A collection of quotes for entrepreneurs curated in March 2026 around a theme of data, stories, and evidence.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in March 2026
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.
My theme for this month’s “Quotes for Entrepreneurs” is data, stories, and evidence.
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“Research means that you don’t know, but are willing to find out.”
Charles Kettering
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“ABCD – Always Be Collecting Data”
I originally used “always be collecting data” on the SKMurphy Blog on Nov-29-2010 in “Keeping Your Customer’s Trust” Under Law 6 in Weinberg’s Laws of Trust. “Always trust your client–and cut the cards.” My comment was “Always be collecting data. Always be collecting multiple perspectives.” I then used it as the title for a blog post.
I recall seeing this phrase in a presentation as “ABCD – Always Be Collecting Data,” in the late 1980s or early 1990s. It may been a riff by the presenter on the Glengarry Glen Ross movie speech by Alec Baldwin where he writes “ABC – Always Be Closing” on the chalkboard during a briefing for the sales team.
I traced the phrase to an answer to a 1925 letter to the editor of Printers’ Ink; but I suspect the phrase is older.
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“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
David Hume
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“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Richard P. Feynman
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“No research without action, no action without research.”
Kurt Lewin
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“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
W. Edwards Deming
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This was a principle for systems design suggested in a talk I heard in the late 80s or early 90s. I can no longer remember the speaker’s name but I remember that he was in the disk drive business. Google has proven unavailing in sourcing it so it was probably an original insight with this engineer that hasn’t gained wider currency. Used as the title for a blog post.
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“Do something today that reflects who you are, what you are capable of, what you care about. Whether it is at work, at home, for pay or for free, do something that shows you. We need to see evidence of our abilities; we need to see evidence of our relevance. Give yourself plenty of evidence of what you can do, and you will not doubt your abilities to do anything.”
David Niven, PhD in “The Simple Secrets for Becoming Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise“
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“Founders have infinite time horizons and concentrated ownership; professional managers have quarterly time horizons and zero ownership.”
“A founder treats the company as a tool for solving a problem; a CEO treats the company as the thing to be preserved.”
Mark Atwood (@_Mark_Atwood)
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“No data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.”
“There is nothing like first hand evidence, as a matter of fact, my mind is entirely made up upon the case, but still we may as well learn all that is to be learned.”
Two quotes by Sherlock Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet” by Arthur Conan Doyle
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“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”
Jim Barksdale+ + +
“Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use.”
Anna C. Brackett in “The Technique of Rest” (1892).
Especially true for entrepreneurs when interviewing prospects. There is a corollary: calculate the expected value of perfect information; don’t spend more on gathering data than the impact it will have on your plans. A reasonable probability is normally the best you can achieve: you can only be certain of missed opportunities, not the ones that are available to you. More context:
“If the train stops, don’t ask a hundred questions, which don’t concern you, as to the cause of the delay. Do not seek for information of which you can make no use. When the steamer goes slowly because of fog, do not attack the captain every time he appears on deck with your inquiries as to whether he thinks he will run into an iceberg or another vessel, or whether there is always fog in that part of the ocean, and a hundred others, so various as to leave no doubt in the mind of anyone who listens to them of the great power of invention of their propounder.”
Anna C. Brackett in “The Technique of Rest” (1892).
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“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”
Ursula K. Le Guin in “The Left Hand of Darkness” (1969).
Originally curated in March 2012
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“There is much evidence that the proper study of programming is done at the level of the programming social unit. Not that the individual level is unimportant, but we might start by asking why, if the average programmer spends two-thirds of his time working with other people rather than working alone (yes, it’s true!), that 99 percent of the studies have been on individual programmers.
One answer, of course, is that if studying programmers is expensive, studying groups of programmers is extravagantly so. Moreover, not just any groups of programmers will do–not, for example, a collection of trainees put into a “team.” Putting a bunch of people to work on the same problem doesn’t make them a team. […] Even studying teams as they are constituted today may not be sufficient, for these are teams that have grown up in an environment pervaded by the myth that programming is the last bastion of individuality.”
Gerald Weinberg in “The Psychology of Computer Programming” (Silver anniversary edition) | 1988
This also applies to gaining an understanding of other kinds of knowledge work.
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“The warning signs are flashing bright red that the venture market has never been more consensus-driven. We believe that the consequences of continued concentration will be catastrophic for venture capital and the broader innovation economy. ”
Omar El-Ayat and Nic Poulos in “We Have Met the Enemy an He is Us“
This impacts bootstrappers indirectly as a widespread consensus builds on the “right way” to build a startups and filters into our niches in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
“Venture capital has long celebrated itself as the business of contrarianism. The best investors prided themselves on spotting what others missed: the non-consensus founder, market, or product. The venture model was designed to harness outlier outcomes — but it relied on individual conviction, not herd behavior, to find them.”
Omar El-Ayat and Nic Poulos in “We Have Met the Enemy an He is Us
I think this still applies for bootstrappers: leverage your unique experience, perspective, and skills to find a niche you can serve exceptionally well.
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“When I look at my grandchildren or I hold them, I can feel that it’s only my individual strength that is subsiding. The strength in the family, in the species, and in the whole beating heart of the universe hasn’t subsided at all.”
David Milch reflecting on his Alzheimer’s and his spirituality in his memoir “Life’s Work“
I am a huge fan of David Milch’s writing in “Hill Street Blues”, “NYPD Blue”, “Deadwood”, “John from Cincinnati”, and “Luck.” I read his “True Blue: The Real Stories Behind NYPD Blue” he co-wrote with Bill Clark and enjoyed it immensely. I thought this might be similar to Somerset Maugham’s “The Summing Up” or Sid Meier’s “Memoir” where creative people offered assessments of what they learned and some insights into their process. This is a very bleak book that recounts some terrible childhood experiences that shapes his life as well as his gambling addiction, drug addiction, and alcoholism. Part of the problem is that by the time he started on the memoir his Alzheimer’s had progressed to a point that he is relying on transcripts of writing sessions and older notes but he has very little memory of events except those that are incredibly painful emotionally.
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“There’s a fundamental connection between seeming and being. We all become what we pretend to be. Everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
Patrick Rothfuss in The Name of the Wind (2007)
This works at a founding team-level as well. This reminds me of two older quotes:
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Kurt Vonnegut in “Mother Night” (1962)
I think our beliefs, dreams, and visions allow us to act our way into expertise. This is not “fake it till you make it,” it’s “acting as if” to allow you to become what you aspire to.
“No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850.
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“Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.”
Erwin Knoll
Known as “Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy” in the 80s. Two decades later Michael Crichton labelled it “Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.”
“Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.
But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.”
Michael Crichton in “Why Speculate” a talk at International Leadership Forum, La Jolla (26 April 2002)
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“Honor and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honor lies.
Fortune in men has some small difference made,
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Worth makes the man, and want of it, the fellow.”Alexander Pope in Epistle V in his “An Essay on Man” (1891)
English has drifted a little since Pope wrote this almost 140 years ago so I will offer my interpretation of these few lines: what matters is how well you play the hand you’ve been dealt. Circumstances, wealth, and social status make little difference, it’s how you manage the situations you find yourself in that allow you to distinguish yourself. This is the mindset that helps entrepreneurs to thrive.
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“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
Graham Greene “The End of the Affair”
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