Quotes for entrepreneurs curated in October of 2021, theme this month is self-improvement and raising the floor of your capabilities.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in October 2021
I curate 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. Please enter your E-mail address if you would like to have new blog posts sent to you.
Theme for this month is self-improvement and raising the floor of your capabilities
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“To rid yourself of old patterns, focus all your energy not on struggling with the old, but on building the new.”
Dan Millman
Reminds me of two quotes by Buckminster Fuller
“Don’t fight forces, use them.” Buckminster Fuller
and
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Buckminster Fuller
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Thought for today: I won’t back down
Well I won’t back down, no I won’t back down
You could stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won’t back downGonna stand my ground, won’t be turned around
And I’ll keep this world from dragging me down
Gonna stand my ground and I won’t back downWell I know what’s right, I got just one life
In a world that keeps on pushing me around
But I’ll stand my ground and I won’t back down
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“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
Anthony Daniels in a Frontpage Magazine interview (August 31, 2005).
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“Always set a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.”
Kevin Kelly in “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice“
I used this originally in “Use the Cult of Done Manifesto to Avoid Procrastination and Perfectionism” and “Quotes for Entrepreneurs Collected in May 2020.” Then Theresa made this schnazzy postcard so it gave me another excuse to post it. Kelly’s advice reminds me of “A goal is a dream with a deadline.”
“One of my good friends gave me her definition of a goal, and it’s the best one I’ve ever heard. ‘A goal is a dream with a deadline.‘ Write yours down–because that’s the only way to give them the substance they need to force you to carry them out.”
Harvey Mackay in “Swim with Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive“
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“Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Flora or fauna, we are all shape-shifters and magic re-inventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.”
Diane Ackerman, in Cultivating Delight; A Natural History of My Garden (2001)
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“If you trust in yourself and believe in your dreams and follow your star, you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”
Terry Pratchett in “The Wee Free Men“
I originally used this twitter-length summary in my “Quotes For Entrepreneurs Collected in December 2017.” Here is the full passage:
“Well, I must go. I hope we shall meet again. I will give you some free advice, though.”
“Will it cost me anything?”
“What? I just said it was free!” said Miss Tick.
“Yes, but my father said that free advice often turns out to be expensive,” said Tiffany.
Miss Tick sniffed. “You could say this advice is priceless,” she said. “Are you listening?”
“Yes,” said Tiffany.
“Good. Now…if you trust in yourself…”
“Yes?”
“…and believe in your dreams…”
“Yes?”
“…and follow your star…” Miss Tick went on.
“Yes?”
“…you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Good-bye.”
It’s easy to mis-assess who your real competition is. We worry the most about competition that cares deeply.
“You’re competing against people in a state of flow, people who are truly committed, people who care deeply about the outcome.”
Seth Godin in “Texting While Working“
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To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield
“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson “Ulysses“
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“If doing your job depends on communicating clearly, it’s a job skill. If you suck at communicating and someone else is expected to work around that, that’s often an unacknowledged and uncompensated jobshare.”
Erika Hall (@MuleGirl)
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“Don’t be ashamed to fail.
Be too proud to cease trying.”
Minna Antrim in Jester Life and his Marionettes (1908)
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“The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. […] Above all things lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous. Consider every act of this kind as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties, and increase your worth.”
Thomas Jefferson in letter to Peter Carr, with Enclosure, 10 August 1787
A longer excerpt for context:
“Man was destined for society. His morality therefore was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality, and not the truth, &c., as fanciful writers have imagined. The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted indeed in some degree to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call Common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules. […] Above all things lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous. Consider every act of this kind as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties, and increase your worth.”
Thomas Jefferson in letter to Peter Carr, with Enclosure, 10 August 1787
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“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”
Alan Alda
h/t Leo Frishberg (@LeoFrish) and Charles Lambdin (@CGLambdin) in their book “Presumptive Design: Design Provocations for Innovation.” They used Alda’s insight to introduce a chapter 6 “Make Assumptions Explicit.” Easier said than done but still a very good idea.
“Presumptive Design” is a fantastic book that should have received the visibility and attention that “The Lean Startup” or “The Startup Owner’s Manual” garnered. There is a lesson there: a book with a small amount of insight but an enormous amount of promotion outperforms a book with a wealth of insight but little promotion. The Presumptive Design approach of using sacrificial artifacts to explore customer needs and refine design concepts is profound and eye-opening. The authors suggest that your initial design concepts are flawed because one or more of your key assumptions are likely to be incorrect. I found their approach well thought out. The book provides a detailed description of how to use their methodology and a rich set of references to prior design thinking and innovation models that they build on and extend. Highly recommended.
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“Good news goes unnoticed. This is a well-known property of the press in the free world. Improvements are never dramatic. Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.”
Edward Teller in The Pursuit Of Simplicity
More context:
Today, in 1980, Europe, Japan and Russia have recovered. Misery is still the lot of most of the world, but the underprivileged comprise three-fourths rather than in excess of 90 percent. The change could never have been made without the aid of technology. What may be even more important is that in Europe, age-old enmities have abated. On the spiritual side, this is fully as important as the material improvement. But this good news goes unnoticed. This is a well- known property of the press in the free world. Improvements are never dramatic. Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible. In a historical perspective, there can be no doubt of the overall trend. The lot of considerable numbers of people improved, not only materially but also in moral respects. This is not disproved by the occurrence of catastrophe, but neither should the setbacks that catastrophes cause be belittled.
Edward Teller in The Pursuit Of Simplicity [Also at Internet Archive]
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“Possibility cannot be determined by opinion, only by attempt”
Dee Hock
h/t Andrew Cronk (@ajcronk)
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“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation–experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.”
Paul Theroux in “Sir Vidia’s Shadow”
I think these requirements apply equally to entrepreneurship.
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“By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race.”
Alfred North Whitehead in “Introduction to Mathematics” (1911)
I am looking for diagrams, visualizations, notations or deals that involve shared risk and co-creation of value. I used a variant of J-curve in https://skmurphy.com/blog/2010/09/01/chalk-talk-on-technology-adoption/ but looking for ideas and suggestions from others.
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“I never trust anyone who is more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful.”
Randall Munroe (hidden quote in Time Management)
I originally used the quote–but not the image–in “Stoking the Star Maker Machinery Behind The Popular App.”
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“Supervision and command are the management of actions; coordination and integration are the management of interactions, and this requires leadership.”
Russell Ackoff
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“The business model that we’re pursuing is never going to be as lucrative or as profitable as the alternative model of invading user privacy and exploiting data. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a profitable business, or a good one.”
Andy Yen (CEO of Proton) quoted in “These alternatives to Gmail, Google Docs, and Drive will protect your privacy“
Privacy, transparency, and due process may become significant issues in the 2020’s. “Free apps” remind me of two quotes:
“It’s all too easy to forget that ‘free’ inevitably means that someone else will be deciding how you live.”
Jaron Lanier in “Who Owns the Future.”
and Lee Kuan Yew‘s insight, “When they say, ‘it is free,’ ask ‘who is paying?'” The latter was included in Quotes For Entrepreneurs Collected in June 2018
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“To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority. It is this point of view—academic minds clinging like oysters to disproved theories–that has blocked every advance of knowledge in history.”
Robert A. Heinlein in “Life-Line’” (1939)
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“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It’s time for that to end.”
Sebastian Junger in “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging“
h/t Morgan Housel @MorganHousel
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“When the world changes…
Do things that might not work.
Develop new assertions.
Go past the edges to unexplored territory.
Try to figure out why things are the way they are.
Fail often.
Real innovation comes from the science of ‘this might not work.'”Seth Godin in “Test Kitchen Mindset“
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“The simple truth is that talent isn’t what you win in a battle. It’s what you build by actualizing the potential of those in your organization and throughout your ecosystem, including partners, customers and the communities in which you operate.”
Greg Satell in “Three Management Myths We Desperately Need to Unlearn“
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“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
J. R. R. Tolkien in “The Return of the King” (1955)
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If you understand the math behind compounding you realize the most important question is not “How can I earn the highest returns?” It’s, “What are the best returns I can sustain for the longest period of time?”
That’s not to say good returns don’t matter. Of course they do. Just that they matter less than how long your returns can be earned for. “Excellent for a few years” is not nearly as powerful as “pretty good for a long time.” And few things can beat, “average for a very long time.” Average returns for an above-average period of time leads to extreme returns.
Morgan Housel in “Nature Shows How This All Works“
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“It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java the thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shakes,
The shakes becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.”
Mark Stein
h/t TV Tropes “Beam Me Up Scotty” and other common misquotations. It’s a riff on the Mentat Mantra in David Lynch’s Dune 1984 movie (but is not in any of the Dune books).
“It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed,
the lips acquire stains,
the stains become a warning.
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.”Mentat’s Mantra from Dune (1984) [David Lynch Movie]
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“Faith that the thing can be done is essential to any great achievement.”
Thomas N. Carruthers
Reminds me of “They can because they think they can” (Possunt quia posse videntur) from Virgil’s “The Aeneid” (29–19 BC), Book V, Line 231 (1866 translation by John Conington). Conington’s translation note: their success makes them believe that they have the power, and the belief gives them it.
Confidence seems integral to an expert successfully engaging with a problem or an entrepreneur unlocking a new market.
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“Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?”
Frank Herbert in “Dune”
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“Normal soldiers always prefer the known to the unknown. Hannibal was an abnormal general and hence, like other Great Captains, chose to face the most hazardous conditions rather than the certainty of meeting his opponents in a position of their own choosing.”
Basil Henry Lidell Hart “Strategy”
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“Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.”
Peter Drucker in “The Effective Executive” (1967)
This reminds me of another quote by Drucker: “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”
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“Seek clarity and consistency before scale.” Ben Ford
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“The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing.”
Kevin Kelly in “68 Bits of unsolicited advice“
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“Being around geniuses motivates by inspiration.
Being around idiots motivates by exasperation.
Both are effective, but the latter has more urgency.”
Vacca observed: “Being a grad student in physics at Stanford in the 1990’s was a bit surreal. While I was there, every year for four consecutive years someone in the department received a Nobel Prize: Marty Perl in ’95, Doug Osheroff in ’96, Steve Chu in ’97, and my own advisor, Bob Laughlin, in ’98. Even for a world-class university, that was exceptional. I remember having this thought sitting in audience when the Nobel Prize was announced for Dr. Laughlin, my thesis advisor.”
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“Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence boils down to curiosity.”
Aaron Swartz