A collection of quotes of interest and use to entrepreneurs: these quotes for entrepreneurs were identified in November 2014. You can follow @skmurphy to get these quotes for entrepreneurs hot off the mojo wire or wait until they 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 November 2014
+ + +
“It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.”
Soren Kierkegaard
+ + +
“Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.”
Daniel Boorstin
+ + +
“Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”
May Sarton
+ + +
“The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.”
George Eliot in “Janet’s Repentance” (1858)
+ + +
“When things are at their worst I find something always happens.”
W. Somerset Maugham in “Of Human Bondage“
More context, not necessarily good advice for bootstrappers.
“I don’t think of the future,” she said. “As long as I have enough money for three weeks’ rent and a pound or two over for food I never bother. Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.”
+ + +
“Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.”
Marcus Aurelius in “Meditations”
+ + +
Bet on companies with software engineering groups to always win over those with “IT departments.” Actually, that’s a startup ideation strategy. Find Fortune 1000 cos with compartmentalized IT departments. Build what they can’t build.
Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis)
There is something about working in most corporate IT departments that seems to drain any entrepreneurial skills or aspiration.
+ + +
You can’t brake when your car is in the air. Once you place your bets and they spin the wheel you have to wait to see the results.
Sean Murphy
+ + +
“There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.”
Mignon Mclaughlin
+ + +
“Character is what emerges from all the little things you were too busy to do yesterday, but did anyway.”
Mignon Mclaughlin
Looking back too late I realized this was an inadvertent duplicate from the December 2009 quotes for entrepreneurs list. It’s such good advice it probably bears repeating more than twice.
+ + +
“I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back.
Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead.”
Anne Lamott in “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith“
Added as an interstitial quote in “Joseph A Murphy 1925-2007, Seven Years On”
+ + +
“History is not a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.”
Lord Acton
+ + +
“For honest insight into who you are, don’t ask yourself what your priorities are for next week. Ask what your priorities were last week.”
Rob Reed (@RobReed)
One way to is keep a diary of how you actually spent your time, a second is to see what you have scheduled–not just put on your to do list–for this week.
+ + +
The “path” comes into existence only when we observe it.
Werner Heisenberg
+ + +
“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks, learns as much from his failures as from his success.”
John Dewey
+ + +
“When a man has no reason to trust himself, he trusts in luck.”
Edward Howe
+ + +
“Trust movement.
Life happens at the level of events, not of words.
Trust only movement.”
Alfred Adler
Good advice for negotiations as well; mix small steps with ongoing negotiations. I used this in “Fifteen Quotes on Negotiation.”
+ + +
“Just about every error has a technical and psychological component: get good at discovering those connections”
Josh Waitzkin in Thomas Huynh’s “Interview with Josh Waitzkin”
Quoted in “Recurring Problems Have Both Technical and Psychological Roots.”
+ + +
“Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.”
Demosthenes
I think the correlation runs even stronger in the other direction: almost all great enterprises begin with small opportunities. Too often quotes for entrepreneurs advise thinking big, seeing the big picture, etc.. I like Bob Bemer’s “Do something small but useful now” and who knows it may snowball.
+ + +
“A community is a small group working together. Community scales by adding groups, and building connections between them, not enlarging them.”
Rob Reed (@RobReed)
+ + +
“I don’t care who you are, what you look like, or what you own. I only care about what you do for others.”
Ed Weissman (@edw519)
+ + +
“A community that learns together excels together.
We need to form communities that learn together.”
Rob Reed (@RobReed)
One term of art for a community that learns together is “community of practice.” I have blogged about why “Entrepreneurs Need a Community of Practice Not a Movement.”
+ + +
“Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.”
Buckminster Fuller in “Synergetics“
+ + +
“Any man who’s not willing to take half a loaf in a negotiation, well, that man never went to bed hungry.”
Lyndon Johnson (via Evan Bayh)
+ + +
“Contentment wears slippers; curiosity wears boots.”
Jack Abrams
h/t James Geary
+ + +
“Connect on your similarities and benefit from your differences.”
Valdis Krebs (@ValdisKrebs)
+ + +
“Design is more of a kitchen than a knife, and more of a lab than a beaker.”
Arman Nobari
h/t Quotes on Design
+ + +
“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
Leo Tolstoy
+ + +
“There is one thing that gives radiance to everything.
It is the idea of something around the corner.”
G. K. Chesterton
+ + +
“When you are looking for early customers the value hypothesis is critical. You may reach them using non-scalable methods that don’t address your first real growth hypothesis.”
Sean Murphy in Difference Between a Hypothesis and an Assumption
+ + +
“A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.”
Brenda Laurel
h/t Karel Vredenburg Quote Collection I used this in “Fifteen Quotes on Negotiation.”
+ + +
“Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits.”
Benjamin Franklin
+ + +
re: You can’t brake when your car is in the air.
All-wheel drive means all wheels on the ground.
Pingback: SKMurphy, Inc. Quotes for Entrepreneurs - December 2009 - SKMurphy, Inc.