Top 70 Scott Berkun Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Innovation is significant positive change.”

— Scott Berkun

2. “I don’t want to be perfect. I want to be useful, I want to be good, and I want to sound like myself. Trying to be perfect gets in the way of all three.”

— Scott Berkun

3. “Part of the challenge of innovation is coming up with the problem to solve, not just its solution.”

— Scott Berkun

4. “Most people doubt online meetings can work but they somehow overlook that most in-person meetings don’t work either.”

— Scott Berkun

5. “The bottleneck is never code or creativity; it’s lack of clarity.”

— Scott Berkun

6. “Good public speaking is based on good private thinking.”

— Scott Berkun

7. “It’s not the fear of writing that blocks people, it’s fear of not writing well; something quite different.”

— Scott Berkun

8. “This is one big problem with working remotely: no one believes you have a job at all.”

— Scott Berkun

9. “The way you find the answers to your problems will be unique to you.”

— Scott Berkun

10. “Big thoughts are fun to romanticize, but it’s many small insights coming together that bring big ideas into the world.”

— Scott Berkun

11. “Silence between teachers’ remarks is a very important part of a lecture. Silence provides time for consolidation and thought.”

— Scott Berkun

12. “Experiment is the expected failure to deliberately learn something.”

— Scott Berkun

13. “Commit yourself to taking enough risks that you will fail some of the time. If you’re not failing, we’re not doing something sufficiently difficult or creative.”

— Scott Berkun

14. “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” – Buddha.”

— Scott Berkun

15. “People tell me this is obvious. But it’s ok to be obvious. Knowing and doing are different. Many people know many obvious things they completely fail to do, despite their knowledge.”

— Scott Berkun

16. “No technique, no matter how good, can turn stupid coworkers into smart ones. And no method can magically make employees trust each other or their boss if they have good reason not to.”

— Scott Berkun

17. “Anyone can criticize or accept praise, but initiating a positive exchange is a hallmark of a difference maker.”

— Scott Berkun

18. “Good engineering estimates are possible only if you have two things: good information and good engineers. If the specs are crap, and a programmer is asked to conjure up a number based on an incomprehensible whiteboard scribbling, everyone should know exactly what they’re getting: a fuzzy scribble of an estimate.”

— Scott Berkun

19. “It’s rare for people to genuinely try to understand what others are trying to say.”

— Scott Berkun

20. “The chief cause of problems is solutions. – Eric Sevareid.”

— Scott Berkun

21. “Imparting trust, the real meaning of delegation, is a powerful thing.”

— Scott Berkun

22. “It seems that bad advice that’s fun will always be better known than than good advice that’s dull-no matter how useless that fun advice is.”

— Scott Berkun

23. “It’s safe to assume that no matter where you stand, someone would be happy to be in your shoes, just as you’d be happy to be in someone else’s.”

— Scott Berkun

24. “Negotiation is useful not only in a crisis situation, but also in management. Good negotiators work from people’s interests, not their positions.”

— Scott Berkun

25. “History can’t give attention to what’s been lost, hidden, or deliberately buried; it is mostly a telling of success, not the partial failures that enabled success.”

— Scott Berkun

26. “My intent is simply to know my material so well that I’m very comfortable with it. Confidence, not perfection, is the goal.”

— Scott Berkun

27. “There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn’t one.”

— Scott Berkun

28. “Professional management was born from the desire to optimize and control, not to lead waves of change.”

— Scott Berkun

29. “Think biologically: humans are in better moods after they’ve eaten a fine meal or when they are in more pleasant surroundings.”

— Scott Berkun

30. “If you’d like to be good at something, the first thing to out the window is the notion of perfection.”

— Scott Berkun

31. “Reflection is highly underrated as a decision-making tool. To reflect means to step back and allow all of the information you’ve been working with to sink.”

— Scott Berkun

32. “Innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their merits; they’re rejected because of how they make people feel. If you forget people’s concerns and feelings when you present an innovation, or neglect to understand their perspectives in your design, you’re setting yourself up to fail.”

— Scott Berkun

33. “Learning from mistakes requires three things: Putting yourself in situations where you can make interesting mistakes Having the self-confidence to admit to them Being courageous about making changes.”

— Scott Berkun

34. “As a rule, if you insist on speaking your mind, you will inevitably find yourself somewhere where everyone hates you.”

— Scott Berkun

35. “Schedules are simply a kind of prediction. No matter how precisely they are drafted or how convincing they appear, they are just a summation of lots of little estimations, each one unavoidably prone to different kinds of unforeseeable oversights and problems.”

— Scott Berkun

36. “The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong... Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate, they’re never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas.”

— Scott Berkun

37. “An amazing thing about our digital age is that the person next to you at Starbucks might just be hacking into a Swiss bank or launching multiwarhead nuclear missiles continents away.”

— Scott Berkun

38. “Taking responsibility for situations, regardless of who caused them, always helps to expedite resolving.”

— Scott Berkun

39. “Without change and the occasional struggle, we can’t learn or grow.”

— Scott Berkun

40. “Human nature reciprocates positive emotion, and when you bring something real out, you invite others to follow.”

— Scott Berkun

41. “Expressing ideas is often the only way to fully understand what ideas are, and to know what it is you really think.”

— Scott Berkun

42. “At some point, all creative tasks become work. The interesting and fun challenges fade, and the ordinary, boring, inglorious work necessary to bring an idea to the world becomes the reality.”

— Scott Berkun

43. “Plans act as a forcing function against all kinds of stupidity because they demand that important issues be resolved while there is time to consider other options. As Abraham Lincoln said, “If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I’d spend four hours sharpening the axe,” which I take to mean that smart preparation minimizes work.”

— Scott Berkun

44. “It’s not a new, radical idea for work to have meaning and for workers to have both great freedom and pride in the work itself. Instead those ideas are rooted in the origins of work; we’ve just lost our way.”

— Scott Berkun

45. “With no universal measure for meaning to compare with the seemingly solid accounting for income, we fall into the data trap. Our larger culture, and our pesky parents, push us toward decisions that seem to score well but are blind to the most important elements of healthy careers and meaningful lives.”

— Scott Berkun

46. “Much of what bad managers do is assume their job is simply to find new things to jam and new places to jam them into, without ever believing they need to understand how the system – the system of people known as culture – works.”

— Scott Berkun

47. “The mystery for why some people you know succeed or fail in life is how courageous they are in pulling people aside and how effective they are in those private conversations we never see.”

— Scott Berkun

48. “It’s natural for people to protect what they know instead of leaping into the unknown, and managers are no exception. Managers might even be worse, as the politics they rely on to survive can make them more entrenched and defensive.”

— Scott Berkun

49. “You can blame people who knock things over in the dark, or you can begin to light candles. You’re only at fault if you know about the problem and choose to do nothing.”

— Scott Berkun

50. “I want to do this job and I’ll give it my heart and soul.”

— Scott Berkun