Quotes For Entrepreneurs–March 2014

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Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in March 2014

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“We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.”
John Dryden

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“Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.”
T. S. Eliot

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“It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”
Henry David Thoreau

Other versions of this exist but this version is taken from Thoreau’s letter to his friend, H.G.O. Blake, on 16 November 1857.
h/t The Henry D.Thoreau Mis-Quotation Page at Walden.org

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“It is not enough to tolerate dissent: sometimes you have to demand it.”
Jack Galvin

h/t Brad Pierce in a comment in “Terry Frazier on How to Do Real Competitive Analysis”

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“Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.”
David Mamet in The Secret Knowledge

I used this as a closing quote in “Nomadic Entrepreneurs In Indigenous Markets”

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“Design is creativity with a strategy.”
Rob Curedale

h/t Expa.com (@Expa) also found at Quotes on Design, a great resource for design quotes.

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It’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
T. S. Eliot

In an interview with Donald Hall in the Paris Review “T. S. Eliot, the Art of Poetry No. 1” Eliot said:

“I wanted to get to learn the technique of the theater so well that I could then forget about it. I always feel it’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.” T. S. Eliot

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“Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.”
George S. Patton

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“My capital is time, not money”
Marcel Duchamp

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“Anytime we see a line, the product in question is underpriced.”
Naval Ravikant (@naval) in “The Bitcoin Model for Crowdfunding“

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“Opportunity is sometimes hard to recognize if you’re only looking for a lucky break.”
Monta Crane

h/t Gerald Weinberg (@JerryWeinberg)

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“If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is.”
Henry David Thoreau

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“How can so many things I’ve no more use for still have so much meaning for me.”
Ashleigh Brilliant

I feel this sensation most strongly when I look through boxes in my garage that store items I kept from old jobs and old startups. I regret loss of things I threw away: pictures and printouts I posted on the walls of my office or cubicle, chip plots, trade show posters, etc…

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“Execution focus yields a prioritized network of interdependent tasks;
exploration yields a portfolio of risks and options.”
Sean Murphy

I have been helping Patrick Steyaert on a new version of his Discovery Kanban talk. This sentence was my attempt at crystallizing the difference between execution and exploration.

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“Sometimes you come to an edge that just breaks off.”
Anne Carson

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“I know the price of success; dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.”
Frank Lloyd Wright

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“Luck cannot be duplicated.”
Richard Kostelanetz

h/t James  Geary
Used as a the opening quote for Feeling Lucky is Not a Strategy

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“Diligence is the mother of good luck.”
Benjamin Franklin

Used as the closing quote for Feeling Lucky is Not a Strategy

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“We work to become, not to acquire.”
Elbert Hubbard

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“A focus on revenue is core to bootstrapping but often at odds with the ‘venture lifestyle business.'”
Sean Murphy

In reply to a tweet by Rashaun P. Sourles (@rashaunps) “@skmurphy: Though my last startup failed, I’ve never forgotten the lessons you taught me about hustling early revenue. Just wish I had listened!”

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“The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.”
John Buchan

I think there are similarities to the early sales process. I can recall once waiting in a conference room with two founders staring at a speaker phone waiting for a scheduled call to start and feeling an eerie similarity to standing at the edge  of a pond with other boys holding our fishing poles with our lines in the water. It led me to write one of my “details as they..” tag lines:

“Details as they stand poised in an expectant silence, like runners before a starting gun, old men waiting for the fish to bite, or a sales team clustered around a speakerphone waiting for the prospect to call back.”
Sean Murphy

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“We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.”
Max De Pree

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“Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.”
Lord Chesterfield

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“Don’t take business advice from people with bad personal lives.”
Frank Chimero “Some Lessons I Learned in 2013“

Used as the opening quote for “Building a Business Requires Building Trust.”

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“The wise speak only of what they know”
J.R.R. Tolkien

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 “Fame is something that must be won.
Honor is something that must not be lost.”
Arthur Schopenhauer

Used as closing quote for “Building a Business Requires Building Trust.”

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“You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.”
Neil Gaiman

h/t Neil Gaiman’s Advice to Aspiring Writers

Gaiman has offered at least two variations on the importance of learning from finishing:

“Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from  a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.”
Neil Gaiman during “Question Time” section of “An evening of awesome with Hank and John Green” (Jan 15 2013) [transcript]

and

“Personally, I think you learn more from finishing things, from seeing them in print, wincing, and then figuring out what you did wrong, than you could ever do from eternally rewriting the same thing.”
Neil Gaiman in “No longer the blog without giraffes“

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“The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change.”
Edwin H. Friedman

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“The quality I most admire in a man is steadfastness.”
David Mamet

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“There is nothing so fatal to character as half-finished tasks.”
David Lloyd George

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“I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”
William Stafford

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“Delivering value is a pre-requisite for sustainably capturing value i.e. getting paid.”
Ash Maurya (@ashmaurya)

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“An MVP is about delivering real value to customers for the purposes of maximizing validated learning.”
Shardul Mehta in “A Case Study in Defining an MVP“

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“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”
George Eliot

Update April 2: this appears to be incorrectly sourced to Eliot and is in fact a quote from Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo Sun-Oct-22-1882

“For the great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together. ”
Vincent Van Gogh

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“Sometimes one pays the most for things one gets for nothing.”
Albert Einstein  in “What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck” published in ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ on October 26, 1929

h/t Quoteyard

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“When you’re more susceptible to interruption, you do more out of the box thinking.”
Don Norman (found at  Quotes on Design)

Seems to be based on the last sentence in this paragraph from “Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better”

Affect makes us smart, that’s the lesson of my current research into the role of affect. This is because affect is always passing judgments, presenting us with immediate information about the world: here is potential danger, there is potential comfort. This is nice, that bad. The affective signals work through neurochemicals, bathing the relevant brain centers and changing the way we perceive, decide, and react. These neurochemicals change the parameters of thought, adjusting such things as whether reason is primarily depth first (focused, not easily distracted) or breadth first (creative, out of the box thinking, but easily distractible).

[…] Positive affect broadens the thought processes, making it more easily distractible. When the problem requires focus, this is bad, but when the problem is best addressed through creative, out-of-the-box thinking, then this is precisely what is needed.

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“Calvin: I’m a misunderstood genius.”
“Hobbes: What’s misunderstood?”
“Calvin: Nobody thinks I’m a genius.”
Bill Watterson

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“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
James Joyce, Ulysses

h/t Shaun Moran (@ShaunM_Dub) offered as a response to Einstein quote: “Sometimes one pays the most for things one gets for nothing.”

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If you think lemons are bitter try some of that fruit from the bin labelled “experience.”
Sean Murphy

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“Change careers like Tarzan: don’t let go of the old until the new supports you, but don’t lose momentum.”
Derek Sivers (@sivers) in “Change Careers Like Tarzan“

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“The shortcut that’s sure to work, every time: take the long way. Do the hard work, consistently and with generosity and transparency. And then you won’t waste time doing it over.”

Seth Godin in “The Certain Shortcut”

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