive ways of achieving the same goal.”
Peter Suderman (@petersuderman) in “No, ObamaCare Won’t Reduce Emergency Room Usage“

Inspired by these study results

“Adults who are covered by Medicaid use emergency rooms 40 percent more than those in similar circumstances who do not have health insurance, according to a unique new study, co-authored by an MIT economist, that sheds empirical light on the inner workings of health care in the U.S.”
“Having Medicaid increases emergency room visits“

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“In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.”
G. K. Chesterton

h/t “Discover Chesterton: Quotes”

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“All of us know the rules for getting ahead, but most of us think that our case is important enough to justify a few exceptions.”
William Feather

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“With laws shall our land be built up but with lawlessness laid waste.”
Njal’s Saga

From the translation by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Palsson, originally quoted in “We Started With Two Empty Hands.” I was reminded of this when I re-read Njal’s Saga over the Christmas holidays.

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“In the quiet hours when we are alone with ourselves and there is nobody to tell us what fine fellows we are, we come sometimes upon a weak moment in which we wonder, not how much money we are earning, nor how famous we are becoming, but what good we are doing.”
A. A. Milne, in “Our Learned Friends” from Not That It Matters

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“I hate vacations. There’s nothing to do.”
David Mamet

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“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.”
Rumi

h/t My Small Boat

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“The search for a scalable business model does not have a finish line. All businesses must revisit this challenge periodically.”
Sean Murphy in “Product Market Fit Metrics”

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“In the margin for error lies all our room for maneuver.”
James Geary in “My Aphorisms“

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“Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.”
George Lichtenberg

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“Use, use your powers: what now costs you effort will in the end become mechanical.”
Georg Lichtenberg

Used as closing quote for “Welcome to 2014”

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“To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”
Nicolaus Copernicus

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“Tactic is an algorithm.
Strategy is a structure.”
Roman Porotnikov (@deepcode)

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“To pursue the happiness within our reach, we do best to pour ourselves into faith, family, community and meaningful work.”
Arthur C. Brooks in “A Formula for Happiness“

Used a closing quote for “The Intelligent Pursuit of Happiness.”

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“Complex environments often call for simple decision rules. That is because these rules are more robust to ignorance.”
Andrew G Haldane

h/t @StatFact

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“To an ant, gravity is nothing, but surface tension is a powerful force. When you change scale, you play by different rules.”
Waldo Jaquith (@waldojaquith)

echoes “On Being the Right Size” (1928) by J. B. S. Haldane

 

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.

An insect, therefore, is not afraid of gravity; it can fall without danger, and can cling to the ceiling with remarkably little trouble. It can go in for elegant and fantastic forms of support like that of the daddy-longlegs. But there is a force which is as formidable to an insect as gravitation to a mammal. This is surface tension. A man coming out of a bath carries with him a film of water of about one-fiftieth of an inch in thickness. This weighs roughly a pound. A wet mouse has to carry about its own weight of water. A wet fly has to lift many times its own weight and, as everyone knows, a fly once wetted by water or any other liquid is in a very serious position indeed.
“On Being the Right Size” by J. B. S. Haldane

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“Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”
Franklin Roosevelt

h/t  Arthur C. Brooks “A Formula for Happiness“ used as a section head in “The Intelligent Pursuit of Happiness.”

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“No one makes history: one doesn’t see it happen, any more than we see the grass grow.”
Boris Pasternak

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“Money never starts an idea; it is the idea that starts the money.”
William J. Cameron

I think this is a key principle of entrepreneurship that bootstrappers understand implicitly.

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“Orientation is the Schwerpunkt. It shapes the way we observe, the way we decide, the way we act.”
John Boyd in his “Organic Design” presentation

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“I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.”
Caskie Stinnett

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1. Make Lists
2. Carry a Notebook Everywhere
3. Try Free Writing
9. Listen to New Music
12. Get Feedback
13. Collaborate
16. Allow Mistakes
18. Count Your Blessings
24. Create a Framework
29. Finish Something

Paul Zappia (@PaulZii) in “29 Ways to Stay Creative.”

These ten were the basis for “Ten from Paul Zappia’s ’29 Ways to Stay Creative.'”

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“An entrepreneur has more ideas than resources”
Conor Neill (@cuchullainn) in “What is an Entrepreneur?“

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“It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.”
Claude Bernard

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“We can only connect the dots that we collect.”
Amanda Palmer

h/t @StatFact (more at BrainPicking’s “Amanda Palmer on Creativity as Connecting the Dots“)

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“Learn to listen. Opportunity could be knocking at your door very softly.”
Reg Saddler (@zaibatsu)

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“If you want to get rid of somebody, just tell’em something for their own good.”
Kin Hubbard

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“It’s only after you fail once or twice and learn to rely equally on thought, analysis, and anticipation–in addition to speed, talent, and execution–that you can really call yourself an entrepreneur. ”
Barry Moltz in “You Need to Be a Little Crazy“

Used as closing quote in ‘The Likely Consequences of Entrepreneurship Require Perseverance.”
Originally cited in “You Need to Be a Little Crazy.”

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“Sooner or later I am going to die, but I’m not going to retire.”
Margaret Mead

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“What you don’t know may not hurt you,
but what you don’t remember always does.”
Gerald Weinberg (@JerryWeinberg) in “Secrets of Consulting”

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“People will listen a great deal more patiently while you explain your mistakes than when you explain your successes.”
Wilbur N. Nesbit

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“One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.”
James Russell Lowell

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“A hypothesis is what is being tested explicitly by an experiment. An assumption is tested implicitly. By making your assumptions as well as your hypotheses explicit you increase the clarity of your approach and the chance for learning.”
Sean Murphy in “Difference Between a Hypothesis and an Assumption“

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“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted.”
Edwin Land

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“Surprise exists in the map, not in the territory. There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts.”
Eliezer Yudkowsky in “Think Like Reality“

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“This is the fundamental thing to realize about undergraduate education, that students are judged by how closely they resemble professors. Excellence in other ways is ignored. It is an incredibly wasteful system. ”
Seth Roberts in “Berkeley Undergraduates and Professors: Then and Now“

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“We build up whole cultural patterns based on past ‘facts’ which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don’t throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact.”
Robert Pirsig in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

Used in “Discerning the Future”

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Being good means judging yourself in the context “compared to what?”
Gregory Sullivan in “Nails“

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