I'm Josh Kaufman. I'm an independent business educator, author, researcher, photographer, veggie burrito connoisseur, and quote enthusiast.
Here's my background, and here's my blog. You can call me at +1-970-480-7622 or e-mail me at josh [at] worldlywisdomventures.com.
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Seth Godin, marketing writer and philosopher:
“Prototyping is valuable, and you can prototype almost anything today and make it look real. Once you’ve prototyped your idea, you don’t have to persuade people to like it – they can judge it themselves.”
This entry was written by , posted on July 31, 2006 at 9:27 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines:
“We have a ’strategic’ plan. It’s called doing things.”
This entry was written by , posted on at 1:59 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Edward Abbey:
“Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am—a reluctant enthusiast. . .a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that sweet and yet lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in and head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe-deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: You will outlive the bastards.”
This entry was written by , posted on at 1:55 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Harold Gotoff, University of Cincinnati Professor of Classics:
“If it doesn’t help – abandon it. If it doesn’t amuze you, instruct you, edify you – if it doesn’t make your life better, it’s not worth spending time on or remembering… DO SOMETHING ELSE!”
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. during a Stanford Graduate Commencement address on June 12, 2005:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
This entry was written by , posted on at 1:51 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Tom Gardner, co-founder of The Motley Fool:
“The greatest minds build. It is essential that you avoid at all costs situations where you’re inclined to criticize someone or something without the intent of seeing it grow more vibrant, truer, and more useful—else you will lose, not it.”
This entry was written by , posted on at 1:50 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
“…It’s essentially impossible to become successful or well off doing a job that is described and measured by someone else.
“The only chance our country (your country, depends where you live), your economy and most of all, your family has to get ahead is this: make up new rules.
“People who make up new rules continue to be in very short supply.”
This entry was written by , posted on at 1:34 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
“As Buddha says, there is no one road to Nirvana. Enlightenment is a house with 6 billion doors. While we’re alive, we intend not to find THE DOOR, not A DOOR, but to find OUR OWN, UNIQUE DOOR.
“And we’re willing to pay for the privelege. We’re willing to give up money and time and power and sex and status and certainty and comfort in order to find it.
“And guess what? It’ll be a great door. It’ll add to this life. It’ll resonate. Not just with us, but with everybody it comes in contact with. The door will useful and productive. Alive and kicking. It’ll create wealth and laughter and joy. It’ll pull its own weight, it’ll give back to others. It’ll be centered on compassion, but will be intolerant of dullards, parasites and cynics.
“It may be modest, it may not. It could be a little candle shop; it could be a software company with the GNP of Sweden. It could involve politics or working with the elderly. It could be starting a design studio or opening a bar with Cousin Mike. It could be a screenplay, oil paints, or discovering the violin. It doesn’t matter. Meaning Scales.“
This entry was written by , posted on July 26, 2006 at 2:38 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Comment posted by Alex at Mises.org:
“Most Austrians have come from more mainstream economic backgrounds. They have found that empirical research into economics is faulty, as it needs to be interpreted by theory. Numbers don’t tell you anything – and numbers themselves are not physical objects! They themselves are merely ‘ideas’, or, put another way, ideas of philosophy.
Even if numbers could tell us what they mean, we would still need to make sure that they were correct. If a economic spreadsheet on statistics and an econometric spreadsheet merely came out and told a positivist economist what the data ‘showed’, he would still need to know whether or not the statement (or statements) were correct, by his own reasoning.
There is simply no way around theory and philosophy in economics and understanding; you cannot even look at numbers without using a form of philosophy. (Numbers are not physical things! They are ideas representing physical things in our universe.)”
Bonus: For more on the philosophy of numbers and mathematics, check out my paper on Aristotle and Mathematics.
This entry was written by , posted on July 23, 2006 at 7:47 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Paul Graham, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and essayist:
“The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.
If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don’t win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.
So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It’s hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it’s hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand to hand combat. It would be pretty easy to write a better word processor than Microsoft Word, for example, but Microsoft, within the castle of their operating system monopoly, probably wouldn’t even notice if you did.
The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. That’s where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and having the same people both design and implement the product. Microsoft themselves did this at the start. So did Apple. And Hewlett-Packard. I suspect almost every successful startup has.”
Full text available here.
This entry was written by , posted on at 7:38 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Paul Graham:
“Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It’s like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they’d make people’s hair stand on end, you’ll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.
When you find something you can’t say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don’t say it. Or at least, pick your battles… Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.
The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it’s also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.”
Full text available here.
This entry was written by , posted on at 7:35 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.