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Quotes for Entrepreneurs–June 2014
“Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.”
Maya Angelou (1928-2014)
Good advice for business and friendship.
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“Many a genius is slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.”
George H. Lewes
h/t Tamela Lewis (@MattersOfSmart)
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“Success, as I see it, is a result, not a goal.”
Gustave Flaubert
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“A business without profit is not a business any more than a pickle is a candy.”
Charles F. Abbott
h/t Robert W. Kent “Money Talk$: 2,500 Greatest Business Quotes” (1985)
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“Everyone lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.”
Robert Louis Stevenson in “Across the Plains
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“Now is no time to think of what you do not have.
Think of what you can do with that there is.”
Ernest Hemingway in “The Old Man and the Sea“
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“A term that is vastly superior to ‘best practices:’ Default choices.”
Reginald Braithwaite (@raganwald)
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“You can’t control the conversation, you can just improve the conversation.”
Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) in Gaping Void Art: “Improve the Conversation“
h/t David Gurteen ( @DavidGurteen)
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“A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.”
Albert Einstein
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“Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb)
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“The best armor is to keep out of range.”
Italian Proverb
Which may be related to Francis Bacon’s “The best armor is to keep out of gunshot” where gunshot means “range of gunfire.”
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“Three grand essentials for happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
Joseph Addison
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“It’s not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.”
Wallace Stevens
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“Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to popular belief, is more powerful in the mature than the young.”
W. Somerset Maugham
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“One of the most heinous, insidious lies is the notion that you have to be an asshole to be a successful business person.”
Alan Cooper (@MrAlanCooper)
For some related commentary see
- Building a Business Requires Building Trust
- The Lucky and the Wise
- Treat Social Capital with the Same Care as Cash
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“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
Arthur Rimbaud
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“Be careful of the ‘story so far’ that you tell yourself. It anchors your position not only with others but in your own mind.”
Sean Murphy
See “Be Careful of How You Tell Yourself ‘The Story so Far’”
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Is the critical path “Will someone pay for this” or “Can we get it to work”?
Sean Murphy
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“Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
h/t Fred O’Bryant’s Quotations Page
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“What isn’t tried won’t work.”
Claude McDonald
h/t Fred O’Bryant’s Quotations Page
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“All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.”
Sidney Lumet
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“Peers in a Community of Practice or a Mastermind group help you see the adjacent possible and persevere in moving toward it.”
Sean Murphy
My tl;dr for both “Reflections on Startup Conference 2014 in Redwood City” and “A Mastermind Group Can Help Entrepreneurs Achieve Their Goals”
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“The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.”
Benjamin Disraeli
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“Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.”
Learned Hand
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“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
Virginia Woolf in “A Room of One’s Own” [online]
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“The essence of strategy is to align your ends with your means: to match your goals and your resources.”
Walter Russell Mead in “Groping For A Reset“
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“Emails get reactions. Phone calls start conversations.”
Simon Sinek (@simonsinek)
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“Discontent follows ambition like a shadow.”
Henry S. Haskins
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“Build pockets of stillness into your life.”
Maria Popova (@brainpicker) in “7 Lessons From 7 Years“
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“Do odd jobs with an even temper, cultivating small kindnesses, a sense of humor, and calmness. ”
Sean Murphy
A rework of the closing two sentences to “Odd Jobs With an Even Temper” to make them apply to every member of the startup team.
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“Honesty pays, but it don’t seem to pay enough to suit some people.”
Frank McKinney Hubbard
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To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1883-1955) in “The Revolt of the Masses”
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“Opportunity is a bird that never perches.”
Claude McDonald
For some reason this reminds me of this stanza from Rush‘s Dreamline
They travel on the road to redemption
A highway out of yesterday, that tomorrow will bring
Like lovers and heroes, birds in the last days of spring
We’re only at home when we’re on the wing
On the wing
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“The maxim ‘Nothing avails but perfection’ may be spelt shorter: ‘Paralysis.'”
Winston Churchill
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“Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.”
Norman Cousins
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“Life is not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“Getting angry can sometimes be like leaping into a wonderfully responsive sports car, gunning the motor, taking off at high speed, and then discovering the brakes are out of order.”
Maggie Scarf
h/t Reader’s Digest Quotable Quotes
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“A challenging and uncertain environment requires you to maximize learning by minimizing the time to try things.”
Twitter-length summary of a bullet from Netflix’s “Our For Impact Culture Code.”
See “Bootstrappers Turn Time Into Resources and Possibilities For Customers” for more more excerpts and my observations on their applicability to for-profit bootstrappers.
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“Information is pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.”
Clarence Day
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“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
Henry David Thoreau
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“The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.”
Jonas Salk, MD
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“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, “but we can’t have both.”
Louis Brandeis
h/t Joel Kotkin in “The Age of Oligarchy”
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“Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell;
I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.”
Charles Studd
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