Quotes for entrepreneurs curated in October 2024 on a theme of action as the natural result of learning and reflection.
Quotes For Entrepreneurs Curated in October 2024
My theme for this month’s “Quotes for Entrepreneurs” is action as the natural result of learning and reflection.
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“Any genuine philosophy leads to action.”
Henry Miller
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“We can usually recognize the consequence of our actions.
It is the consequence of our inaction that gets confused with the inevitable.”
Robert Brault
This reminds me of a quote by Chesterton I curated in November 2018
“I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.”
G. K. Chesterton in “A Visit to Holland” (April 29, 1922)
A bias for action is a hallmark of entrepreneurship.
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“324. It is not enough to know, we must also apply; it is not enough to will, we must also do.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe In his “Maxim’s and Reflections”
Also translated as “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
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“Cynicism is not a neutral position, although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils. […] Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.”
Nick Cave in Red Hand Files April 22
Part of his answer to a question from Valerio: “Following the last few years I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?” Cave explains on the about page what the Red Hands Files are:
“The Red Hand Files began in September of 2018 as a simple idea – a place where I would answer questions from my fans. Over the years, The Red Hand Files has burst the boundaries of its original concept to become a strange exercise in communal vulnerability and transparency. Hundreds of letters come in each week, asking an extraordinarily diverse array of questions, from the playful to the profound, the deeply personal to the flat-out nutty. I read them all and try my best to answer a question each week. The Red Hand Files has no moderator, and it is not monetized, and I am the only one who has access to the questions that sit patiently waiting to be answered. Thank you all for being a part of what has become, at least for me, a life-changing, soul enriching exercise in commonality and togetherness.”
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Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Godin’s Corollary “Any sufficiently advanced technology is worth understanding. If we understand it, we can use it well, improve it, and share it with confidence.
Effective action is predicated on sufficient understanding. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if you don’t understand the proper uses and limits of your tools, mental models, and current situational awareness, you won’t be effective.
I have added Godin’s Corollary to my list of “sufficiently advanced” laws in “Nature, Technology, and Magic.”
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“The great end of life is not knowledge but action. What men need is, as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organise into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning as others are from over-fulness of meat and drink.”
Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) “Technical Education” (1877)
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“Doing nothing is harmless, but being busy doing nothing is not.”
Eric Hoffer in “Reflections on the Human Condition” (1973)
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“Try, above all things to be still and to contain yourself. You always want to rush into action. Realize that a certain kind of stillness is the most perfect form of action, like a seed can wait. One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not be a mere rushing on.”
D.H. Lawrence, in a letter to Mabel Luhan Sep-1924
It’s critical to distinguish between a rapid response or fast action and an effective response.
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“Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make progress.”
Alfred Montapert
This can also be phrased, “Don’t confuse action with results.”
“I told my strategists to collect receipts. Know when and why something works or fails, for whom, at what scale. Make the learning goals, data collection plan and actions clear.”
Hà Phan (@hpdailyrant)
I like the use of “collect receipts.” I reminds me of a quote often incorrectly credited to Winston Churchill:
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
Ian Gilmour
h/t Henry Codolfing and Barry Popik
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“Endeavor to make your talents convertible to ready use, prompt for the occasion, and adapted to the ordinary purposes of life; cultivate strength rather than gracefulness; in our country it is the useful, not the ornamental, that is in demand.”
Washington Irving in a letter to Pierre Paris Irving (nephew), 1824 December 7th
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“The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.”
John Dewey “Democracy and Education” (1916) [PDF]
I think the self is refined and improved through reflection on actions and the results achieved. More context
A physician who continues to serve the sick in a plague at almost certain danger to his own life must be interested in the efficient performance of his profession—more interested in that than in the safety of his own bodily life. But it is distorting facts to say that this interest is merely a mask for an interest in something else which he gets by continuing his customary services-—such as money or good repute or virtue; that it is only a means to an ulterior selfish end. The moment we recognize that the self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action, the whole situation clears up. A man’s interest in keeping at his work in spite of danger to life means that his self is found in that work; if he finally gave up, and preferred his personal safety or comfort, it would mean that he preferred to be that kind of a self.
John Dewey “Democracy and Education” (1916) [PDF]
I think when you see someone pursuing their work in spite of danger it may be more appropriate to call it a calling.
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“Never act until you have clearly answered the question: “What happens if I do nothing?”
Robert Brault
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“It is a golden rule that one should never judge men by their opinions, but rather by what these opinions lead them to be.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), in “Lichtenberg’s Reflections” translated by Norman Alliston, 1908
Look at the results of the actions that your beliefs lead you to take. I try to use this same lens in evaluating others’ beliefs: do they encourage actions that create results I favor? I may find some of their beliefs absurd, but if their beliefs encourage actions with positive outcomes perhaps I have mis-assessed. The flip side is to judge my actions not by my intent but by the resulting outcomes. There are honest mistakes, but if someone repeatedly makes the same “honest mistake,” I start to question how honest the mistake is.`
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“Creative spirits always anticipate the course of events. They do not wait for the dawn of a new era. They resolutely begin the new era at the moment when they see that the old era is ended. The darkness gathers, but it is a time, not for vain repining over that which has passed away, but for eager planning for that which must take its place. There is a quick transfer of interests to new problems which relate themselves to the new period.”
Samuel McChord Crothers in “On the Evening of the New Day,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1919
Crothers explains why he titled the essay “On the Evening of the New Day”
When does a day begin? Different nations have had their own methods of punctuating time. Our calendar follows the Romans in beginning the day at midnight; for all practical purposes we reckon it from sunrise to sunrise. The Athenians and the Hebrews, however, began their new day at sunset. In the story of creation we are told, ‘And the evening and the morning were the first day.’
Samuel McChord Crothers in “On the Evening of the New Day,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1919
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I have never heard any thing about the resolutions of the disciples, but a great deal about the Acts of the Apostles.
Horace Mann
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“No lesson survives first contact with learners. So teach your material while it is in draft: at a conference, for a local college or bootcamp, or online. If no one signs up, you just learned something useful…”
Greg Wilson in “Writing a Technical Book“
This is from slide 21 of his presentation “Writing a Technical Book.” It’s a great deck packed with some hard won lessons. I have written five books: two workbooks for entrepreneurs, a book of quotations for entrepreneurs, and two in the “Working Capital” series. All were self-published. I did each of them differently: I did teach from the material in draft form for the two workbooks and two working capital books. The workbooks were intentional: I started with a vision of what I wanted to accomplish. The “Working Capital” books grew out of a presentation that was inspired by a number of questions at the Bootstrappers Breakfasts and other forums for entrepreneurs. I am currently revising “Working Capital Volume 1: It Takes More than Money” as part of recording an audiobook version.
His slide on “Sketch First” offers an approach I will apply to longer blog post and my next book: “Draw diagrams on paper or a whiteboard: it’s faster and more flexible than any computer drawing tool. Take a picture and use as a placeholder until you’re sure, because you’re going to iterate a lot on diagram.” I have done a few posts that started from a concrete visualization or image: “Chalk Talk on Technology Adoption” comes to mind as an early one. But I have drifted away from diagrams, which used to be a natural mode of getting ideas out of my head.
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“Technological revolutions can only change the world when the new technology becomes cheap enough for it to be widely applied.”
John Steele Gordon in “How Elon Musk Changed the World“
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“The fastest way forward may not be the most reliable. Leverage makes us brittle. Too often, though, we celebrate the brittle head start without noticing in the long run, the turtle did a lot better than anyone expected. ”
Seth Godin in “This is Strategy: Make Better Plans.“
Excerpts from chapter 66: Resilience and Leverage
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“The incentive to try something new after failure is the key feature of Silicon Valley.”
Brian Norgard (@BrianNorgard)
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“You must make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation”
T. H. Huxley, in letter to Anton Dohrn (Oct. 17, 1873)
The ability to make decisive choices under pressure–too little time, too few resources, social disapproval from challenging traditions–is essential for an entrepreneur to persevere. Pressure can trigger a change in perspective that unlocks new creative insights. Deadlines, especially self-imposed deadlines to prevent inaction from drifting into a decision, are enable many fruitful creative efforts. I blogged about a similar observation by Snowden in “Innovation Needs Starvation, Pressure, and a New Perspective.”
- Starvation of familiar resource, forcing you to find new approaches, doing things in a different way;
- Pressure that forces you to engage in the problem;
- Perspective Shift to allow different patterns and ideas to be brought into play.
Dave Snowden
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“Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.”
James Clear
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Diary entry for Oct-3-1938: We know many things that, in our everyday life, do not work out in the way we might expect. The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.
Dec-10-1938: Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long. The busiest time of all is childhood, because it is fully occupied by finding out what the world is and getting used to it.
Cesare Pavese in “This Business of Living”
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“Knowledge does not advance practice. Rather practice advances knowledge.”
Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin in “Power of Positive Deviance“
h/t David Gurteen “Knowledge and Practice” See also “Positive Deviance FieldGuide” (PDF) and “The Positive Deviance Initiative.” Positive deviance is a very important model for entrepreneurs to master, see “Early Customer Conversations: Use Appreciative Inquiry and Amplify Positive Deviance” for more. I originally curated this quote in November 2016 but felt it was on target for quotes about action. The authors offer a variation on this idea:
“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than think your way into a new way of acting.”
Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin in “Power of Positive Deviance“
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“I never ‘worry’ about action, but only about inaction.”
Winston Churchill
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“How to avoid tons of problems in life: Go to bed on time.”
Alex Hormozi (@AlexHormozi)
I find this hard to do some days, but it’s always a good idea to get up earlier and give it hell in the morning rather than grinding into the night unless you are truly in the grip of an idea, in which case you are not trapped in a worry cycle but executing.
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“In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Prudence“
The time may not feel like it’s ripe and the way forward may be far from clear, but when you are in a difficult and deteriorating situation you cannot stand still.
I originally curated this in April 2011 and have used it as an interstitial quote in “A Clear-Eyed View of the Way Forward” and “Early Markets Offer Fluid Opportunities.” I frequently long for a clear eyed view of the way forward. Sometimes the path becomes clear when a situation echoes with prior experience or I see a pattern match to a prior success (or failure). Other times clarity flows from recognizing that there is only one option left: the “best bad plan.” The trick is to act immediately so as not to foreclose your only remaining potentially viable option.
“The start is what stops most people.”
Don Shula