Your competitors are going to keep killing you because you’re scared [...] You need to decide what kind of company you want to be: comfortable and dead or risky — and possibly rich.
— Don Draper in an episode of Mad Men (“Public Relations”)
Suddenly the dream of having my own company has become much stronger… I’m over this bullshit.
I’m ready for different bullshit.
— A friend, messaging me from their job
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.
— Leonard Bernstein
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lighting to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.
— Chuck Close in Wisdom: The Greatest Gift One Generation Can Give To Another
50 of the world’s most inspiring and iconic figures over the age of 65 share their words of wisdom. Wisdom is a multimedia exhibition that features extraordinary large-format portraits and documentary footage of interviews created by award-winning photographer and filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman. Watch the introduction video.
Lucy: You’re being too hard on yourself.
Tom: You know who isn’t hard on themselves? Amateurs.
— From an episode of Studio 60
People showing up at some website, they don’t care about it as much as you — the founders — care about it.
What you [should] care about is the person who shows up randomly [...] and has their finger poised over the Back button. Because think how many websites you visit everyday. Most of them are no good. You click on Back and go on with your life.
So you’re designing your website for the guy who’s just about to leave. Who’s just on the cusp of even caring [about] what you do. You know what your website does. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even care that much. So you have to tell him.
— Paul Graham in an interview on Mixergy
Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’
And I tend to say, ‘What’s so wonderful?’
It’s like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don’t wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part.
— Nina Holton
Too many entrepreneurs stop after they build the product. They think that building products is what makes them an entrepreneur. But entrepreneurship is about building businesses, and the product is just one part of that.
— Rob May on his blog post, Entrepreneurship is not sexy
[Paul McCartney] said he hated music at school. He went through the whole of his education and nobody thought he had any musical talent whatsoever [...]
One of the students in the same class was George Harrison [...] And nobody thought he had any talent, either.
So this one teacher in Liverpool in the 1950s had half The Beatles in his class.
And he missed it.
— Sir Ken Robinson
If you’re a fan of Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, “Do schools kill creativity?“ you may be interested in another talk he gave at UCLA to discuss his new book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.
