These quotes for entrepreneurs were curated in October of 2023 around a theme of grit and perseverance.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in October 2023
Theme for this month: Grit and Perseverance.
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“So everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.”
May Sarton in “Journal of a Solitude” (1973)
Cultivating a garden provides a wealth of insights–and at least a few good habits–useful for growing a successful startup.
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“If you look for rest in this life, how will you attain to everlasting rest? Dispose yourself, then, not for much rest but for great patience.”
Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380-1471)
h/t WIST (Dave Hill); I think Edwin Land echoed this mindset with his observation, “The bottom line is in Heaven”
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“Never be discouraged by people who don’t know what you are about to accomplish”
Robert Brault in “Reflections“
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“Whatever you are doing, you have to figure out when to give out effort and when to withdraw it. The really high-functioning people are able to do both; somehow they have an eye for asking whether they are in the game too long. They have to be willing to commit to higher-level goals by shifting lower level tactics. The higher level it is, the more you should be tenacious. The lower level it is, the more concrete or particular it is, the more you should be willing to give it up. I think that’s a good rule of thumb.”
Angela Duckworth quoted by Sarah Lewis in “The Rise“
A startup is never an easy journey. One book I read recently about bouncing back and persevering is “the Rise” by Sarah Lewis. I found it very helpful. There was a section near the very end with a summary of Angela Duckworth’s concept of grit (see http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit for her TED Talk on “Grit”). I think grit is the same as Albert Bandura‘s “Self-Efficacy” (See also Frank Pajaraes “Self-Efficacy” site [Archive]) and what Robert Pirsig calls gumption in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
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“In the battle between physics and platitudes, physics is undefeated.” It is a polite way of articulating that the hard realities of life must eventually be confronted, and no amount of pompous speech, deceptive statistics, or outright fabrications can overcome the laws of physics.”
Doomberg (@DoombergT) in “Windbaggery“
Entrepreneurs can apply in many contexts.
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Seth Bullock: I don’t like that sonofabitch.
Sol Star: Thank God you didn’t let him see it.
Deadwood Episode 2 written by David Milch
I rewatched the Deadwood series again recently and found it as interesting as when it first came out. The scripts use expletives like punctuation which strikes me as unnecessary but it was interesting to watch. One of the puzzles is how Seth Bullock and Sol Star became partners. They have very different personalities and the series starts with them already established in joint effort to start a business in Deadwood. Different personalities in this case also means complementary and that is part of the secret to their shared success. I found “The Deadwood Chronicles” a useful reference site for scripts and director’s commentary tracks.
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I’ll not willingly offend,
Nor be easily offended;
What’s amiss I’ll strive to mend,
And endure what can’t be mended.Isaac Watts (1674-1748) in “Good Resolutions“
Watts also wrote “Joy to the World.” This stanza predates Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer” by about three centuries.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Serenity Prayer
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“We came from Caladan–a paradise world for our form of life. There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind–we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving paradise in this life– we went soft, we lost our edge.”
Frank Herbert in “Dune”
I worry the last decade or so has been a vacation on Caladan for the US entrepreneurs. It’s probably more accurate to see March 2022 as then end of Minsky boom where the business cycle reasserted itself and started to flush unprofitable businesses out of the economy–taking more than a few temporarily unprofitable but fundamentally sound firms with them.
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“If there is such a thing as luck, then I must be the most unlucky fellow in the world. I’ve never once made a lucky strike in all my life. When I get after something I need, I start finding everything in the world I don’t need–one damn thing after another. I find ninety-nine things I don’t need, and then comes number one hundred, and that–at the very last–turns out to be just what I had been looking for.”
Thomas Edison (1847-1931) in M. A. Rosanoff, “Edison in His Laboratory,” [Paywall] Harper’s (Sep 1932)
h/t WIST (Dave Hill)
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“All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
More context:
“In the orchard many trees send out a moderate shoot in the first summer heat, and stop. They look all summer as if they would presently burst into bud again, but they do not. The fine tree continues to grow. The same thing happens in the man. Every man has material enough in his experience to exhaust the sagacity of Newton in working it out. We have more than we use. I never hear a good speech at caucus or at cattle-show but it helps me, not so much by adding to my knowledge as by apprising me of admirable uses to which what I know can be turned. The commonest remark, if the man could only extend it a little, would make him a genius; but the thought is prematurely checked, and grows no more. All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) in “Powers and Laws of Thought,” Natural History of Intellect, Lecture 1, Harvard (1870, Spring)
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“The difference between a good officer and a poor one is about ten seconds.”
Arleigh Burke
Possibly influenced this quote by Frank Herbert:
The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices
Frank Herbert in “God Emperor of Dune”
More context:
“The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices that can usually can be made to work. They depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they’ve done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it’s too late to make corrections.”
Frank Herbert in “God Emperor of Dune”
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“There is a quiet willfulness some gentle people have, a kind of graceful readiness. Their energy passes out of them like tissues from a box, each act drawing a successor, giving them an impression of serene limitlessness.”
James Guida in Marbles
I originally curated this in “Seven Aphorisms From Marbles by James Guida” noting: “Whenever I meet people like this I try and find ways to collaborate with them on projects. I suspect my constant stream of new ideas–some of which are good ideas and a few are even better ideas–is as annoying for them as for most, but they seem to handle it better. When they tell me “these are not the new ideas you are looking for” I find it strangely calming, as when the Imperial Storm Troopers confronted Obi Wan Kenobi but were soothed by his suggestion that “these are not the droids you are looking for.”
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“I fear we have wakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”
Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (Possible observation on impact of Pearl Harbor attack.)
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“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”
Marshall McLuhan (1970), Culture is Our Business (See also Internet Archive version]
h/t Maggie Leber (@MaggieL) A prescient quote from 50 years ago. More context:
“World War I was a railway war of centralism and encirclement.
World War II was a radio war of decentralism.
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”
Marshall McLuhan (1970), Culture is Our Business (See also Internet Archive version]
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“The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.”
Tom Bodett (@TomBodett)
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“There’s this feeling that you get only very rarely in the course of a lifetime, that this is what you were born for.”
Dr. Jeff Levenson
h/t Francesco Block in “Is it Wrong to Cure Blindness” Alignment with mission or core purpose enables grit and perseverance. I am reminded of a quote I curated in 2009:
“I’m not afraid…I was born to do this.”
Joan of Arc
The times in my life I have felt this way were triggered by an individual in terrible need where failure was not just possible but highly likely. I saw an individual with a clear need that I believed I was uniquely qualified to address. It’s a very different from righteous indignation, the desire to right a wrong or provide justice. It’s more about mercy and preventing a painful situation from continuing to deteriorate.
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“Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.”
Charles Handy in “Revisiting the Concept of the Corporation”
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“The sharpest and most competent version of you hates the dullest and least competent version of you, and the chasm between those two iterations is vast, but expecting to run at peak performance constantly and hating yourself when you don’t doesn’t actually improve anything.”
Illimitable Men (@TellYourSonThis)
Two good points in this:
- You have to be dissatisfied with your performance or results to make the effort to improve. But you cannot be so dissatisfied that you give up.
- Our capabilities and performance levels fluctuate. The only people who are always at their best are never inspired and never make an effort.
Professionals don’t wait for inspiration, they summon their talent (but not always peak performance) as the situation requires it.
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“It is not a move, even the best move, that you must seek, but a realizable plan.”
Eugene Znosko-Borovsky
Crafting a realizable plan requires persevering until you have a viable strategy that makes allowance for likely contingencies. See also “The Best Bad Plan.”
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“For Life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it.”
Benjamin Franklin in “The Morals of Chess“
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“My fourteen-year-old son observed, ‘Everyone talks about how if you went back in time, some tiny change could make everything different now, but no one talks about how some tiny change now could make everything different in the future.'”
Paul Graham (PaulG)
Foresight is harder to achieve than hindsight but allows you to learn from the future–whether to avoid or create it. Hindsight offers leverage since the future often rhymes with the past.
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“Culture is defined by compensation, promotions, and terminations. Basically, people seeing who succeeds and fails in the company defines culture. The people who succeed become role models for what’s valued in the organization.”
Tae Hea Nahm in “Tae Hea Nahn of Storm Ventures, a believer and skeptic in one“
I used this as the closing quote for “Key Takeaways From Two Survival to Thrival Books”
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“Certain management policies–stretching of credit resources, for example-may lead to great progress in good conditions; but, like the Grand Prix car in comparison with the Land Rover, they may not be robust enough to survive when the going gets tough”
Stafford Beer in “Management Science: The business use of operations research” (1968)
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“The times are urgent; let us slow down.”
African proverb recounted by Bayo Akomolafe in “A Slower Urgency“
This is good advice. Faster skims the surface, slowing down allows you to work more smoothly and at a deeper level. You see it reflected in other aphorisms:
“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”
Navy Seals dictum“5. Go Deep: the deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.”
Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth“When in doubt, choose to go deeper rather than faster. Accept the idea that reflection and understanding your own nature, including the dark side, is the key to effective action.”
Peter Block in “The Answer to How is Yes.”
There is a tendency to try to go faster, but sometimes, you must look below the surface and revisit your expectations and mental models. I also believe that in many instances committing to a low-intensity long-duration effort to effect a change or improvement is more likely to succeed and more effective when it does.
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“I should think,” said the drummer’s voice, “that you’d feel your knife and gun clean through that pillow.”
“I do,” responded the Virginian.
“I should think you’d put them on a chair and be comfortable.”
“I’d be uncomfortable, then.”
“Used to the feel of them, I suppose?”
“That’s it. Used to the feel of them. I would miss them, and that would make me wakeful.”Owen Wister in “The Virginian” (1902) [Gutenberg]
The cowboy version of semper parratus or “Be Prepared.” Drummer was the 1900 word for salesperson.
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“It is a human inclination to hope things will work out, despite evidence or doubt to the contrary. A successful manager must resist this temptation. This is particularly hard if one has invested much time and energy on a project and thus has come to feel possessive about it. Although it is not easy to admit what a person once thought correct now appears to be wrong, one must discipline himself to face the facts objectively and make the necessary changes — regardless of the consequences to himself.”
Hyman Rickover
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“The myth of feature creep disguises the real problem: the inability to execute on the core value of your product.”
Hiten Shah (@hnshah)
h/t Etienne Garbugli; strategic vision informed by customer feedback should drive feature content. You cannot please everyone, make sure you please your core constituency.
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“A watershed moment in life is the day you realize that what you can or cannot do is a test of your resolve, not an extrapolation of your resume.”
Robert Brault in “Reflections“
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Image credit: Thomas Edison in his lab public domain