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By Managing Partner Mike Edelhart
From time to time I share quotations I have gathered that seem helpful to the entrepreneurial experience. In this moment, self-isolated and spending hours “alone-together” on Zoom, I felt the need to share some thoughts related to dealing with crisis and catastrophe.
So here you have it - a special COVID edition of quotes to entrepreneur by.
“This the right time for hard pivots. If your product is not already doing well and you are hitting a wall, you might as well use this time to pivot completely to another idea.
- Mayank Khanduja, SAIF Partners
“Treat this crisis as practice for the next crisis.”
- John Parenti
“Some days punch us in the gut so hard it seems we can feel the whole universe gasp with despair.”
- Curtis Tyrone Jones
“Any disaster is a learning process.”
- Julia Child
"What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?"
- George Eliot
"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same."
- Rudyard Kipling
“I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity."
- John D Rockefeller
“The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"People are trying to decide whether the man-made disaster is worse than Mother Nature's disaster."
- Larry Sabato
“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
- Carl Sagan
“Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature.”
- Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Life constantly presents the greatest opportunity brilliantly disguised as the biggest disaster.”
- David Icke
“He who refuses to stoop, who cannot be bribed by the promise of success or the fear of failure - who walks the highway of the right, and in disaster stands erect, is the only victor.”
- Robert Green Ingersoll
“The fine line between roaring with laughter and crying because it's a disaster is a very, very fine line. You see a chap slip on a banana skin in the street and you roar with laughter when he falls slap on his backside. If in doing so you suddenly see he's broken a leg, you very quickly stop laughing and it's not a joke anymore.”
- Roald Dahl
“There's nothing like a jolly good disaster to get people to start doing something.”
- Prince Charles
“Disasters teach us humility.”
- Anselm of Canterbury
“I beg you take courage; the brave soul can mend even disaster.”
- Catherine the Great
By Managing Partner Mike Edelhart
@MikeEdelhart