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Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in July 2013
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“There is no distance on this Earth as far away as yesterday.”
Robert Nathan
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“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
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“The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion–these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.”
Jerome S. Bruner
I used this as the closing quote for “Early Markets Offer Fluid Opportunities”
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“Good design successfully manages the tensions between user needs, technology feasibility, and business viability.”
Tim Brown
From an interview in “Imagine Design Create”
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“The secret to success is constancy of purpose”
Benjamin Disraeli
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“The right way to build a company is to experiment in lots of small ways, so that you have plenty of room to make mistakes and change strategies.”
Vinod Khosla quoted in “What Does Vinod Khosla Know About Web 2.0 That Others Don’t?” (2005)
Used as closing quote in “Making Our Business More Credible in 2006”
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“A reputation for good judgment, for fair dealing, for truth, and for rectitude, is itself a fortune.”
Henry Ward Beecher
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“Don’t save the canary. Fix the coal mine.”
Seth Godin in “Canaries and Coal Mines“
This is not the best line in the blog post, it’s “My own little Potemkin Village” which highlights Godin’s insight into the perils of celebrity.
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“Innovation is fostered by information gathered from new connections; from insights gained by journeys into other disciplines or places; from active, collegial networks and fluid, open boundaries. Innovation arises from ongoing circles of exchange, where information is not just accumulated or stored, but created. Knowledge is generated anew from connections that weren’t there before.”
Margaret J. Wheatley
h/t Valeria Maltoni Used as closing quote in “Byron Wien’s Lessons Learned in 80 Years: Seven for Entrepreneurs.”
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“Before you can score you must have a goal.”
Greek proverb
Used as the title for “Before you can score you must have a goal.”
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The days you work are the best days.
Georgia O’Keeffe
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“Nothing happens to you that has not happened to someone else.”
William Feather
I really liked William Feather’s 1949 book, “The Business of Life.” It’s a collection of short notes, letters, newspaper columns magazine articles. Very insightful, and something like reading a blog from the 1930?s and 40?s. I used it as the basis for four blog posts:
- “William Feather’s ‘The Business of Life’“
- “More from William Feather’s ‘The Business of Life’“
- “William Feather on Perseverance Rewarded“
- “William Feather on ‘Dead Business’“
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“If you were were really crushing it,
you’d be too busy crushing it
to tell people how much you’re crushing it.”
Griffin Caprio (@gcaprio)
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“I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day,” said Mr. Irwine. “No dust has settled on one’s mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things”.
George Eliot in Adam Bede (1859)
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“When you struggle to reach for something you don’t know, that’s where most of the interesting stuff is.”
Herbie Hancock
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“Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.”
Alice Walker
Added as part of a July 2013 postscript to “Good Fortune.”
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“Look around. Find the stories that are the ones that one day, you’re going to wish somebody had told sooner. Tell them.”
Scott Rosenberg (@scottros) in Missed stories: About that Horace Mann School article in the Times
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“That’s the scary thing about hope, if you let it go too long it turns into faith.”
Christopher Moore in “Coyote Blue“
Used as the closing quote for “Christopher Moore’s Coyote Blue.”
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“Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it’s in music or in life, something as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.”
Benny Goodman
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“To select well among old things is almost equal to inventing new ones.”
Nicolas Charles Joseph Trublet
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“What is the quality of your intent? Certain people have a way of saying things that shake us to the core. Even when the words do not seem harsh or offensive, the impact is shattering. What we could be experiencing is the intent behind the words.”
Thurgood Marshall
Used as the opening quote for “Advising Entrepreneurs”
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“It is too late now for earlier ways;
now there are only some other ways,
and only one way to find them–fail.”
William Stafford excerpt from “Level Light”
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“The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.”
John Gregory Dunne
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“One startup’s earlyvangelist is another enterprise’s intrapreneur.”
Sean Murphy
It’s taken me a while to recognize this duality. I think “change agent” is an equally useful term for intrapreneur.
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“There is a difference between knowing a thing and understanding it.
You can know a lot about something and not really understand it.”
Charles Kettering
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“I try to do the right thing at the right time. They may be just little things, but they usually make the difference between winning and losing.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
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“Marry for love, stay married, and raise happy children who are quick to laugh and slow to judge.”
Christopher Moore in “Coyote Blue“
Great advice. I used this quote in “Christopher Moore’s Coyote Blue.”
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“True deception goes unnoticed.”
Les Coleman
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“‘Fortune favors the bold,’ but only if they are playing a game they thoroughly know.”
Lois Grafe
I think Grafe adds a useful qualification to Virgil‘s “Fortune favors the bold.” (line 284 of Book 10 of the Aeneid: “Audentes fortuna juvat.”)
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The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas.”
Edward de Bono
h/t Jabe Bloom (@cyetain)
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“Try to be one on whom nothing is lost.”
Henry James
From his essay “The Art of Fiction” James advises:
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it–this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience. […]I should certainly say to a novice, “Write from experience and experience only” […] and “Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.”
Henry James in “The Art of Fiction”
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