The theme for this month’s collection of quotes for entrepreneurs is learning, in particular I suggest you make 2023 a year of learning.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in February 2023
Theme for this month: learning. 2023 will be a good year for entrepreneur’s to focus on learning.
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“The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.
The best learning takes place in teams that accept that the whole is larger than the sum of the parts, that there is a good that transcends the individual.”
Arie P. de Geus in “Planning as Learning” in HBR March-April 1988
Make 2023 a year of learning. I really like this quote and the “Planning as Learning” paradigm that de Geus proposes. I referenced originally in “Quotes For Entrepreneurs–February 2013” after including it in “Startups Where ‘We Are All In This Together’ Learn Faster .” I used it as the closing quote in “Planning and Reflection” noting that
Markets continually evolve, forcing each firm to run it’s own “Red Queen Race,” running faster and faster (or learning more and more) just to maintain market share. But action without planning and reflection is rarely effective.
Sean Murphy in “Planning and Reflection“
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“Empathy isn’t dictated to us by a focus group or a statistical analysis. Empathy is the powerful (and rare) ability to imagine what motivates someone else to act. […] What is required is a persistent effort to understand how other people see the world, and to care about it.”
Seth Godin in “If I Were You…“
I used this as a point of departure for Customer Care arguing that early stage startups can encourage empathy in every team members and use the resulting insights to power improvements to strategy, products, and services.
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“I think there has to be an ongoing, intense curiosity and care on the part of everyone in the startup who touches the customer about how to create value or how to remove things that are limiting or restricting the value customers will get from the product.”
Sean Murphy in an interview with Etienne Garbugli for Lean B2B Podcast (Mar 2021)
I added this as a post script to “Customer Care.”
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“Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st Century.”
Sydney Joseph Perelman
I used in Continuing Education In Entrepreneurship
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“In a time of drastic change one can be too preoccupied with what is ending or too obsessed with what seems to be beginning. In either case one loses touch with the present and with its obscure but dynamic possibilities. You do not need to know what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and embrace them with courage, faith and hope. In such an event, courage is the authentic form taken by love.”
Thomas Merton in “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander” [Archive.org]
It’s an interesting observation that seems on point for 2023 which feels like a period of drastic change: what are the possibilities we need to explore and the challenges we need to manage.
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“Expertise is what you know.
Humility is knowing what you don’t know.
Curiosity is how much you want to learn.
In a changing world, expertise quickly becomes obsolete without humility and curiosity.”
Adam Grant
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“We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.”
Peter Drucker
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“Seldom does the cobbler take up with the new-fangled way of soling shoes, and seldom does the artisan willingly take up with new methods in his trade. Habit conduces to a certain inertia, and any disturbance of it affects the mind like trouble.”
Henry Ford “My Life and Work” [Gutenberg]
More context:
“If to petrify is success all one has to do is to humor the lazy side of the mind but if to grow is success, then one must wake up anew every morning and keep awake all day. I saw great businesses become but the ghost of a name because someone thought they could be managed just as they were always managed, and though the management may have been most excellent in its day, its excellence consisted in its alertness to its day, and not in slavish following of its yesterdays.
Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey. Everything is in flux, and was meant to be. Life flows. We may live at the same number of the street, but it is never the same man who lives there.
Seldom does the cobbler take up with the new-fangled way of soling shoes, and seldom does the artisan willingly take up with new methods in his trade. Habit conduces to a certain inertia, and any disturbance of it affects the mind like trouble. […]
Business men go down with their businesses because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change. One sees them all about—men who do not know that yesterday is past, and who woke up this morning with their last year’s ideas. It could almost be written down as a formula that when a man begins to think that he has at last found his method he had better begin a most searching examination of himself to see whether some part of his brain has not gone to sleep. There is a subtle danger in a man thinking that he is ‘fixed’ for life. It indicates that the next jolt of the wheel of progress is going to fling him off.”
Henry Ford “My Life and Work” [Gutenberg]
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“Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.”
George S. Patton
Reading history and biographies can enlarge your sense of the possible. In particular, the history of a field or industry can give you an idea of what’s been tried that may now be viable. Reading science fiction and fantasy can increase your ability to imagine “what if?” In general, we are too confident in a narrow range of outcomes: miracles and catastrophes occur more often than you might think, but often “nothing happens” despite everyone’s best efforts. Or at least nothing new.
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“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.
So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.”
Neil Gaiman in “New Years Wish for 2011“
You need an “error budget” to be learn. You must be able to practice and make low-cost mistakes to go beyond your current capabilities. To support your error budget, you must allow for multiple tries and the time and resources to execute them. If you have to get it right the first time, you should have done it many times already and developed at least a level of proficiency, if not expertise.
Paul Schoemaker’s “Brilliant Mistakes” offers some good guidance in using intentional mistakes to test if you have over-constrained your search for a better solution. It’s hard to do just one thing. All actions have multiple effects that mix desired and unwanted outcomes.You have to distinguish between “state” and “control” variables. State variables define the current situation or future outcomes. Control variables represent the decisions you can make, the resources you can allocate, and what you can directly influence. For example, I can have a goal of doubling my business, but all I can control are the actions I will take that I believe will lead to the outcome I want.
In addition to focusing on what’s under their control, successful entrepreneurs can often find uses for outcomes they may have initially viewed as negative or undesirable. As Elbert Hubbard advises, when life hands you lemons–make lemonade. The exact–and perhaps more entrepreneurial–quote is:
“He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.”
Elbert Hubbard in his 1915 obituary for Marshall Pinckney Wilder
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“Research is creating new knowledge.”
Neil Armstrong
One of the biggest challenges is not creating new knowledge but recognizes what it obsoletes.
“The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it–once you can honestly say, ‘I don’t know,’ then it becomes possible to get at the truth.”
Robert Heinlein in “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls“
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“Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”
Samuel Butler
Also applies to your first few startups.
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“Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.”
Edsger Dijkstra in “Introducing my fall 1987 course on Mathematical Methodology (EWD 1011)” [PDF Version]
More context (original quote bolded):
This whole course is no more and no less than an invitation to take the experiment of changing some of your reasoning habits and adopting some new modes of expression. As you take the experiment you will notice that it is not acquiring the new habits that presents the greatest problem, for that is getting rid of the old ones. Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.
This is obvious. Yet it needs to be stressed because stupid educationists have invented for the educational process the profoundly inadequate term “knowledge transfer”, suggesting a uni-directional stream of knowledge towards an accumulating recipient, who becomes monotonically more knowledgeable. This is a caricature at best.
Edsger Dijkstra in “Introducing my fall 1987 course on Mathematical Methodology (EWD 1011)” [PDF Version]
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“Reversible decision” is a poor framing of the realities.
- Every decision embeds a irrevocable commitment of resources (time and effort if nothing else).
- Every decision carries an opportunity cost: other options are at best delayed if not foreclosed.
Sean Murphy
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Courage to Fail
“One of the reasons why mature people are apt to learn less than young people is that they are willing to risk less. Learning is a risky business, and they do not like failure.”
h/t Maria Popova (@brainpicker) in “John Gardner on Failure” Here is more context:
Courage to Fail
“One of the reasons why mature people are apt to learn less than young people is that they are willing to risk less. Learning is a risky business, and they do not like failure. In infancy, when the child is learning at a truly phenomenal rate– a rate he will never again achieve–he is also experiencing a shattering number of failures. Watch him. See the innumerable things he tries and fails. And see how little the failures discourage him. With each year that passes he will be less blithe about failure. By adolescence the willingness of young people to risk failure has diminished greatly. And all too often parents push them further along that road by instilling fear, by punishing failure or by making success seem too precious. By middle age most of us carry in our heads a tremendous catalogue of things we have no intention of trying again because we tried them once and failed — or tried them once and did less well than our self-esteem demanded.
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We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure — all your life. It’s as simple as that.”
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“There is as much to learn from what doesn’t work as there is to learn from what does.”
Edward Lovick
h/t John D. Cook (@JohnDCook). Edward Lovick wrote “Radar Man” a memoir of his work on stealth (invisible to radar) aircraft at the Lockheed Skunk works. I have blogged about “The Ship that Never Was” from “Skunk Works” by Ben R. Rich who was the second director of the Skunk works, succeeding Kelly Johnson.
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“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
C.S. Lewis in “Learning in Wartime” (1939)[PDF] (Collected in “The Weight of Glory and other Addresses”)
C. S. Lewis preached “Learning in Wartime” at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford,Autumn, 1939. World War 2 had broken out and there were concerns that University activities should be subordinated to the war effort. Lewis fought in the trenches at the battle of the Somme and was wounded, he knew war first hand. An earlier related passage from the same sermon:
“Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life”. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil,like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never come.
[..] Men propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffold, discuss, the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.”
C.S. Lewis in “Learning in Wartime” [PDF] (Collected in “The Weight of Glory and other Addresses”)
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“My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God.
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.”
Thomas Huxley, Letter to Charles Kingsley September 23, 1860.
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“I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn’t hard when I had a reason to want to know it.”
Homer Hickam in “Rocket Boys” (aka “October Sky“)
This is true for me as well. I can start with the need to help someone I know who has a real problem, or the desire to get to the root of an anomaly or strange occurrence, or just an odd fact that gives me an itch to uncover the context and reasons for it.
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“Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else–that’s how you’ll get ahead.”
Austin Kleon in Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
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“It has been a long trip,” said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; “but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn’t made so many mistakes. I’m afraid it’s all my fault.”
“You must never feel badly about making mistakes,” explained Reason quietly, “as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”
Norton Juster in “The Phantom Tollbooth”
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“The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.”
Orson Scott Card in “Ender’s Game“
Any time I hear someone planning to go “all in” I try to dissuade them. A simple rule is to hold enough back to “get back to shore” if the startup does not work out and to divide your plan into three iterations so that you plan for partial failures that you can learn from. Bootstrappers must be prudent risk-takers. You can dream and make long-range plans but you need to keep your near-term ambitions in line with your capabilities.
“The situation is what it is, the result of one man wanting something more than was wise, given the circumstances.”
Byron York
I originally curated the “essence of training” quote in the June 2018 quotes for entrepreneurs roundup.
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“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to a mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on a rock.”
Mary Shelley in “Frankenstein” [Gutenberg]
Originally published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s metaphor of lichen is a useful analog for new long-term memories causing the growth of new cellular structures in the brain. Short-term memory is electrical, but long-term memory is biochemical. Also true for signals within the human body: fast nerve signals are electrical, while slower, more persistent signals are chemical—for example, neurotransmitters and hormones. We have a “body electric” emerging from a biochemical substrate. Beneath that substrate are resident microorganism populations–the multiple microbiomes in the–body that evolve in response to the environment.
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“People ask me why we work with bootstrapping entrepreneurs and how we make any money at it. I relate to the bootstrappers’ orientation toward creating value for their customers (it’s the only way they can get paid, so it’s also a matter of enlightened self-interest). We run our practice on a “low intensity long duration” model that assumes success is going to require perseverance, intelligent experimentation, and a commitment to solving problems that will make a difference in people’s lives (a shorter answer is that we make less than we might serving other firms but we enjoy it more so it balances out).”
Sean Murphy in “The Startup Mythology of Silicon Valley” (closing paragraph)
I open with a plea to “Align your startup with a higher purpose to sustain motivation. Avoid “entrepreneurial lifestyle” and startup mythology: build a going concern.” You may think I am a dreamer, but I ‘m not the only one.
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“The child intuitively comprehends that although fairy tales unreal, they are not untrue.”
Bruno Bettelheim in “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales“
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“A common and mistaken idea hidden in the word “learning” is that learning and doing are different kinds of acts. Of course, this is nonsense. We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way. This process never ends.”
John Holt in “Instead of Education”
(h/t Sean Michael Morris “A Primer on Progressive Education” for providing a pointer to the source of “We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way.” And suggesting a useful context.) This quote collects sentences from three places in two paragraphs in Holt’s “Instead of Education.” Here is a longer excerpt showing them in context.
“A common and mistaken idea hidden in the word “learning” is that learning and doing are different kinds of acts. Thus, not many years ago, I began to play the cello. I love the instrument, spend many hours a day playing it, work hard at it, and mean someday to play it well. Most people would say that what I am doing is “learning to play the cello.” Our language gives us no other words to say it. But these words carry into our minds the strange idea that there exist two very different processes: (1) learning to play the cello and (2) playing the cello. They imply that I will do the first until I have completed it, at which point I will stop the first process and begin the second; in short, that I will go on “learning to play” until I “have learned to play,” and that then I will begin “to play.”
Of course, this is nonsense. There are not two processes but one. We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way. When we first do something, we probably will not do it well. But if we keep on doing it, have good models to follow and helpful advice if and when we feel we need it, and always do it as well as we can, we will do it better. In time, we may do it very well. This process never ends.”
John Holt in “Instead of Education”
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“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”
John Archibald Wheeler (quoted in John Horgan’s Dec-1-1992 Scientific American Article “The New Challenges” [Paywall])
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“The purpose of today’s training is to defeat yesterday’s understanding.”
Miyamoto Musashi in “The Book of Five Rings“
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