Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in January 2022, theme this month is orchestration: documenting innovation related methods and processes to create consistent and predictable results.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in January 2022
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 orchestration: documenting innovation related methods and processes to create consistent and predictable results.
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Innovation: What is the best way?
Quantification: How well does the innovation work?
Orchestration: Document the innovation for consistent and predictable results.”
Michael Gerber in “E-Myth Manager“
Orchestration seems related to ISO’s Process Quality Management Principle:
Consistent and predictable results are achieved more effectively and efficiently when activities are understood and managed as interrelated processes that function as a coherent system.”
Principle #4: Process in ISO Quality Management Principles [PDF]
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“Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.”
Baltasar Gracian in “The Art of Worldly Wisdom”
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3 ideas to start your year:
- You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
- Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
- Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
James Clear (@JamesClear) Jan-2-2022 Tweet
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“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.”
C. S. Lewis in a Letter to Arthur Greeves 20-Dec-1943
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“Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”
Frank Herbert in “Children Of Dune“
This is a good definition of entrepreneurship as well.
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If something is too early to criticize, it’s also too early to evangelize.
Kelsey Hightower (@KelseyHightower)
If want to be an effective change agent–if you are advocating for a new approach or methodology or a migration to a new tool or infrastructure–who builds a long term relationship with the people that you serve then you must be willing to:
- explain any shortcomings or defects that you are aware of up front;
- be clear what they will lose from their current status quo if they make the change you are advocating;
- acknowledge any shortcomings and defects that are brought to your attention;
- negotiate and make changes in your approach the better reflect that needs and constraints that members of your community face in adopting a new method or tool.
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“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Crack-Up” (1945) Edmund Wilson (ed.) Chapter ‘Note-Books E: Epigrams, Wisecracks, Jokes.”
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“What is ethical selling? It is telling the absolute truth. Telling the customer the specifics, without garnishment, and also the pros and the cons. Helping the customer make a regret-free decision. Educating the customer on the tradeoffs, because there are always tradeoffs.”
Kristin Zhivago (@KristinZhivago) in “Marketing Ethics“
Great article: here is the setup to her conclusion.
The phone rings at dinnertime, “I’m not calling to sell you anything.”
A a boldfaced lie, one that is in the script.
Of course they are calling to sell me something.
Why else would they be calling?
It’s insulting to be treated like a fool.
Selling deceptively is not selling. It is lying.
Kristin Zhivago (@KristinZhivago) in “Marketing Ethics“
I covered a similar topic in “Honesty in Negotiations.” Most of the negotiations I am involved with related to establishing long term business relationships. I always assume that the other party will find out if we have lied or withheld material information and will never forget. At some level if you have to explain to someone why lying is a bad idea more than half the battle has already been lost, probably somewhere around kindergarten, but it’s nonetheless worth the effort. You should not tolerate lying in yourself, your partners, or your employees.
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“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain–attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
Sir Author Conan Doyle in “A Study in Scarlet” [Speech by Sherlock Holmes]
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“The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”
Voltaire
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“Kindness: a language the dumb can speak, and the deaf can understand. It speaks well for the native kindness of our hearts, that nothing gives us greater pleasure than to feel that we are conferring it.”
Christian Nestell Bovee in “Intuitions and Summaries of Thought” [Archive.org]
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“When things don’t work. Double down on iteration. When things do work. Double down on consistency.”
Janis Ozolins (@OzolinsJanis)
Image Credit: @GoLimitless
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“Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable; precisely the balance and wisdom that comes from long perspectives and broad foundations.”
George Santayana “Persons and Places: Vol 3 My Host the World’“(1953) in the chapter “Old Age in Italy”
More context (bold added).
In Rome, in the eternal city, I feel nearer to my own past, and to the whole past and future of the world, than I should in any cemetery or in any museum of relics. Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable; precisely the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations. Everything shines then for the spirit by its own light in its own place and time; but not as it shone in its own restless eyes. For in its own eyes each person and each place was the center of a universe full of threatening and tempting things; but old age, having less intensity at the center has more clearness at the circumference, and knows that just because spirit, at each point, is a private center for all things, no one point, no one phase of spirit, is materially a public center for all the rest. Thus recognition and honor flow out to all things, from the mind that conceives them justly and without egotism; and thus mind is reconciled to its own momentary existence and limited vision by the sense of the infinite supplements that embosom it on every side.
George Santayana “My Host the World”(1953) [Archive.org] in the chapter “Old Age in Italy”
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“Conduct yourself so that everyone can rely on you; be wary in choosing those on whom you rely.”
Peter Siviglia “The Sidelines of Time”
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“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”
Stephen Covey
Tom Peters inverts this and says you can look back at your calendar (and your budget) and determine your true priorities on where you spent you time and your money. Especially for bootstrappers, we’ve come to appreciate that how you spend your time is much more important that how you spend your funds. I used the Peters quote to close quote in “No More Than Four Items On Your To Do List.”
“All we have is our time. How we spend our time is our priorities, our strategy. Your calendar knows what you really care about.”
Tom Peters
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“Writing comes through quick, successive, cumulative overlays of opportunity put upon chance beginning.”
William Stafford
I think this is also true for planning, updating plans, documenting your processes, and updating your processes and procedures in light of new experience.
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“Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”
Seneca the Younger in Letter LXXI: On the Supreme Good
h/t Conal Elliot Quotes Collection. For entrepreneurs: don’t lose the core substance of your innovation in documenting a wealth of details. More context:
“The archer must know what he is seeking to hit; then he must aim and control the weapon by his skill. Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind. Chance must necessarily have great influence over our lives, because we live by chance. It is the case with certain men, however, that they do not know that they know certain things. Just as we often go searching for those who stand beside us, so we are apt to forget that the goal of the Supreme Good lies near us.”
Seneca in Letter LXXI: On the Supreme Good
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“It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. Fragility can be measured, risk is not measurable.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb in “AntiFragile”
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“In small companies execution speed is limited by build time. In large companies, it is limited by decision time.”
Angela Jiang (@angjiang)
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“Many of our disappointments and much of our unhappiness arise from our forming false notions of things and persons.”
Abigail Adams
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“Design your external company processes (sales, marketing, partnerships) to introduce FOMO and artificial scarcity”
Julia MacDonald (@julia_m_mac)
What if instead you designed your external processes such that you were easy to do business with by being predictable and reliable. I suspect that would outlast FOMO by a century or two.
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“Luck Razor: If given 2 options, pick the one that has more luck potential.
E.g. Cocktail party vs watching Netflix. Which one has the highest potential for future luck?
Run equal A/B decisions through this razor. If stuck with 2 equal options, pick the one that feels like it will produce the most luck later down the line.”
George Mack (@George__Mack)
My opinion of “luck” has shifted: there is a random element but it’s much more a reflection of good relationships with people and care taken in advance to design adequate margin into systems. Here are some related blog posts:
- Cultivating Luck in Business Endeavors and Relationships
- Increase Your Luck Surface Area To Get More Customers
- Naval Ravikant On Avoiding Bad Luck
- The Lucky And The Wise
- Entrepreneurs, Luck, and Silicon Valley
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“The mind says, ‘I wish I could change the past.’
The heart says, ‘I’m open to the future.’
Life says, ‘welcome to the present.'”
Jeff Foster
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“Self-examination is far less painful than self-destruction.”
Ascendant Power (@AscendantPower)
An unexamined life that ignores the near term consequences of self-destructive behavior may be less painful. It may also be enabled by friends not holding you accountable or encouraging you to be better. I think in the long run this is correct but in near term some postpone evaluating the consequences because self-destructive behavior feels good initially.
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“A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces.
More commonly it’s modeled of baling wire and acne.
More commonly it wheezes and tips over.”
Marge Piercy
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“The body of science is not, as it is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to the next by a logical string. In truth, whenever we discover a new fact it involves the elimination of old ones. We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally in error.”
Lewis Thomas in “On Science and Certainty'” Discover Magazine (Oct 1980)
But less wrong over time, framing better questions as we go. More context
“The greatest achievements in the science of this and the last century are themselves the sources of more puzzlement than human beings have ever experienced. Indeed, it is likely that these times will be looked back on as the time when science provided the first close glimpse of the profundity of human ignorance. We have not reached solutions; we have only begun to discover how to ask questions. Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before. The body of science is not, as is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to the next by a logical string. In truth, whenever we discover a new fact it involves the elimination of old ones. We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally in error.”
Lewis Thomas in “On Science and Certainty‘” Discover Magazine (Oct 1980)
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“I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.”
Plutarch
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“If you can keep your head whilst all around are losing theirs, maybe you haven’t grasped the true facts of the event.”
John T. Phillifent, ‘‘Flying Fish’’ (1964)
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“Be prepared.
Show up.
On time.
Follow through.”
Donald Tober
8 words of business advice, quoted by a friend in his obituary. Steve Odell: “Donald left us with eight words, and we live them every day. The first two words are ‘Be prepared.’ The second are ‘Show up.’ The third two words are ‘On time.’ And the last two are ‘Follow through.’” quoted in NYPost: “Sweet’n’Low Magnate Leaps to Death”
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The professional mind-set is built on common sense, rationality, cold logic, and a shrewd understanding of the business process.
On the battlefield and in the marketplace, our emotions are perpetually attacked, manipulated, courted, and torn. But the real professional is the person who can overcome all of the glitter and distraction, all of the melodrama and posturing. The true pro stays within himself, analyzes the chessboard, thinks ahead, stays cool and keeps this constant mind: Just get the job done.
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“The facts of the present won’t sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.”
William Macneile Dixon
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“Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. But that’s the nature of creative work. There are only a few people in each field that know what to do. It’s not just effort. It’s not just accidental. There’s something else going on. In these domains, we have a very small number of people who know what to do. And we have a much larger number of people typically laboring under some set of delusions—generating crap. It is what it is. I wish there were more quality painters…or entrepreneurs.”
Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) in an interview with Andy Kessler in the WSJ “90% of everything is you know what” (Jan. 23, 2022 )
I think this assessment neglects the importance of exploring design options for new businesses. The design space is large but only a small fraction is viable at any point in time. I think amateurs can discover what is now possible where experts are blinded by its past infeasibility. The second aspect of performance is that many people can perform at an acceptable level with practice and training. Andreessen is correct that achieving very high performance is not just a matter of effort or desire, but you can often create a breakthrough by aiming at the intersection of two or three domains that has not been explored. See “Jack of All Trades” for more on stacking above average performance in two or three domains to create a unique capability.
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“Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics and sustainability in warfare”
Robert Hilliard Barrow (1922-2008), a United States Marine Corps four-star general, in an interview published in the San Diego (CA) Union on November 11, 1979.
h/t Barry Popik “Amateurs Talk Strategy” cites 11 November 1979, San Diego (CA) Union, “Q&A: Marines’ General Robert Barrow Backs SALT—And Conventional Rearming,” pg. C4, col. 4:
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“What you don’t want is a product to be cool. You want it to be a part of people’s everyday life.”
Sean Parker
I like this advice for entrepreneurs: focus on providing value not status.
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“I stepped through a thick hedge of Pampas grass, growing out of the curb and the puzzle-fractured remains of a parking lot.”
Pat MacEwen in “Rough Magic“
This months’ theme is documenting innovation related methods and processes to create consistent and predictable results. I think the image of Pampas grass breaking up the smooth regularity of the parking lot is what a degraded system looks like – or one where a resilient chaos is emerging. Pampas grows up to five or even ten feet tall, has very sharp leaves, seeds freely and is categorized as an invasive species in California. A good metaphor for chaos: be careful what you allow to establish itself, much less what you plant.
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“My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”
Jacob Margolis interpretation of last set of status messages from Opportunity Rover
OK that’s the end of January, we’ve had our trial run for 2022 time to pause, assess, and get down to it.