Quotes for entrepreneurs curated in July 2024 on a theme of your best and highest purpose–pursuing transformational goals for yourself your team, and your customers.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in July 2024
My theme for this month’s “Quotes for Entrepreneurs” is your best and highest purpose–pursuing transformational goals for yourself your team, and your customers.
In my teenage years my father would often ask me if I were following my best and highest purpose. He would phrase it as “What in the Hell do you think you are doing?” or “Are you paying attention to what you are doing?” but I knew what he meant.
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“The successful man admits that there is more pleasure in work than in having secured the rewards of it—that becoming is better than being—since possibility marks the one and finality seals the other.”
Sir Thomas Oliver M.D.
h/t Quote Investigator “Becoming”
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“When you are inspired by some great purpose,
some extraordinary project,
all of your thoughts break their bonds.
Your mind transcends limitations.
Your consciousness expands in every direction.
You find yourself in a new and great and wonderful world.
Dormant forces, faculties, and talents come alive,
and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far
than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 200 B.C.E.
h/t Steve Omohundro
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Some teams approach to “iterating” reminds me of John L’Hereux’s mythical Clang Bird
“The Clang Bird is a rare creature that flies in ever decreasing circles at ever increasing speeds until with a terrible clang it disappears up its own ass. It is only because of the will of God that the Clang Bird is not yet extinct.”
St. Gomer, O.S.T., Founder, Order of St. Thomas, Novissima Verba, 1717From the opening of John L’Hereux’s “The Clang Birds“
This can also happen when you cannot relax the constraints on a problem and keep revisiting the same approaches you have ruled out.
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“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Napoleon
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Build half a product not a half-assed product
You can’t do everything you want to do and do it well. You have limited time, resources, ability, and focus.
Cut your ambition in half. You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole. Most of your great ideas won’t seem all that great once you get some perspective.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson in “Rework” (2010)
Focus for effect.
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“There are glimpses of heaven to us in every act, or thought, or word, that raises us above ourselves.”
Robert Quillen
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“Moral basis for Enterprise: ‘Be of Service’ is the Sole Basis for an organization’s existence. Excellence is the daily aspiration/way of life.”
Tom Peters
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“Character is more crucial now than ever, because in times of great uncertainty past performance is no indicator of future performance. Experience falls away and all you’re left with is character.”
David Rothkopf
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- “The first step is to measure what can easily be measured.
This is okay as far as it goes.- The second step is to disregard that which cannot be measured, or give it an arbitrary quantitative value.
This is artificial and misleading.- The third step is to presume that what cannot be measured is not very important.
This is blindness.- The fourth step is to say that what cannot be measured does not really exist.
This is suicide.”Daniel Yankelovich quoted in “Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life” by John Bogle
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“Like Tonto helping the Lone Ranger navigate the Badlands, I spend much of my time looking for clues in a state of slowly dawning comprehension.
We agree on the goal but need to navigate a landscape that is a mix of ignorance, uncertainty, new insights, ambiguity, and partial knowledge that can obscure essential facts.
Open discussion, analysis of competing hypotheses, iteration, appreciative inquiry, and reflection are all required to find a viable base camp or initial niche that enables further exploration.”
Sean Murphy
Excerpts from a recent email to a client on the challenges of exploring new markets.
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“Diversity isn’t about appearances but rather different perspectives shaped by experience. It removes blind spots and gives us more tools to solve problems.”
Shane Parrish in “Stormtrooper Problem“
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“You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction.
I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes”.
Joanna Maciejewska (@AuthorJMac) in a Mar-20-2024 tweet
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“The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.”
Arthur Koestler in “The Ghost in the Machine” (1967) [Archive.org]
More context, from a section called “Self-Repair and Self Realization”
“Every revolution has a destructive and a constructive aspect. The destruction is wrought by jettisoning previously unassailable doctrines, and seemingly self-evident axioms of thought. The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which seemed once to possess eternal life. Progress in art involves an equally agonizing reappraisal of accepted values, criteria of relevance, frames of perception. When we discuss the evolution of art and science from the historian’s point of view, the undoing and re-doing is taken for granted as a normal, inevitable part of the story. If, however, we focus our attention on the concrete individual who initiated the revolutionary change, we are faced with the psychological problem of the nature of human creativity.”
Arthur Koestler in “The Ghost in the Machine” (1967) [Archive.org]
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“103 “The wicked are always surprised to discover ability in the just.”
Vauvenargues in Maxims
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“I tried out various experiments described in treatises on physics and chemistry, and the results were sometimes unexpected. At times I would be encouraged by a little unhoped-for success, at others I would be in the deepest despair because of accidents and failures resulting from my inexperience. But on the whole, though I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy, this first trial confirmed in me the taste for experimental research in the fields of physics and chemistry.”
Marie Curie in Pierre Curie by Marie Curie, with Autobiographical Notes. (1923).
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“Strive for Excellence. Ignore success.”
Bill Young
h/t Andrew Sullivan
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“For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.”
John Tierney in “March of Dimes Syndrome“
Have a plan for achieving your goals, or at least reaching a new equilibrium where the problem has been dramatically reduced.
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“Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.”
Thomas J. Watson
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“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.”
Alfred North Whitehead in “Process and Reality in Cosmology” [Archive.org]
I used this in “The Messy Order of Robust Communities.” Here is a longer excerpt with more context:
The history of the Mediterranean lands, and of western Europe, is the history of the blessing and the curse of political organizations, of religious organizations, of schemes of thought, of social agencies for large purposes. The moment of dominance, prayed for, worked for, sacrificed for, by generations of the noblest spirits, marks the turning point where the blessing passes into the curse. Some new principle of refreshment is required. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.”
Alfred North Whitehead in “Process and Reality in Cosmology” [Archive.org]
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“Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas and progress.”
Charles Kettering
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“If I had permitted my failures, or what seemed to me at the time a lack of success, to discourage me I cannot see any way in which I would ever have made progress.”
Calvin Coolidge
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“Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.”
Joyce Grenfell in “English Lit.” collected in “Stately as a Galleon” (1978) [Archive]
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“Every company needs to have a skunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you’re not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you’re not going to make progress.”
Nolan Bushnell
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“When we make progress quickly, it feeds our emotions. Then, when there’s a period of waiting or we hit a plateau, we find out how committed we really are and whether we’re going to see things through to the finish or quit.”
Joyce Meyer
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“Innovation initiatives that were once handled by dozens a decade ago are now run by only handfuls. The median size of the core innovation group has dropped from a football/soccer eleven to a basketball five. Less apparently enables more. […]
The key performance indicator here is, ironically, slow growth. A fast-growing innovation team means either the wrong people were hired or that the wrong challenge was picked. The team delivers measurably impressive results with only marginally more members. That is the success metric.”
Michael Schrage in “Quiet but Unsubtle Innovation” (2011)
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“A systematic approach to discovery uncovers the evidence that transforms intuition into a viable strategy.”
Sean Murphy
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“Problems are the price of progress. Don’t bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.”
Charles Kettering
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The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.
Terry Pratchett
I work on more than one thing at a time: I have many barely-started, half-finished, and almost-done projects in the pipe at any one time. It’s not ideal but it does allow me to explore along a broad front. There are advantages to minimizing work-in-progress but there are also advantages to getting at least a rough draft of an idea for a product or service or article out of your head an down on paper (or captured in green letters on a black screen).
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