A collection of quotes for entrepreneurs curated in February 2025 around a theme of taking action when it’s necessary, before it’s too late.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in February 2025
I curate these quotes for entrepreneurs from a variety of sources and tweet them on @skmurphy about once a day where you can get them hot off the mojo wire. At the end of each month I curate them in a blog post that adds commentary and may contain a longer passage from the same source for context. Please enter your E-mail address if you would like to have new blog posts sent to you.
My theme for this month’s “Quotes for Entrepreneurs” is taking action when it’s necessary, before it’s too late.
“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”
Napoleon Hill
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“There is a time to let things happen and a time to make things happen.”
Hugh Prather in “Notes on Love and Courage” (1977) [Archive]
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“More than anything, a lack of experience translates into caring too much about things that don’t matter.”
Sean McClure (@Sean_A_McClure)
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- Jason Cohen (@asmartbear): Is “Willpower” is good for tangible things that need to be done, like diet, exercise, sleep regimens, inbox-zero, enqueuing tweets, procrastination?
Or is it better to develop habits and rules?
Is “willpower” ever the right answer? - Sean Murphy (@skmurphy): Predictable challenges are better managed by habit , process, checklists. Unpredictable challenges, setbacks, and surprises require you to persevere through discomfort, boredom, and pain: they require willpower. Willpower is powered by stoicism or least realistic expectations.
- Jason Cohen (@asmartbear): Oh that’s an interesting distinction — between the predictable and the unpredictable.
- Sean Murphy (@skmurphy): Possibly related:
“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained.
To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”
James Carse in “Finite and Infinite Games” (more at Entrepreneurs Plant Enduring Companies For Posterity)
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“There are times to stop and take reckoning as well as times to go forward. A man must always have his wits about him, matching the winds and ready to quickly take soundings of the course he is sailing and the depths he is in.”
John Wanamaker in “Maxims of Life and Business” (1923)
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“The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.”
Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (attributed)
This is widely attributed to Toffler but the closest passage I can find is from Chapter 16 Future Shock Psychological Dimensions:
“The limitations of the sense organs and nervous system mean that many environmental events occur at rates too fast for us to follow, and we are reduced to sampling experience at best. When the signals reaching us are regular and repetitive, this sampling process can yield a fairly good mental representation of reality. But when it is highly disorganized, when it is novel and unpredictable, the accuracy of our imagery is necessarily reduced. Our image of reality is distorted. This may explain why, when we experience sensory overstimulation, we suffer confusion, a blurring of the line between illusion and reality.”
Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (Chapter 16 Future Shock Psychological Dimensions)
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“We must discipline ourselves to convert dreams into plans, and plans into goals, and goals into those small daily activities that will lead us, one sure step at a time, toward a better future.”
Jim Rohn in “Five Major Pieces To the Life Puzzle“
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“The move is there, but you must see it.”
Savielly Tartakower
This made me realize that I have to become more deliberate and systematic in my analysis of a situation or diagnosis of a problem. I often invite people to “walk around a problem” but it’s clear I need to develop some checklists for specific categories or types of problems so that I can not only “make that intuitive leap” but approach the analysis more systematically.
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“Tactics is what you do when there is something to do; strategy is what you do when there is nothing to do.”
Savielly Tartakower
I have been trying to cultivate a baseline of good habits / default actions that are generally applicable (or perhaps defined over a long time horizon of 6-12 months so that I don’t fall back to “there is nothing to react to so I should play solitaire”). I have been experimenting with “gamifying” various default activities so that I am taking constructive action when there are no problems to solve.
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“To avoid losing a piece, many a person has lost the game.”
Savielly Tartakower
It’s tricky because most of what I attempt, or at least most new initiatives , have a low probability of success. So I don’t want to give up too easily. But holding on too long or refusing to admit defeat is also very costly. I think the test is Peter Drucker’s “organized abandonment” model of, “knowing what you know now would you have started this project/product/initiative?” If the answer is no then you have to find a way for a graceful exit that honors any commitments you made. This has the side effect, at least in my case, of being more careful about commitments. This follows Abraham Lincoln’s observation:
“My old Father used to have a saying that ‘if you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter.'”
Abraham Lincoln in a letter To Joshua F. Speed, February 25, 1842
I first curated this in October 2013 and used it again in “Michael Wade: Things I Wish I Knew In My Twenties.” in the “Keep your word. Do what you say you will do.” I advised:
“The easiest way to keep your word is to be very careful about what promises you make. Learn to negotiate, not only to clarify other people’s expectations but also to minimize your commitments. Have a plan for delivering on your promise before you make it, take the time to develop one even if pressed. Be careful to make pledges only about events and actions that are under your direct control.
Sean Murphy in “Michael Wade: Things I Wish I Knew In My Twenties.”+ + +
“If you are not careful the time you spend looking for shortcuts will far exceed the time it would take you to do what you know you need to do.”
Janis Ozolins “Nike is Right” (Just Do It!)
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“Knowledge isn’t power. The ability to act on knowledge is power.”
Michael Schrage
h/t David Gurteen “Knowledge and Power”
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“Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.”
Learned Hand
I originally curated this in June 2014 and am recycling this month because it’s on target for the theme of taking action when necessary.
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“When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change.
It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.”
Bruce Sterling in “State of the World 2009” [closing line of post 14]
h/t Steve Mays; I think one thing that holds me back from taking action–certainly taking timely and effective action–is when I lack an accurate understanding of the current situation and how it’s likely to evolve. I blogged about my confusion over the current state of the world in “Entering 2025 as a Stranger in a Strange Land.” I offered five possibly useful perspectives for navigating 2025 from George Friedman, G. Michael Hopf, Alasdair Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Your mileage may vary, but now that it’s mid-February 2025, I would offer a sixth perspective, this one from Harry Truman: “There’s nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”
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“Generative AI is a promising technology whose gains will remain elusive until there is a shift from prioritizing the development of general human-like conversational tools to focus on reliable information that can increase the marginal productivity of educators, healthcare professionals, electricians, plumbers and other craft workers.”
Daron Acemoglu in “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI” (May 2024) [condensed concluding paragraph]
Full paragraph:
“My assessment is that there are indeed much bigger gains to be had from generative AI, which is a promising technology, but these gains will remain elusive unless there is a fundamental reorientation of the industry, including perhaps a major change in the architecture of the most common generative AI models, such as the LLMs, in order to focus on reliable information that can increase the marginal productivity of different kinds of workers, rather than prioritizing the development of general human-like conversational tools. The general-purpose nature of the current approach to generative AI could be ill-suited for providing such reliable information. To put it simply, it remains an open question whether we need foundation models (or the current kind of LLMs) that can engage in human-like conversations and write Shakespearean sonnets if what we want is reliable information useful for educators, healthcare professionals, electricians, plumbers and other craft workers.”
Daron Acemoglu in “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI” (May 2024)
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“Any success takes one in a row.
Do one thing well, then another.
Once, then once more.
Over and over until the end, then it’s one in a row again.”
Matthew McConaughey in his autobiography “Greenlights“
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“The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.”
Henri Frederic Amiel in his Journal
I think this is why B students often make better entrepreneurs, they are more comfortable being mostly right and don’t look at a lack of perfection as failure. A reasonable probability is as close to certainty as you can normally come before you need to make a decision before an opportunity changes or a competitor acts. Startups are no place for perfectionists. (I originally curated this in October 2015 and thought it was apropos for this month’s theme as well.)
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“There is only one proof of ability—action.”
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, in Aphorisms (1880–93)
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When you travel on foot, for example—and I don’t mean backpacking or hiking, I mean, for example, traveling on foot from Munich to Paris—you are given a world view, an insight that is different or outside of the average knowledge. I have a dictum: “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.”
Werner Herzog in a 2022 interview with Michael LaPointe “Werner Herzog has never liked Introspection“
A “walking tour” or a hike through a market, observing with your own eyes and having real conversations, gives you a better sense of the ground truth. It seems more efficient to take a car, or better, a car, helicopter, or jet. But it’s the illusion of rapid progress and meaningful comprehension.
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“Of course I know that it is better to build a cathedral than to make a boot; but I think it is better to actually make a boot, than only to dream about building a cathedral. It is far nobler to do great things than small things, I admit; but it is nobler to do small things than to waste all one’s time in wanting to do great ones, and to end by doing nothing at all.”
Ellen Thornycroft Fowler in “Concerning Isabel Carnaby“
Your product ideas must leave “Thoughtland” to create value.
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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.”
Thomas Merton in “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander” (1966)
We have faced drastic change in the 2020s, but the 1960s were no less eventful. This quote reminds me of a related observation by Eric Hoffer:
“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
Eric Hoffer in “Reflections on the Human Condition” (1973) [Archive]
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“More than anything, a lack of experience translates into caring too much about things that don’t matter.”
Sean McClure (@Sean_A_McClure)
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“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Douglas Adams in “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time”
Needless to say, deadlines are useful for determining when you need to make a decision. If you don’t decide, you have unwittingly decided by your inaction.”
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“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.”
Patrick Henry his “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” Speech, March 23, 1775
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“It is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.”
Edsger Dijkstra in “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” 1975
Adding resources for parallel efforts that rely on the same methods may not improve results. I included this because sometimes the decision you have to make is to change methods. There is a variation on this that recognizes that many processes have a time constant or change constant: a system change or transformation can only happen so fast. This reminds of a 1957 quote by Theodore von Karman:
“Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month.”
Theodore von Karman
Fred Brooks riffed on this with:
“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”
Fred Brooks in the “Mythical Man Month” (1975)
I find Fred Brooks very insightful and have blogged about him “A Half-Fast Entrepreneur with Half-Vast Experience,” “Fred Brooks’ “No Silver Bullet” Revisited,” “Human Nature As Applied to Software Development,” and “Finding And Adding People Successfully to Your Startup Team.”
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“By “augmenting human intellect” we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by “complex situations” we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers—whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.
Man’s population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man’s intellect, in the sense defined above, would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits.”
Doug Engelbart in Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (1962)
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Eleven from Seth Godin’s Practical approaches for more effective teamwork
- Make promises and keep them
- Say back what you heard to be clear you understand
- Insist on a spec, write one, improve it
- Get aligned on time frames
- Agree on a budget
- Keep a calendar
- Give credit, take responsibility
- Ask what if
- Show your work
- Don’t be late
- Pick your team with care, invest once you do
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“The hero is the man who is immovably centered.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
h/t “Leaves of Life” (1914), by Margaret Bird Steinmetz; if you understand what’s needed for you to support your best and highest purpose, then action becomes straightforward. As Merlin Mann observed:
“A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise it’s necessarily not a priority.”
Merlin Mann in “Priorities“
Image Credits:
- “Dont’ Wait” Clock Image based on 89172577 https://www.123rf.com/
- Janis Ozolins “Nike is Right” (Just Do It!) [Used with Attribution]
- Jono Hey for “One In a Row” [Used with Attribution]
