The Next 1,000 Entrepreneur Sayings

We put together 1,000 quotes to
educate and inspire entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and artpreneurs in 2011. The
first 600 are posted at: https://www.eqjournal.org/?p=1084 and 601 to 1,000 are at: https://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2343.

It’s
time, as we begin to head into 2013, to start another 1,000!

Here
we go:

1001. “Buy when everyone else is
selling, sell when everyone else is buying. Buy what no one else is buying.
Sell what no one else is selling. Buy before the bottom of the market and sell
before the top,” Bruce M Firestone.
1002. “The difference between good, even very good, and great is huge,” Bono.
1003. “Those mundane and tedious little things that, when done exactly right,
with the right kind of attention and intention, form in their aggregate a
distinctive essence, an evanescent quality that distinguishes every great
business you’ve ever done business with from its more mediocre counterparts
whose owners are satisfied to simply get through the day,” Michael E Gerber.
1004. “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something
completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools,”
Douglas Adams.
1005. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So
they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear
solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s
understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” Steve
Jobs.
1006. “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time,”
Thomas Merton.
1007. “The thing I ask myself almost every day is—am I doing the most important
thing I could be doing?” Mark Zuckerberg.
1008. “Money isn’t everything, you know, but you can buy freedom with it and
freedom is everything,” Arian Foster.
1009. “The only thing limited in this world is time. Act accordingly,” Brent
Mondoux.
1010. “If you leave something on the table for the other guy, guess what? He’ll
come back and spend it on more of your products or services later anyway,”
Cyril M Leeder.
1011. “What’s usually cheaper than equity? Debt. What’s usually cheaper than
both debt and equity? Supplier credit, customer deposits and bootstrap capital,
that’s what,” Bruce M Firestone.
1012. “Our first priority is to take care of our business; so our business can
take care of our families; so our families can take care of us; so we don’t
become a burden on society or our fellow human beings; so we can look after the
interests of our fellow human beings; so that they can help our business,”
Ellen Brooks.
1013. “If people in your business ecosystem trust you—suppliers, clients,
partners, sponsors, whomever—they’ll cut you a lot of slack if you muck things up
and you’ll live to fight another day,” Damien Graham Bell.
1014. “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But
of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works,” Steve Jobs.
1015. “I think about my work every minute of the day,” Jeff Koons.
1016. “The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist,” Novalis.
1017. “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing
left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away,” ANTOINE DE SAINT
EXUPÉRY.
1018. “Make the deal,” Damien Graham Bell.
1019. “Long-range planning works best in the short term,” Doug Evelyn.
1020. “Surviving a failure gives you more self-confidence. Failures are great
learning tools… but they must be kept to a minimum,” Jeffrey Immelt.
1121. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most
intelligent, but the one most responsive to change,” Charles Darwin.
1022. “You are looking at the present through a rear-view mirror and basically
trying to march backwards into the future,” Damien Graham Bell.
1023. “I don’t pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of
money because I pay good wages,” Robert Bosch.
1024. “The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter
know more facts. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this
is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can
handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory
situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when
things seem overly straightforward,” Neal Stephenson.
1025. “Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity,”
Charles Dickens.
1026. “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at
work worth doing,” Theodore Roosevelt.
1027. “Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the
thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she
works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just
harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder,”
Malcolm Gladwell.
1028. “Most companies are looking to “wow” with their products, when in reality
what they should be looking for is an “of course” reaction from their users,”
CHRISTIAN LINDHOLM.
1029. “The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure,” Dale
Carnegie.
1030. “The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but
information in the hands of many,” John Naisbitt.
1031. “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which
ones to keep,” Scott Adams.
1032. “Number one, cash is king…,” Jack Welch.
1033. “Take banking advice from your banker, legal advice from your lawyer,
accounting advice from your accountant but only take business advice from
yourself,” Matthew P Firestone.
1034. “Never litigate but if it happens, it’s usually better & cheaper to
defend than to sue since you can sometimes win simply by delay,” Bruce M
Firestone.
1035. “Do you want the public answer or the private one?” Jean Pigott,
former Chair of the National Capital Commission. “Are they different?” Bruce M
Firestone. “Yes, they are.” “Then both.” “The private answer is, ‘No.’ The
public answer is, ‘We’ll study it.’ We don’t like to say no to private
enterprise so we say this instead. The reality is, we’ll study it until either:
a) the proponent gives up and goes away or b) they die whichever comes first.”
In answer to the question, can the Palladium (now Scotiabank Place, home of the Ottawa
Senators) be built at Lebreton Flats.
1036. “If you have a secret biz model that is Facebook times ten, what you
probably have is an idea that sucks. Greatness needs to be verbalized and
critiqued by a trusted mentor,” Bruce M Firestone.
1037. “There’s a saying in real estate, ‘When someone buys a building lot,
they’ve bought a problem. When they buy a house, they’ve bought a solution,’”
Bruce M Firestone.
1038. “Whether in your personal life on in business, never put anything in an
email or message that you don’t want on the front page of your local
newspaper,” Bruce M Firestone.
1039. “When you write an email or message in anger, never actually send it,”
Bruce M Firestone.
1040. “S/he who loses her or his temper first, loses,” Bruce M Firestone.
1041. “Many people have ideas with potential but it is few who actually have
the courage to FIRE (Focus, Initiate, Risk & Execute) away and realize any
value from them,” Ken Le Clair.
1042. “People are capable of extraordinary feats if they would just focus on
completing one ordinary task at a time,” Brent Mondoux.
1043. “Theories are great…in theory,” Matthew P Firestone.
1044. “Well done is better than well said,” Benjamin Franklin.
1045. “If I can help enough other people to achieve their goals in life then I
can achieve mine,” Greg Kells.
1046. “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful
than a life spent doing nothing,” George Bernard Shaw.
1047. “The worst advice I ever got was that it is OK in business to be right
51% of the time and wrong 49%. You have to be right 99.7, 99.8 or 99.9% of the
time in business to build anything worthwhile,” Bruce M Firestone.
1048. “To be what you are, and to become what you are capable of becoming, is
the only purpose in life,” Robert Louis Stevenson.
1049. “If you want to make good decisions in life then make sure that your
head, your heart and your gut are all in agreement. If you aren’t passionate
about what you do (i.e., your heart isn’t in it), if your gut is screaming at
you that this isn’t going to work and if the analysis you did with your head
shows that even your best case results in a horrible outcome then STOP and find
something else to do,” Bruce M Firestone.
1050. “Creativity is not a process, right? It’s people who care enough to keep
thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it,” Tim Cook.
1051. “So many people, particularly, I think, CEOs and top executives, they get
so planted in their old ideas, and they refuse or don’t have the courage to
admit that they’re now wrong. Maybe the most underappreciated thing about Steve
(Jobs) was that he had the courage to change his mind. It’s a talent,” Tim
Cook.
1052. “A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the
experience,” Elbert Hubbard.
1053. “Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship,”
Benjamin Franklin.
1054. “If you knew then what you know now, you would never have started your
new enterprise,” Bruce M Firestone.
1055. “Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a
little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own,”
Arnold Bennett.
1056. “You should buy from people you sell to & people who sell to you
should also buy from you,” Bruce M Firestone.
1057. “I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on
trying,” Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi.
1058. “Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs,”
Farrah Gray.
1059. “Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts
can do that,” Norman Vincent Peale.
1060. “I’ve always been pushing that envelope. I want to risk hitting my head
on the ceiling of my talent,” Quentin Tarantino.
1061. “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to
make his family rich,” Malcolm Gladwell.
1062. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” LEONARDO DA VINCI.
1063. “I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have
done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things,” Steve Jobs.
1064. “Think BIG, be BIG,” Anonymous.
1065. “The bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after the sweetness of
low price has faded from memory,” Aldo Gucci.
1066. “When negotiating, remember to leave something on the table for the other
party. 100% of nothing is nothing,” Amanda Wagorn.
1067. “Most of us like to buy, but we don’t like is to be sold. Old-school
marketing is based on persuasion; new marketing is based on invitation,” Chris
Guiilebeau.
1068. “One of the keys to success is to like what you do and do what you like,”
Sean O’dea.
1069. “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into
hard work,” Peter F Drucker.
1070. “Money is better than poverty if only for financial reasons,” Woody
Allen.
1072. “Good things happen to those who hustle,” Anais Nin.
1073. “Advertising is like sex: only losers pay for it,” Chris Guillebeau.
1074. “Business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another one
coming,” Richard Branson.
1075. “Nothing will work unless you do,” Maya Angelou.
1076. “Chris ‘The $100 Startup’ Guillebeau and Jason ’37 Signals’ Fried tell
solopreneurs to think usefulness not innovation. I would say think useful
innovation,” Bruce M Firestone.
1077. “A charlatan is all talk, no work. A martyr is all work, no talk. An
entrepreneur is both talk and work which makes him or her a hustler,” Joey Roth
and Chris Guillebeau (edits by Bruce M Firestone).
1078. “I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as
I’ve become. If I had, I’d have done it a lot earlier,” Oprah Winfrey.
1079. “Entrepreneurs are either in a rowboat paddling like heck to get to the
other side of a stormy ocean or they’re onshore. You can’t have one foot in the
boat and one onshore, won’t work,” Bruce M Firestone.
1080. “If you think you are developing a real business while keeping a regular
JOB, what you are really doing is creating a hobby,” Bruce M Firestone.
1081. “You gotta pay attention to signs. When life reaches out w/ (an
opportunity*) like this, it’s a sin if you don’t reach back,” Silver Linings
Playbook.
1082. “You can invest your way to wealth a lot faster than you can save your
way there,” Bruce M Firestone.
1083. “You can think your way to wealth a lot faster than you can work your way
there,” Bruce M Firestone.
1082. “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen,” Ernest
Hemingway.
1083. “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and
become more, you are a leader,” John Quincy Adams.
1084. “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world
today,” Robert McKee.
1085. “Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds,” SEAL Teams.
1086. “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it,” Charles
Swindoll.
1087. “The only way to do great work is to love the work you do,” Steve Jobs.
1088. “Entrepreneurship is living your life like most people won’t so you don’t
have to live life like most people do,” Bruce M Firestone.
1089. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” Leonardo da Vinci.
1090. “Authenticity is the alignment of head, mouth, heart, and feet–thinking,
saying, feeling, and doing the same thing – consistently. This builds trust,
and followers love leaders they can trust,” Lance Secretan.
1091. “If you tell me, it’s an essay. If you show me, it’s a story,” Barbara
Greene.
1092. “You can say anything/sell anything as long as you smile,” Dennis Hope.
1093. “Ideas are easy. Execution is everything. It takes a team to win,” John
Doerr.
1094. “There is no such thing as failure! What other people label or might try
to call failure, I have learned is just God’s way of pointing you in a new
direction,” Oprah Winfrey.
1095. “You know people say that in the era of social media advertising is like
sex, only losers pay for it. Well, here’s my view—advertising is like sex, it gets better with
practice,” Bruce M Firestone.
1096. “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished,” Ben Franklin.
1097. “All life & all businesses are experimental until proven otherwise,”
Bruce M Firestone.
1098. “A short time to revenue doesn’t necessarily mean your startup will
succeed but a long time to revenue almost certainly guarantees failure,” Tom
Duxbury.
1099. “Highest and best use for a property is achieved when the value created
by its development for a specific set of physically possible, permitted uses
(its functional program) and a particular form of structure combine to produce
the highest present value of rents over the economic life of a project,” Bruce
M Firestone.
1100. “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence but an optimist because of
will,” Antonio Gramsci.
1101. “Entrepreneurs start without asking permission from anyone and won’t stop
unless forced to; bureaucrats won’t start until given permission and forced
to,” Bruce M Firestone.
1102. “When you compare the work done by a true professional to a talented
amateur, well you now understand the words ‘amateur’ & ‘professional’
better,” Bruce M Firestone.
1103. “Opportunity is missed by most people
because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work,” Thomas Edison.
1104. “The world is not limited by IQ. We are all limited by bravery and
creativity,” Astro Teller.
1105. “Life is meant to be owned so own it and own up to it,” Brent Mondoux.
1106. “A great brand is like a home-run swing in baseball: graceful,
effortless, big result, hard to do,” Bruce M Firestone.
1107. “Those who want to do something find a way; those who don’t find an excuse,”
Brent Mondoux.
1108. “I do not understand why people put too much effort into planning the
future when it’s right in front of them,” Jessica Mah.
1109. “Never underestimate a competitor, just take their clients, one at a
time,” Brent Mondoux.
1110. “No great thing is created suddenly,” Epictetus.
1111. “I’d rather do 10 good deals than 2 perfect ones,” Bruce M Firestone.
1112. “To live through an impossible situation, you don’t need the reflexes of
a Grand Prix driver, the muscles of a Hercules, the mind of an Einstein. You
simply need to know what to do,” Anthony Greenbank.
1113. “Reach for the sky. When you get there, aim for the next star,” Brent
Mondoux.
1114. “The riches are in the niches,” Anon.
1115. “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time,” Zig Ziglar.
1116. “Done is better than perfect,” Brent Mondoux.
1117. “If something exists, it must be possible,” Amory Lovins.
1118. “Act yourself so you have less to memorize,” Lee James Carey.
1119. “Asset flippers, tech, real estate or anything else, are like gamblers,
they’ll flip til they flop so build and hold,” Bruce M Firestone.
1120. “The shortest path to success is via hard work, passion and focus,” Bruce
M Firestone.
1121. “Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for
three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the
first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire
somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy,” Warren
Buffet.
1122. “Success comes from doing fewer things better,” Bruce M Firestone.

@ProfBruce
@Quantum_Entity

*
Original quote is, “You gotta pay attention to signs. When life reaches out w/
a woman like this, it’s a sin if you don’t reach back,” Silver Linings Playbook.
Changed to make it more suitable for entrepreneurs. Ed.