Quotes for entrepreneurs curated in June of 2021, theme this month is giving a talk, briefing, demo, or presentations.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in June 2021
I collect these quotes for entrepreneurs from a variety of sources and tweet them on @skmurphy about once a day where you can get them hot off the mojo wire. At the end of each month I curate them in a blog post that adds commentary and may contain a longer passage from the same source for context.
Theme for this month is giving a talk, briefing, demo, or presentations.
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“The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe that all his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction.”
Michael Faraday
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“Attendance at your talk is a function of marketing and competition. Focus on the audience in the room, not the one you were hoping for. Don’t lament the turnout to the attendees: they’ve voted with their feet already. When it’s it’s time to start, get started and give the best talk that you can.”
Sean Murphy in “Be Here Now When Giving a Talk”
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“If they smoked at every stoplight, you’d call it an unhealthy addiction.
If they drank at ever stoplight, you’d call it an unhealthy addiction.
Yet there you are, checking your phone at every stoplight.”
Tweet by @AscendantPower
I covered some of this issue in “Superstimulus: Refining Online Interactions into Digital Heroin.”
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“Proper Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance”
A variation on the 7P British Army Adage
I used this as the opening quote for “Rehearsal.”
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“Create something small and simple and quickly get it out there. You’ll get much better and faster feedback than if you try to go around asking people what they want. Refine it based on feedback. Document it. Do it again.”
Steve DiBartolomeo in “Founder Story: Steve DiBartolomeo of Artwork Conversion Software“
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“No story I have covered moved me more than the 50th D-Day anniversary in France. The very sight of those rows of American grave markers in the U.S. cemetery above the beaches of Normandy brought home what sacrifices our soldiers made to liberate not conquer. RIP.”
Brit Hume (@brithume) in June 6 2021 tweet
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“What can be played can be misplayed.
Every win is first won in practice.”
Bruce Pandolfini
Key to a sales good presentation is not just the rehearsal of the pitch but preparation for likely questions and a plan for explaining the next steps if the prospect is interested.
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“Some people find fault like there’s a reward for it.
You never know when a moment and a few sincere words can have an impact on a life.”
Zig Ziglar
Avoid the temptation to find fault with a customer’s current solution or approach. It’s much better to understand what they value about their status quo and so that you can present how to move forward without breaking what they want to keep. This appreciative inquiry approach is more likely to bear fruit than criticizing what they rely on: listen to their criticisms but make sure you understand what they value.
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“The secret to leadership is to see through the eyes of all six important counterparty groups and make sure that everything you do is structured in such a way to be win-win with them:
- your customers
- your suppliers
- your employees
- your owners
- your regulators
- the communities you operate in
And if you can truly see through the eyes of all six of these counterparty groups and understand their needs, their aspirations, their insecurities, their time horizons. How many blind spots do you have now? Zero.”
Peter D. Kaufman in “The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking” (2018)
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“A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.”
George Santayana in Carnival (1922)
The key to a good presentation is to communicate a sense of possibility that your product can unlock.
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“Everybody engaged in complex work needs colleagues. Just the discipline of having to put your thoughts in order with somebody else is a very useful thing.”
Charles Munger
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“There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties, or you alter yourself to meet them.”
Phyllis Bottome
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“To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.”
Johannes A. Gaertner
Giving a talk or writing an article forces you to crystallize what you believe is the best advice for a situation. You can suggest multiple options and methods for diagnosing the situation in detail but life will rarely allow us to wait.
“Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, ‘here and now’ without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point blank. And culture, which is but its interpretation, cannot wait any more than can life itself.”
He also used “life is fired a us point blank” in “Man and People.”
“To live or to be alive or, what is the same thing, to be a man, does not admit of any preparations or preliminary experiments. Life is fired at us point blank. … Where and when we are born, or happen to find ourselves after we were born, there and then, like it or not, we must sink or swim.”
José Ortega y Gasset in “Man and People”
If you are smarter later (and if you are not then have you really been paying attention and learning?) then you can take some comfort in this observation by Mignon McLaughlin:
“You will turn over many a futile new leaf till you learn we must all write on scratched-out pages.”
Mignon McLaughlin
If you refuse then you will have to live with what you have settled for with the reputation you have established and the results you currently achieve. To refuse to improve is to start to die.
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“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
Mark Twain
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“Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.”
Martin Farquhar Tupper (1810-1889)
One of the most effective way to emphasize a point in a demo or sales pitch is to add pauses before and after.
“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
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“No road is long with good company.”
Turkish Proverb
I used this in my next book “Working Capital Vol 2: Forming Your Team” (still in progress) as part of the summary for the “Finding a Cofounder” chapter.
“There is a Turkish proverb, ‘No road is long with good company.’ The right team members make the ups and downs of an entrepreneurial journey much more tolerable. But choose wisely. After a co-founder or two and a few early employees, your company culture will have the malleability of dried concrete. The values that these early team members bring will ultimately determine the values of the startup.”
Sean Murphy in “Working Capital Vol 2: Forming Your Team” (book in progress)
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“Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
Kurt Vonnegut
Basic guideline for any talk or article. Or a sales pitch for that matter. This is the sin of most cold outreach.
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“A speech that is good, if brief, is good twice over.”
Miguel de Cervantes
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“There’s a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstance. You buy that, you pay with your soul.”
Tom Robbins in “Still Life with Woodpecker”
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“A complex system can explore alternatives while exploiting what it already finds useful.”
John H. Holland in “Complexity: A Very Short Introduction “
h/t Joni Baboci “Resilience.” It’s a short introduction to complexity but his explanation for this in an earlier chapter is “In CAS [complex adaptive systems] agents, many rules and production lines are active simultaneously (recall the activities in a biological cell). Because new rules generated by cross-over do not usually replace their parents (replacing weak rules instead), extant production lines are rarely disrupted by new rules, allowing exploration without disrupting regularities already being exploited.”
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“When told you don’t understand the big picture, ask to see that big picture.”
Richard Moran in “Nuts, Bolts, and Jolts“
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“Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgment is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only act by suppressing originality.”
Alfred North Whitehead in “Introduction to Mathematics”
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“Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
Benjamin Franklin
Which reminds me of a quote I used in “Ten Quotes to Help You Bring Order Out of Chaos” which was likely influenced by or derived from this quote by Franklin:
“The difference between a good career and a great career is the ability to leave some things unsaid.”
Keith Herrmann
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“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Kierkegaard
h/t David J Bland (@davidjbland)
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“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
Jack Kerouac
Simplicity is so hard to accomplish but it’s core to a good talk , a well written article, or an effective sales pitch.
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“Discoveries do not arise de novo, like Athene from the brow of Zeus, but are more akin to the living layers of a coral reef built on the past labors of countless predecessors.”
Maurice B. Strauss in Medicine Volume 43, 1964 (p. 619)
h/t Practically Speaking: a Dictionary of Quotations on Engineering, Technology, and Architecture by C. C. Gaither; it’s a great book and part of a series curated by Gaither. Strauss offers an apt biological metaphor for “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
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“I told him the story of the kid who proudly tells his father that he saved a quarter by running alongside a bus rather than taking it. The father slapped the kid on the head for not running next to a taxi and saving a buck fifty.”
Ben R. Rich in “Skunk Works“
A useful antidote to some ROI calculations; another one I like is “Have you heard about the farmer who was able to teach his horse how to work with out feeding it? Just as soon as he got the animal trained it died on him.” I blogged about “Skunk Works” in “The Ship that Never Was” from “Skunk Works” by Ben R. Rich
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“The quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading.
Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.”
Edward Tufte
Useful advice for organizing a sales presentation or demo as well.
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“No healthy democracy allows military officials to be venerated to the point of residing above critique.”
Glenn Greenwald
Also true for any government official…or any successful entrepreneur. Challenge is a Clear Eyed View of the Way Forward
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”Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds us that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while living we are living to ends outside ourselves
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Address to the Harvard Alumni Association to the Class of ’61, in Speeches (1913)
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”The wise are silent, the foolish speak, and the children are thus led astray, for wisdom is not knowledge, it is a realization of the scheme and of one’s own part in it.'”
Algernon Blackwood in “The Bright Messenger” (1921)
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“What we think, or what we know; or what we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do; and for man, woman, or child, the first point of education is to make them do their best.”
John Ruskin in The Crown of Wild Olive ( The Future of England lecture 1869)
More context
So much for the master’s motto, “Every man in his place.” Next for the laborer’s motto, “Every man his chance.” Let us mend that for them a little, and say, “Every man his certainty”—certainty, that if he does well, he will be honored, and aided, and advanced in such degree as may be fitting for his faculty and consistent with his peace; and equal certainty that if he does ill, he will by sure justice be judged, and by sure punishment be chastised; if it may be, corrected; and if that may not be, condemned. That is the right reading of the Republican motto, “Every man his chance.” And then, with such a system of government, pure, watchful and just, you may approach your great problem of national education, or in other words, of national employment. For all education begins in work. What we think, or what we know; or what we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do; and for man, woman, or child, the first point of education is to make them do their best.
John Ruskin in The Crown of Wild Olive ( The Future of England lecture 1869)
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“The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.”
John Buchan in Montrose and Leadership (1930)
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“It is easy to promise results; for only the few look at causes, and trace them to their effects.”
T. S. Arthur “Ten Nights in a Bar Room and What I Saw There.” (Night the Fifth)
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“Do birds sing for the joy of singing? I believe they do. The complexity of their songs is far greater than is needed for recognition or for marking of reserved areas. I have become acquainted with a catbird who obviously derives pleasure as he tries out little phrases on his own. Moreover, I believe that evolution produced birdsongs, and the joy that goes with them, because of the survival value they bestow.
He who struggles with joy in his heart struggles the more keenly because of that joy. Gloom dulls, and blunts the attack. We are not the first to face problems, and as we face them we can hold our heads high. In such spirit was this book written.”
Vannevar Bush in his forward to “Pieces of the Action” (1970)