Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in June 2024 on a theme of persevering in doubting conventional wisdom–tolerating being viewed as mistaken–and perhaps really being wrong–for a long time.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in June 2024
My theme for this month’s “Quotes for Entrepreneurs” is persevering while doubting conventional wisdom: accepting you will be perceived as wrong–and may in fact be wrong–for a long time before you get it right.
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“Most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what they’ve been told to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see–not what is right in front of them in its pristine condition.”
Vincent Bugliosi in “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder“
Important to bear in mind during customer discovery. Please note that while I like this quote very much–I always like to source quotes to make sure they are correctly attributed–I have not read the Bugliosi’s book and don’t have an informed opinion about it.
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“I have often pondered over the roles of knowledge or experience, on the one hand, and imagination or intuition, on the other, in the process of discovery. I believe that there is a certain fundamental conflict between the two, and knowledge, by advocating caution, tends to inhibit the flight of imagination. Therefore, a certain naivete, unburdened by conventional wisdom, can sometimes be a positive asset.”
Harish-Chandra quoted in ‘Harish-Chandra’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (1985), Vol. 31, 206. by R. P. Langands
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“Sorry to be all misty-eyed but like. Do you remember when software used to come out every so often with a new thing it could do. And that thing was useful–or failing that, somewhat interesting–rather than Some Bullshit Nobody Asked For.”
Aanand (@aanand)
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“Innovation is creativity with a job to do.”
John Emmerling
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“Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you’re headed the wrong way.
Sam Walton in “Sam’s Rules for Building a Business“
I’ve used this quote twice but never curated it:
- Don’t Waste Time Painting Tom Sawyer’s Fence: Proving Someone Wrong Is A Poor Motivator
- Focus On Your Prospect’s Pain Not The Brilliance of Your Product Idea
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“More is missed by not looking than not knowing.”
Thomas McCrae, MD (1870–1935)
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“What nobody tells people who are beginners–and I really wish someone had told this to me…is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Ira Glass
h/t John McWade (see recording at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY
This is true whether you are debugging and refining your art, your practice, a new technology, or your business model. I have learned to be comfortable “being wrong” for a long time before I get it right. Take small steps, explore with small experiments and refinements that will fail safely or with a minimum loss you can absorb.
Starting at the 40 minute mark in “The New Space Race, SpaceX & Starship – Satellite constellations & Launcher Evolution” video by Perun he recounts several Space-X failures with their new rocket, followed by this slide:
“Fail Fast to Learn Fast?
- May be a broader lesson to apply to multiple fields.
- A willingness to risk failure in order to develop an idea more rapidly may often be the faster and more efficient path to improvement than trying to get everything right the first time.
- Falcon 9 did not have a clean test record, but it has a very , very good reliability record in actual service.
- In Ukraine, the path for rapid development has often been to simply get something fielded and see if it works–iterating on feedback as required.
- People need to be allowed to fail responsibly.
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The main management skills needed for success are:
- Management of cash flow
- Management of systems
- Management of people
Robert Kiyosaki “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”
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“Conventional wisdom is invariably out of date. Because in the time it has taken to become conventional–to become what everyone believes–the world has moved on. Conventional wisdom is a remnant of the past.”
Michael Crichton
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“A man of capacity possesses considerable intellectual riches: A man of genius finds out a vein of new ore. Originality is the seeing nature differently from others, and yet as it is in itself. It is the discovery of new and valuable truth.
All the world do not see the whole meaning of any object they have been looking at. Habit blinds them to some things; short-sightedness to others.
William Hazlitt in “Table Talk” [Gutenberg] Essay V “On Genius and Common Sense”
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A great strategy has the following characteristics:
- Simple: Reshapes complexity to be manageable and actionable.
- Candid: Dares to spotlight the most difficult truths.
- Decisive: Asserts clear decisions and accepts their consequences.
- Leveraged: Magnifies strengths into durable competitive advantage.
- Asymmetric: Defeats uncertainty with higher upside than downside.
- Futuristic: Solves for the long-term.
Jason Cohen in “Great Strategy“
I think this is a good list, in particular being candid about your weaknesses so you can focus on where you have strengths.
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“The beaten path can be a busy and distracting place.”
Richard Brookhiser in “Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln”
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“There are two ways to use money: as a tool to live a better life or as a yardstick of success to measure yourself against other people. The first is quiet and personal, the second is loud and performative. It’s obvious which leads to a happier life.”
Morgan Housel in “Quiet Compounding“
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“People do not decide to become extraordinary.
They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.”
Edmund Hillary (actually a Rolex ad)
A great insight but Wikiquote notes: “Though widely attributed to Hillary on the Internet, this appears to have originated as a quote about him in a Rolex advertisement.”
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“Scientific exploration implies investigating the unknown. The result can never be who’ll anticipated. Charles Lindbergh said, ‘Scientific accomplishment is a path, not an end; a path leading to and ending in mystery.'”
Buzz Aldrin in testimony to Congress on Sep-16-1969
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“Progress is not a straight line; the future is not a mere projection of trends in the present. Rather, it is revolutionary. It overturns the conventional wisdom of the present, which often conceals or ignores the clues to the future.”
Dr. An Wang
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All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth–it requires an ensemble of correct assumptions and valid calculations.
Henry Petroski in an interview in ASK OCE — July 20, 2006 [Vol. 1, Issue 10]
Petroski offers a several insights in this five question interview.
- Just because something ain’t broke doesn’t mean that it won’t break eventually. The responsibility of designers is to have a good idea when something will break and “fix” it before that happens. This is the essence of responsible maintenance, and a proper maintenance schedule should be part of a good design.
- Success can mask latent flaws in a design. If the Titanic had not struck an iceberg and sank on its first Atlantic crossing, its design (as an “unsinkable” ship) would likely have served as a model for subsequent transatlantic ocean liners, which would likely have been built to carry more passengers and to sail faster, perhaps with fewer lifeboats. As long as those ships experienced no failure, they would continue to grow and multiply. They would also continue to incorporate the Titanic’s basic design assumptions, which we now know were severely flawed, until one or more of the latent flaws caused a tragic failure to occur.
- Engineers who think and talk about failure are not pessimists, they keep principal goal of avoiding failure in the forefront. Success is best achieved by being fully aware of what can go wrong in a design and designing against its happening.
- Engineering calculations of stress, temperature, etc., are meaningful only in that they tell us how far from failure a particular design is. I employ case studies of failure into my courses, emphasizing that they teach us much more than studies of success. It is not that success stories cannot serve as models of good design or as exemplars of creative engineering. They can do that, but they cannot teach us how close to failure they are. And that is what an engineer must always know.
- The experiences of older engineers with earlier generation designs are not irrelevant to the current state of the art. Fundamental design assumptions (and understood limitations) do not become obsolete in a system that develops over decades. Indeed, they can be among the most critical pieces of knowledge that the younger engineers can inherit. The lessons of past failures should be passed on explicitly to the next generation.
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To map your path from idea to revenue:
- Validate your idea.
- Validate the market
- Validate your offer.
- Build the product.
- Build a repeatable sales process.
Easy to say, hard to do.
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“There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.”
Ben Horowitz
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“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
Flannery O’Connor
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“A man can see by starlight, if he takes the time.”
Michael Crichton in “Next”
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“In the next twenty centuries […] humanity may begin to understand its most baffling mystery–where are we going? The earth is, in fact, traveling many thousands of miles per hour in the direction of the constellation Hercules—to some unknown destination in the cosmos. Man must understand his universe in order to understand his destiny.
Mystery, however, is a very necessary ingredient in our lives. Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis for man’s desire to understand. Who knows what mysteries will be solved in our lifetime, and what new riddles will become the challenge of the new generation? Science has not mastered prophesy. We predict too much for the next year yet far too little for the next ten.”
Neil Armstrong in testimony to Congress on Sep-16-1969
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“Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.”
Abraham Lincoln
I don’t think it takes towering genius to seek out the unexplored. Curiosity, a desire to “go and see” and a willingness to take prudent risks are as important.
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Economic and social behavior arc complex and mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to the ideas which represent our understanding. I shall refer to these ideas as the conventional wisdom. The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the “march of events.” Conventional wisdom accommodates itself not to the world that it is meant to interpret, but to the audience’s view of the world. Since the latter remains with the comfortable and the familiar, while the world moves on, conventional wisdom is always in danger of obsolescence.
John Kenneth Galbraith “Affluent Society” (excerpts from Chapter 2: The Concept of Conventional Wisdom)
Condensed from two longer passages:
“People approve most of what they best understand. Economic and social behavior arc complex and mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to the ideas which represent our understanding. This is a prime manifestation of vested interest. For a vested interest in understanding is more preciously guarded than any other treasure. It is why men react, not infrequently with something akin to religious passion, to defend what they have so laboriously learned. Familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human behavior, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of acceptability.
Because familiarity is such an important test of acceptability, the acceptable ideas have great stability. They arc highly predictable. It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability. I shall refer to these ideas henceforth
as the conventional wisdom.[…]
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the “march of events.” Conventional wisdom accommodates itself not to the world that it is meant to interpret, but to the audience’s view of the world. Since the latter remains with the comfortable and the familiar, while the world moves on, conventional wisdom is always in danger of obsolescence. This is not immediately fatal. The fatal blow to the conventional wisdom comes when the conventional ideas fail signally to deal with some contingency to which obsolescence has made them palpably inapplicable. This, sooner or later, must be the fate of ideas which have lost their relation to the world.”
John Kenneth Galbraith “Affluent Society” (excerpts from Chapter 2: The Concept of Conventional Wisdom)
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“I doubt whether anybody was ever conscious of creating an industry at the time it was started. I have even said that nobody is smart enough to go into the business he ends up in. You get into an industry without knowing it.”
Charles Kettering
Quoted in T. A. Boyd’s “Prophet of Progress: Selections from the Speeches of Charles Kettering”
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“A great man adds to the sum of knowledge, extends the horizon of thought, releases souls from the Bastille of fear, crosses unknown and mysterious seas, gives new islands and new continents to the domain of thought, new constellations to the firmament of mind.
A great man does not seek applause or place; he seeks for truth; he seeks the road to happiness, and what he ascertains he gives to others.
Greatness is not the gift of majorities; it cannot be thrust upon any man; men cannot give it to another; they can give place and power, but not greatness. The place does not make the man, nor the scepter the king. Greatness is from within.”
Robert Ingersoll in “Voltaire” in Vol 3 of Works of Robert Ingersoll
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Science is iterative and complex, not a blunt weapon to be wielded
Science includes two related components:
- The existing body of knowledge about how the world works
- Cultivating new and more accurate knowledge by hypothesizing, experimenting, and iterating
Kamal Patel in “Don’t Weaponize ‘The Science’“
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Advice for Change Agents
- Support the company and its customers.
- Do what’s needed.
- Be realistic about goals
- Stay humble; focus on results.
- Find people to help you, build coalitions.
- Ask for advice then ask for resources.Express gratitude and share credit.
Inspired by Gifford Pinchot’s Intrapreneuring and “Intrapreneur’s Ten Commandments” and my direct experience.
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“I want a news service that tells me what no one knows but is true nonetheless.”
Michael Crichton in an interview Jack Shafer “Michael Crichton, Vindicated“
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Closing thought: Bright, creative individuals are outliers who pursue ideas contrary to conventional wisdom. Sometimes they are correct and improve the quality of our lives, and sometimes they are (badly) mistaken. Expertise and accomplishment in one field do not necessarily translate well to other domains.