David S. Kidder > Quotes

“Money Is a Magnifying Glass Money makes you more of who you already are. If you are a jerk, it will make you a bigger jerk; if you’re insecure, you become even more insecure; if you are generous, you become even more generous; if you are nice, you become even nicer. Making money is like holding up a magnifying glass to who you are, personally and professionally. It creates a lot of energy and power, and it’s up to you to use that in a really good way.”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“Focus on People, Perseverance, and Passion These “Three P’s” are the keys to successful entrepreneurship. People are the most important, particularly in the first year of a venture. To maximize their value, spend as much time as you can assembling the best possible team that really complements your skill set and can lead a little bit into where you’re heading, not just where you are. Creating the right kind of dynamic in terms of culture and commitment is really critical. Perseverance: never underestimate the value of really caring about your idea and being unwilling to drop it. If you have a big idea, and you know in your heart it’s going to happen (Passion), but know there will be roadblocks and challenges along the way. In this regard, a high degree of passion and commitment is extremely important. In my experience, really big ideas often take a decade to reach fruition. Sign”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“Find Something Nobody Else Can Do Selection is critical. When you launch a venture, you have to be comfortable with the idea that this is what you’re going to do for the rest of your professional life. It has to be awesome; it has to be ten times better than anything in the marketplace. Also, it can’t just be better because nobody else is doing it currently. It has to be something that nobody other than you can do, especially once you’re up to scale. Show”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“Belief in reincarnation was the central tenet of the Pythagorean religion. Pythagoras taught that the soul was indestructible, but that people needed to follow certain rules to ensure the best possible reincarnations after their physical deaths. Among the rules adopted by his followers: no wearing shoes in the temple, no touching white roosters, put the right shoe on first, and always abstain from eating beans.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“Don’t Suffer from the Sin of Comparison. Follow Your Own Path.”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“Babylonian scientists used a counting system based on the number sixty, which is why minutes have sixty seconds.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Culture

“It is physically impossible to walk under a rainbow. They literally exist only in the eyes of the observer.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Culture

“To blacks, he was proof that a former slave could succeed. To many whites, on the other hand, his nonconfrontational attitude was a model for how to be a “good” black.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“Over and over again, creative thinking comes from outside the core of an industry.”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“Combining the French passions for snails and beheadings, Lavoisier conducted a series of experiments in 1768 that proved that certain species of snails would regrow their heads after they were chopped off.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“Find a Match Between Your Talents and Your Customers’ Needs”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“Do not fly a kite in a thunderstorm. Several imitators, under the impression that Franklin had safely carried out the test as described in his paper, have been electrocuted trying to replicate his experiment.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“As you can see, it is very hard to say what causation is. This has led some philosophers to deny that there are causes in the world at all.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Culture

“Whosoever would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Massachusetts”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: American History: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Converse Confidently about Our Nation's Past

“Why didn’t the chicken cross the road? According to the ancient philosopher and logician Zeno of Elea (c. 495–c. 430 BC), the bird simply found it impossible to get to the other side.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.—L.P. Jacks, Education through Recreation”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“Zhang’s seismometer—Houfeng Didong Yi, or the “instrument for inquiring into the wind and the shaking of the earth”—was reconstructed by a Chinese museum in 2005. The device used a pendulum in the middle of an urn that was lined with eight dragons, each pointing outward in a different direction. When the machine detected a quake, the pendulum dislodged a bronze ball that then dropped out of the mouth of one of the dragons and into the mouth of a metal toad—indicating the direction of the earthquake’s epicenter.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“For instance, Socrates is a substance because we say, “Socrates is pale.” Aristotle called certain qualities of substances, such as the quality of being pale, accidents. Accidents are things said of substances; when we speak about them, they usually function in sentences as adjectives.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Culture

“England's King Henry VIII initially opposed Luther, but he rejected Catholicism in 1534 after the pope refused to allow him to divorce his wife, Catherine ofAragon.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Culture

“The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“But it would take the English more than fifty years to subdue Scotland. According to legend, Wallace’s animosity toward the English was sparked by an incident in which several invading soldiers tried to steal fish he had caught.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“The Roman Catholic Church remains headquartered at Vatican City in Rome, a few blocks from the ruins of the colosseum where ancient Roman authorities once fed Christians to the lions.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Culture

“Change happens on the margins. It’s usually outsiders who identify the unrecognized need that customers and competitors within the industry have not been able to see.”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“HIRING Find Producers Who Are Also Visionaries One of the tricky things about being an entrepreneur is finding people who can engineer and deliver on schedule, but who are also willing to take intellectual risks. If you’re doing something radically new, you need a team that’s willing to go on a ride that’s very different from anything they’ve encountered before. It’s hard to find people who can both deliver and try something quite radical and stay with the vision.”
― David S. Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“When we spoke, Steve explained the larger context. “If”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“Robespierre was unmoved by the mayhem he unleashed. “Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice” he once declared.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“Start small, and be open to the idea that the beta test may take two or three years. In some industries, that’s hard to do. But if you can do it, you’ll see the concrete reality of your business every day. CHIP”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“Don’t Be Afraid to Fail When I was growing up, my dad would encourage my brother and me to fail. We would be sitting at the dinner table and he would ask, “So what did you guys fail at this week?” If we didn’t have something to contribute, he would be disappointed. When I did fail at something, he’d high-five me. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was completely reframing my definition of failure at a young age. To me, failure means not trying; failure isn’t the outcome. If I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, “I didn’t try that because I was scared,” that is failure.”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“Your entire organization must focus on an area of strength where you can defeat your competitors and radically differentiate your company by being ten times better than anyone else in the world. This is the bar you set for your team; you must own and be known for this value.”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs

“If we’re not doing something that’s game-changing, then frankly I’m not interested in doing it.”
― David Kidder, The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs