Quotes for entrepreneurs curated in February 2024 on a theme of positive deviance and useful non-conformance that create ‘productive variety.”
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in February 2024
My theme for this month’s quotes for entrepreneurs is positive deviance and useful non-conformance.
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“Creativity is the ability to identify self-imposed constraints, remove them, and explore the consequences of their removal.”
Russel Ackoff
This is what entrepreneurs do for teams, organizations, and societies. They are positive deviants, they provide a useful nonconformity that unlocks a novel and valuable perspective.
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“The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.”
Maria Montessori
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“When you invest at the very beginning of a startup, you feel more like a co-conspirator than an investor.”
Mike Maples in “Pattern Breaking Startup Ideas“
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“Life is one big lottery in which only the winning numbers are visible.”
Jostein Gaarder in “Sophie’s World“
More context:
“You could say that life is one big lottery in which only the winning numbers are visible. […] Those that have lost in the struggle for existence have disappeared, you see. It takes many millions of years to select the winning numbers for each and every species of vegetable and animal on the earth. And the losing numbers–well, they only make one appearance. So there are no species of animal or vegetable in existence today that are not winning numbers in the great lottery of life.”
Jostein Gaarder in “Sophie’s World“
Sometimes you have to “picnic in the graveyard” to learn from the past and overcome survivorship bias. Unlike organisms product ideas can be too early and arrive before the minimum necessary ecosystem is in place.
Picnic in the Graveyard – do research on what’s been tried and failed. Many near misses have two out of three values in a feature set combination correct (some just have too many features and it’s less a matter of changing features than deleting a few). If you are going to introduce something that’s “been tried before” be clear in your own mind of what’s different about it and why it will make a difference to your customer.
Sean Murphy in “Pretotyping: Techniques For Building the Right Product” Section “Five I Think Should Be Added”
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“Never say anything about yourself you do not want to come true.”
Brian Tracy (@BrianTracy
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“We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”
Robert Brault
If the lesser goal is a basecamp that enables further exploration, it won’t keep you from your ultimate goal. But the basecamp or waypoint must be on the way to your ultimate goal, not leading you away from it. “There must be an easier way” is a useful principle for improving a process, but you have to find a path to your goal. Don’t prematurely optimize by looking for an easier way before you have found one way that works.
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“The aphorism suddenly makes us see what habit only made us look at.”
Mario Vassalle
An aphorism can unlock the insights that enable the useful non-conformance of the entrepreneur. Vassalle published a book of aphorisms “The Riddle of the Mind” (“L’enigma della mente: aforismi” in the original Italian) in 1996 that I am still trying to locate it’s mentioned in this 2014 interview and a few other places by him. Some excerpts from several of his books of aphorisms, all in Italian, are listed at https://www.aforismario.eu/2019/03/mario-vassalle-aforismi.html
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“We don’t have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did.”
Kevin Kelly in “Out of Control” (1995)
This is what experts do. It’s how they advance the start of the art and create a community of practice to help them refine their understanding, methods, and techniques.
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“Over-simplification comes from not seeing trade-offs.
Over-complication comes from not accepting trade-offs.”
John D. Cook (@JohnDCook)
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“Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realized, it is hardly distinguishable from phantasy and phantastery.”
Goethe in Maxims and Reflections
Two sites that track how ideas from (science) fiction become real products–and problems–are Technovelgy and TV Tropes.
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“We’d all like to vote for the best man but he’s never a candidate.”
Kin Hubbard in “Abe Martin’s Primer (1914)”
The more things change the more they stay the same, this is still true 110 years later.
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“Word of mouth is the best advertising medium of all. The best word of mouth comes from disrupting markets.”
Hugh MacLeod, in “Random Thoughts on Being an Entrepreneur“
I blogged about this in “Hugh MacLeod’s Thoughts on Being an Entrepreneur (Take Two).” I observed: So many talk of “viral marketing” as if it can be added to a product as a coating or a post-development “quality injection step” in the same way that sitcom soundtracks are “sweetened” with laughter. Word of mouth is intrinsic to the customer’s relationship with the product in the context of existing options in the market.
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“There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”
Herman Melville in “Moby-Dick”
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“We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.”
Edward De Bono
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Four indications you are in an echo chamber from Seth Godin in the Santa Problem
- It’s considered unpopular, weak or even immoral to change your mind
- Isolation from contrary facts or opinions is celebrated as an admirable trait
- The rationale for the core beliefs of the echo chamber changes when insurmountable reality can’t be avoided
- Calm conversations that touch a nerve often become heated debates
Don’t let your startup become an echo chamber.
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“8. The most exciting things work in practice but not theory.”
One of the 95 Theses of the 1517 project
I highlighted thirteen back in 2017.
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“It was simply an idea I stumbled upon along with the wherewithal to accomplish it. There was a real sense of providence. So I just jumped in and said, “Well, that’s what I’m going to do.” Knowing providence would take care of an idea that good, there was no way it wouldn’t get completed.”
Paul Newman in his autobiography “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man“
Condensed from a longer passage on page 272 on how he came to start “Hole in the Wall Gang” camps “to provide opportunities for children with serious illnesses to experience the transformational spirit and friendships that go hand-in-hand with camp.” I thought this captured the essence of an entrepreneurial vision that inspires and enables the entrepreneur to solicit and organize resources beyond his direct control.
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“Novelty necessarily verges on heresy. True doctrine is old doctrine; and proper piety demands reverent preservation of ancient ways and ideas.”
William McNeil in “The Rise of the West” page 61
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“In any complex system–whether nation, city, or individual–deterioration sets in once growth stops. Only in the minds of planners does stasis exist.”
Tom Bethel “The Electric Windmill” (page 159)
Renewal can follow deterioration, or the system may be supplanted by a successor.
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“We created AI capable of answering, in seconds, any question within the bounds of all recorded human knowledge, and the first thing we asked it was to lie.”
Mike Solana (@micsolana)
This is not the Singularity, it’s not Skynet acting autonomously, it’s human evil finding agency in new technological capabilities. Google is steadily erasing the “Don’t” from their root ethical injunction of “Don’t Be Evil.” I am sure totalitarian governments are taking copious notes at this point as they see a rich set of population control capabilities unfolding almost daily. Related observation from Paul Graham:
“The bigger your cash cow, the worse your culture can get without driving you out of business. And Google’s cash cow, search advertising, is one of the biggest the world has ever seen. The ridiculous images generated by Gemini aren’t an anomaly. They’re a self-portrait of Google’s bureaucratic corporate culture.”
Paul Graham (@paulg)
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“The surest sign that you’re on the right path is that you like the company you’re keeping.”
Robert Brault
Ideas are not responsible for who believes in them but if you find yourself traveling in a pack of jackasses consider you may be on the wrong road. I am not sure what a herd of nonconformists looks like but I am reminded a cartoon by Brian Savage in the December 1966 issue of Playboy. Two men are sitting on a park bench. One, dressed in very conservative clothes, leans over to whispers to the other man, who’s sloppily dressed, with long hair and a beard, “I said, ‘I, too, am a nonconformist.”
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“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
Rudyard Kipling in a 1935 conversation with Arthur Gordon, recounted in “Six Hours with Rudyard Kipling,” The Kipling Journal (June 1967), p. 7.
h/t Stephen Hicks for the source of this quote; it’s frequently mis-attributed to Nietzsche.
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“I don’t give a damn what others say. It’s okay to color outside the lines.”
Jimi Hendrix
h/t Jon Miltmore; this one is thinly sourced but seems consistent with Hendrix philosophy.
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“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. […]
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Self-Reliance” (1841)
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“Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”
Voltaire (1724-1788) in Philosophical Dictionary [Gutenberg]
More context from the “Men of Letters” article in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary:
“The men of letters who have rendered the greatest services to the small number of thinking beings spread over the world, are the isolated writers, the true scholars shut in their studies, who have neither argued on the benches of the universities, nor told half-truths in the academies; and almost all of them have been persecuted. Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”
Voltaire (1724-1788) in Philosophical Dictionary [Gutenberg]
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“I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost in “The Road Not Taken”
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“There are two sources of learning: the past and the emerging future.”
Otto Scharmer “Theory U”
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“I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today many things indicate that we’re going through a transitional period when it seems that something is on the way out, and something else is painfully being born. It’s as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.”
Vaclav Havel in July 4, 1994 speech at Philadelphia Freedom Hall
Reminds me of a quote by Clay Shirky
“That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
Clay Shirky “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”
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Four barriers to learning and change
- Not recognizing what you see.
- Not saying what you think.
- Not doing what you say: ´Practice what you preach´ and ´Walk the talk´
- Not seeing what you do.
Otto Scharmer in “Theory U“
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