Quotes For Entrepreneurs – October 2008

In April of this year I started to post quotes for entrepreneurs on @skmurphy. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts to your inbox.

Quotes For Entrepreneurs – October 2008

“When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.”
George Bernard Shaw

+ + +

“These are just systems, and if you’re not honest with yourself about what went wrong, you ain’t gonna be able to fix anything.”
Don Arabian (hat tip to Brian Dunbar “Words to Live By“)

+ + +

“Gray hair is God’s graffiti.”
Bill Cosby

+ + +

“Code is not a static answer to a math problem but an evolving answer to newly discovered questions: make it easy to change.”
Paul Graham (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341179 edited to twitter’s length limit).

+ + +

“It’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast (and efficient) that eat the slow (and sparsely connected).”
Jason Jennings (+John Smart)

+ + +

“In Silicon Valley on a Friday afternoon it’s not TGIF but ‘two more working days until Monday!!'”
Miles Kehoe

+ + +

“Between stimulus and response there is a space that is our power to choose, in our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Viktor Frankl

I used this in “Conversations with Prospects: Practice, Review, Share Notes, and Ask for Feedback.”

Update: This was attributed to Frankl by Steven Covey but the sentence does not appear in Frankl’s writing. It is now believed Covey based this on a passage from a 1963 article by Rollo May “Freedom and Responsibility Re-Examined” (emphasis added):

“Freedom is thus not the opposite to determinism. Freedom is the individual’s capacity to know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it may be, on the side of one particular response among several possible ones.”
Rollo May “Freedom and Responsibility Re-Examined

citation by Garson O’Toole in “Between Stimulus and Response There Is a Space. In That Space Is Our Power To Choose Our Response” is

1963, Behavioral Science and Guidance: Proposals and Perspectives edited by Esther Lloyd-Jones and Esther M. Westervelt, Article: Freedom and Responsibility Re-Examined by Rollo May, Start Page 95, Quote Page 103, Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. (HathiTrust Full View) link

+ + +

Torkington’s Law: when VCs no longer emphasize becoming cash flow positive as soon as possible, you’re officially in a bubble.”
Nat Torkington

+ + +

“A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.
Edward Howe

+ + +

“Jeff Bezos was not a dissatisfied customer. Amazon sold books because Bezos identified books as an arbitrage opportunity.”
Alex Krupp in Social Arbitrage

+ + +

“Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
Robert Louis Stevenson

I used this as a closing quote for “Mark Twain on a Dumb Sense of Vast Loss.

+ + +

“In an always on world presence is meaningless. Of course you are on-line, who and what are you available for is the issue.”
Yori Nelken

+ + +

“Time moves in one direction, memory another: we create artifacts to counter the natural flow of forgetting.”
William Gibson “Dead Man Sings” (originally in Forbes ASAP )

+ + +

“To Travel Hopefully is a Better Thing than To Arrive,
the True Success is To Labor.”
Robert Louis Stevenson

Update: I used this as the basis for Traveling Hopefully, my kickoff post for 2011.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top