The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.
Wendell Berry
The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.
Wendell Berry
Lay down your expectations of growth and your need to feel successful.
Tim Suttle
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
The Bright Field, RS Thomas
…all is not lost. As the earth responds and shows us daily the folly of our ways, there is a growing movement of people who recognize that we have gone very far off course. Increasingly people are realizing that another way is not only possible but necessary for our very survival.
Jacqueline Patterson – Director, NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program
Those of us who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. We will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressivity, our ego-centered ambitions, our delusions about ends and means.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.
The real voyage of discovery rests not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
“The visions we are offering our children shape the future. It matters what those vision are.”
– Carl Sagan
We all have our individual “song”, our unique mission or opportunity in life, whether or not we accept it. As we travel on our journey, that inner song is either released, progressively, or it is further imprisoned. When it is fully expressed, we at last know ourselves, and our purpose. It is joyful. Travelling in the other direction is a journey to obscurity, alienation and misery.
Anthony Seldon, Beyond Happiness
They are not new lessons. Never owe any money you can’t pay tomorrow morning. Never let the markets dictate your actions. Always be in a position to play your own game. Never take on more risks than you can handle…Good businesses, good management, plenty of liquidity, always having a loaded gun; if you play by those principles you will do fine no matter what happens. And you don’t ever know what’s going to happen…
Warren Buffett
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
William James
We see with the eyes But we see with the brain as well And seeing with the brain Is often called imagination
Oliver Sacks
Getting Better at Saying No Saying “no” can be very difficult for some people, but it is essential. You cannot take on an endless number of commitments and still focus on your priorities. Say “No” Politely, but Firmly and Without Apologizing Remember that saying “no” to less important requests is a way of saying “yes” to what really matters. The time you recoup is worth more than the initial discomfort of saying “no.”
The Daily Startup
A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts, and, before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat pack. The price is too high.
I think if you’re going to start a business, build it around something that you’re interested in and something that you think the world needs because it’s something you need, rather than around something you think will make you money.
Alan Schaf
This is a story about us, people being persuaded to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.
Tim Jackson
If business plans are marvelous works of fiction — and they most often are — then the specific financial goals that they are tied to are fairy tales.
Jeff Cornwall
Values are really important with people who want to make any kind of change. That’s because values operate like a form of compass, which can help us navigate uncertain or new territory.
Rob Archer
It’s a good lesson for anyone who’s trying to compete with bigger competitors. If you’ve got a smaller product mix, you can obsess over these details in a way that big guys can’t. Customers respond to that.
Matt Linderman
When You Say It, It’s Bragging. When Someone Else Says It, It’s Proof.
Jeffrey Gitomer
If I had to sum up the challenge, I’d put it like this. A decade into the 21st century, it has never been clearer that not letting yesterday’s institutions, products, services, “business models,” roles, tasks, assumptions, and beliefs fail — that our endemic, systemic failure to fail — is a titanic roadblock standing in the way of a more authentic, enduring prosperity.
Umair Haque
If I had a nickel for every time a potential investor told me this wouldn’t work…
Jeff Bezos
Minimum Viable Product: the smallest feature set that gets you the most: orders, learning, feedback, failure
Steve Blank
No business plan survives first contact with customers.
Steve Blank
More start-ups fail from a lack of customers than from a failure of product development.
Steve Blank
A start up is a temporary organisation used to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.
Steve Blank
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.
Seneca
He offended no more than he pleased.
Madame Bovary – Flaubert
The strongest thing you can cultivate as an entrepreneur is to not rely on luck but cultivating an ability to recognize fortunate situations when they are occurring.
Jack Dorsey
You have to solve a problem that people actually have. But it’s not always a problem that they know they have, so that’s tricky.
Joshua Schachter
It’s also very hard to make a product when you’re not the target audience. Because you have to make decisions along the way, and unless you would be the target user, you’re going to make the wrong decisions.
Daniel Gross
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
Albert Einstein
Every mistake you make brings with it a newfound level of clarity, but more importantly, gets you one step closer to a solution.
Andrew Loos
Sport provides people with a way of living intensely. For some people, intense living becomes a compulsion… It’s about balance. Without intensity, life has no savour, but without safety, life becomes, for most of us, unliveable. Sport fills the 21st-century shortfall in intensity.
Simon Barnes
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King
In flickering intervals a firefly pursues itself.
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet
Without outside capital, we have to make do with less … Constraints are a beautiful thing because they force creativity and precision. We don’t have the resources to throw after hit-or-miss hires or strategies. Bootstrapping a business requires a different mentality. It’s taught us to be frugal, hire slowly, and exercise caution as we grew the business. While companies that take funding can do those things, people have a tendency to behave differently when it’s not their money on the line.
Bryan Johnson
It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.
Jean-Luc Godard
We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.
Brian Cox
In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
Steve Jobs
We see the world not as it is, but as we are.
Anais Nin
John Stuart Mill once remarked: “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some other object.” This is the paradox of happiness – if you try too hard to reach it, you’ll never arrive. Henry David Thoreau noticed the same paradox, suggesting that happiness was like a butterfly: “The more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
Jules Evans
If you’re lucky enough to become an agent of change, it’s incredibly frustrating when other people fail to grasp your ideas – even worse when they reject them out of hand. But you can see why it happens. Change can be dangerous. Often, the bigger you are, the slower you move, the more dangerous change becomes
Richard Branson
It’s too easy to relinquish responsibility for your idea to experts. This is almost always a mistake, because experts are only experts in their field. They’re no experts in your idea. At this stage the only person qualified to assess your idea is you.
Richard Branson
Every change ushers in unforeseen consequences.
Richard Branson
How will people judge us a generation from now?
Chris Guillebeau
The pain is not limited to the beginning of the venture. It’s still there three years in, despite real revenue, profitability, customers arriving everyday, and a great team.
A Smart Bear