Quotes for Entrepreneurs curated in September 2021, theme this month is managing doubt and discomfort, leveraging surprise.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in September 2021
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.
Theme for this month is managing doubt and discomfort, leveraging surprise.
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“The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty– some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.”
Richard Feynman in “The Value of Science” (1955) [collected in “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman“
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“A hugely profitable investment that doesn’t begin with discomfort is usually an oxymoron.”
Howard Marks
h/t Lattice Work Investing Quote Collection
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Blake: This place slightly resembles an insane asylum.
Alexander: Well, all you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people.”
Eric Hatch in “My Man Godfrey“
True for many kinds or organizations and communities: a boundary or container and a clear filter on input.
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“No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art.”
Henry Petroski
By far the more common approach is to make mistakes and not learn from them–often because we cannot admit we made a mistake.
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- Kyle Krzeski (@kylekrzeski): Early stage startup lifecycle: am I missing something? Build -> Ship -> Get feedback -> Repeat.
- Sean Murphy (@skmurphy) : Where in the cycle do you generate revenue? When do you start making a profit?
- Dominic St-Pierre (@DominicStPierre): there’s a HUGE void of unknown between ship and get feedback. In my attempts that is, this part is where it’s tough, again, to me at least.
- Sean Murphy (@skmurphy) : You can get quite a bit of feedback without shipping if you talk and write about the problem you are addressing and ask folks if it’s a problem for them and how they are managing it now. Consider this alternative: Observe/Measure/Converse <-> Learn -> Build
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“The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted. The trick lay in not letting it get out of control.”
William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Predates Andrew Grove’s “Only the Paranoid Survive” by four years.
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“You need to plan the way a fire department plans: It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.”
Andrew S. Grove in “Only the Paranoid Survive”
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“Today’s intellectual climate has elevated tentative scientific consensus as sacred revealed truth and treats even modest doubt as blasphemy punishable with intellectual death.
Yet there can be no scientific progress when we suppress all doubt.”
Sridhar Vembu (@svembu)
I think the embrace and cultivation of doubt is central to the definition of science. Richard Feynman made this point in his “The Relation of Science and Religion” talk at the Caltech YMCA Lunch Forum on May 2, 1956. A transcript is available from the CalTech library site:
It is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding, we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt.
Richard Feynman in “The Relation of Science and Religion“
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Pondering Sifu (@ponderingsifu): Everything that you see, every skill is easy to learn. People try to sell you courses to make you believe those courses will make it easier to learn. It does not. The easiest way is to just do it, just learn it, just put the time in.
Sean Murphy (@skmurphy): Sometimes it’s knowing what NOT to do given a situation. Some skills are like combination locks that require the successful integration of multiple actions, either in parallel or sequence. Others have a high penalty for failure: for example packing a parachute before you skydive.
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“At that time (1909) the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.”
Igor Sikorsky
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“We have here the paradigm of all progress in science: discoveries are made by pursuing unsuspected possibilities suggested by existing knowledge. This is how science retains its identity through a sequence of successive revolutions.”
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“If I ever hear that ‘can’t make an omelet’ phrase again, I’ll start doing a little murder myself! It’s used to justify every atrocity under every despotism, Fascist or Nazi, or Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir, men’s souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!”
Sinclair Lewis, “It Can’t Happen Here”
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“A man’s gifts are not a property; they are a duty.”
Henrik Ibsen
I recently read “Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher” by Tom Bethel and was pleased to learn that Hoffer collected quotes. He had several thousand on 3×5 cards that he had meant to turn into a book. Bethel included a selection of quotes along with notes that Hoffer had made about each. Hoffer added the following commentary:
“Talents do not come fully grown; they have to be developed. Do highly endowed people feel a duty to realize their potentialities? Sometimes a talent compels a person to develop. But it is probably true that from the beginning of time talents have been wasted on an enormous scale. It is the duty of a society to create a milieu optimal for the realization of talents. Such a society would preach self-development as a duty–a holy duty to finish God’s work.”
Eric Hoffer quoted in “Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher”
I agree with Hoffer, but what’s funny about his comments is that while he was an avowed atheist, he certainly paraphrased Luke 12:48
“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”
Luke 12:48
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“The problem with A/B Testing is that you cannot be surprised.
Surprise is an important marker for learning.”
Sean Murphy
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“People who live on the frontier sometimes make mistakes, but they also advance our civilization. When oligopoly speech platforms vanish entire worlds of thought that their social media managers don’t understand it is incredibly damaging.”
Mike Solana in “The Crime of Curiosity“
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“It’s OK to delete things from the todo list that you never managed to do. Ask yourself:why did I put this task on it?”
Katerina Bohlec (@katerinabohlec)
I explicitly mark them off as “not done” and look back every two to three months to see if I can detect any patterns. For example tasks that involve a particular skill or activity or related to particular prospect or client.
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“People can have a really hard time empathizing with their adversaries. Which is too bad, because the better you can model your adversary, the more effective you can be in countering their OODA Loop–or knowing when you can ignore it.”
Sonya Mann @sonyasupposedly
This is quite insightful. I had blogged about some different aspects of the OODA Loop in “Planning and Reflection.”
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“To persuade, lead with inquiry.”
Charles Lambdin
Ask questions to make sure you understand the other party’s point of view: any argument or sales pitch you make will have to start from their state of information and connect with their needs and goals. The Appreciative Inquiry model offers an excellent foundation. I blogged about the value of genuine curiosity for your customer’s situation and needs in “A Great Demo is driven by mutual curiosity.”
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“There is something a little terrifying about a man with too long a view.”
Robert Heinlein “Beyond this Horizon”
Beware those who seek to immanentize the Eschaton.
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“One thing I’ve learned with mapping over all these years is the moment you think you are right just because “it’s obvious” is also the moment you discover that you were wrong.”
Simon Wardley (@swardley)
The mapping that Wardley is referring to is his “Wardley Mapping.” His epiphany brings to mind Francis Bacon’s insight that you are better served to begin with an open mind.
“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.”
Francis Bacon in “The Advancement of Learning” [Gutenberg]
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“Happiness is to take up the struggle in the midst of the raging storm and not to pluck the lute in the moonlight or recite poetry among the blossoms.”
Ding Ling (1904-1986) in “Thoughts on March 8” (Aug-3-1942) collected in “I myself am a woman : selected writings of Ding Ling” [Archive.org]
Here is a longer passage for more context:
“Resolution in hardship, perseverance to the end. Aware, modern women should identify and cast off all their rosy illusions. Happiness is to take up the struggle in the midst of the raging storm and not to pluck the lute in the moonlight or recite poetry among the blossoms. In the absence of the greatest resolution, it is very easy to falter in mid- path. Not to suffer is to become degenerate. The strength to carry on should be nurtured through the quality of “perseverance.” People without great aims and ambitions rarely have the firmness of purpose that does not covet petty advantages or seek a comfortable existence.”
Ding Ling (1904-1986) in “Thoughts on March 8” (Aug-3-1942) collected in “I myself am a woman : selected writings of Ding Ling” [Archive.org]
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“The moment something hangs in the balance , the least amount effort is required to change its trajectory. At such moments, courage is the highest virtue.”
Michael Mayer (@mmay3r)
I think there are two situations that appear similar but are quite different. The first is when two or more forces are balanced, holding the system in an equilibrium position. A small amount of effort can have a disproportionate impact. Think of a freelancer who develops a product and makes her first sale. With courage, she can transition from selling her time to selling her product. But there is a second type of system that started with a reservoir, perhaps assets or momentum, exhausted by a constant force. It appears to be in balance, but only momentarily. One example is a gymnast at the top of her arc on a trampoline; the constant force of gravity stopped her rising action. A similar case is a startup that raised investment and then incurred a stream of ongoing expenses without generating enough revenue to become profitable. When the bank balance hits zero, it’s not in equilibrium. It will go into bankruptcy.
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“The first trick every utterly unreasonable person masters is a calm and reasonable appearance.”
Aaron Haspel in “Everything“
Bad hires are always good interviewers. Poor customers–and poor vendors–often start out positive. You have to allow for mistakes so that you can also find “minus plus” people. I used this as a closing quote in “Plus Minus People”
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“Focus on understanding why the system is doing what it’s doing, rather than why it’s not doing what you wanted it to.”
John Guttag quoted in Jon Udell’s “Computational Thinking and Life Skills“
I initially used this in my “Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in January 2013“, but I thought it was directly on point for this month’s theme: managing doubt and discomfort, leveraging surprise. It’s excellent advice for any stalled sale. Focus on what the prospect is doing. And in an enterprise sale with many stakeholders, there may be conflicting assessments. You need to look at individual assessments as well as their sum. If they are not moving forward, they may have decided to live with their current solution because your offering does not seem to offer enough improvements to offset the costs and disruption of a migration. Or they may be deadlocked, with some excited by what you offer and others opposed because of what they will lose in a migration. In the first case, you have to consider how to increase your impact. In the second case, you have to reduce the losses you would inflict.
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“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
Dwight Eisenhower in a letter drafted “In Case of Failure” for the D-Day landings
This primary source comes from the Collection DDE-EPRE: Eisenhower, Dwight D: Papers, Pre-Presidential National Archives Identifier: 186470 Transcript from DOCSTeach: “In Case of Failure 6/5/1944” One of the leadership lessons offered in B.V. Jagdeesh on “Startup Leadership Lessons Learned” was “Prepare Two Speeches.”
Leadership Lessons Learned: Prepare Two Speeches
His tenure at NetScalar saw the company narrowly avoid shutdown and go on to establish a new paradigm for Internet connectivity management. He had to prepare two speeches for the employees, one where he announced that the company was getting shut down, and one where they announced new round of funding (from Sequoia as it turns out). He was able to give the second speech and returned 8x to Sequoia when Citrix acquired NetScalar two and half years later.
B.V. Jagdeesh on “Startup Leadership Lessons Learned”
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“Don’t try and position yourself as bringing fire to the savages, acknowledge the challenges and real pain your prospects are experiencing and offer a specific measurable benefit that differentiates you from other potential solutions.”
Sean Murphy in “Nusym De-cloaks 4″
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“A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.”
David Brinkley
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“If you accept that COVID is here to stay, then you must accept that it is inevitable that everyone will catch it. Several times.
If you accept this, then the only valid public health measure is increasing odds of survival, not decreasing odds of contraction.”
Michael Mayer (@mmay3r)
I think that’s where we are, COVID has become endemic.