Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo. The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec is.
- Seth Godin
Notable Quotables
It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.
- Timothy Ferriss
I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.
- Elon Musk
EBay is a great company. There are a lot of good assets and good customers, and the U.S. people love it.
- Jack Ma
I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.
- Bill Gates
I think like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Failure is a great teacher. At the same time, you must remember, success will never last… Whether it’s tech or fashion, it must be for the customer.
- Tadashi Yanai
I will not lose, for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned so it evens up for me.
- Jay-Z
Why don’t we have enough teachers of math and science in the public schools? One answer is well, if they knew the subject well, they’d also know enough to work for Google or Goldman Sachs or God knows where.
- James Simons
We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference. Some organizations haven’t realized this yet, or haven’t articulated it, but we need artists.
- Seth Godin
It is true that integrity alone won’t make you a leader, but without integrity you will never be one.
- Zig Ziglar
Do not listen to those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious.
- Og Mandino
The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over.
- Peter Thiel
The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.
- Dale Carnegie
It is very likely that Hong Kong has reached the end of the tunnel and the bright sunshine is not far from us.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I seldom read anything that is not of a factual nature because I want to invest my time wisely in the things that will improve my life. Don’t misunderstand; there is nothing wrong with reading purely for the joy of it. Novels have their place, but biographies of famous men and women contain information that can change lives.
- Zig Ziglar
Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.
- Dale Carnegie
If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them—not that they are working for you.
- Sam Walton
The best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met are all good communicators. It’s perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.
- Timothy Ferriss
I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it. But I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States.
- Stephen Wynn
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human body, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.
- Thomas Edison
The seed of a bamboo tree is planted, fertilized and watered. Nothing happens for the first year. There´s no sign of growth. Not even a hint. The same thing happens – or doesn´t happen – the second year. And then the third year. The tree is carefully watered and fertilized each year, but nothing shows. No growth. No anything. For eight years it can continue. Eight years! Then – after the eight years of fertilizing and watering have passed, with nothing to show for it – the bamboo tree suddently sprouts and grows thirty feet in three months!
- Zig Ziglar
There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.
- Jeff Bezos
[Introducing himself to Sony co-founder Akio Morita] I have six of your TVs in my house.
- Phil Knight
The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren’t rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are.
- Dale Carnegie
F-E-A-R has two meanings: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise.’ The choice is yours.
- Zig Ziglar
We have an average household net worth of $3.7 million. Of course, some of our cohorts have accumulated much more. Nearly 6 percent have a net worth of over $10 million. Again, these people skew our average upward. The typical (median, or 50th percentile) millionaire household has a net worth of $1.6 million.
- Thomas J Stanley
It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
- Bill Gates
Today, getting people to hear your story on social media, and then act on it, requires using a platform’s native language, paying attention to context, understanding the nuances and subtle differences that make each platform unique, and adapting your content to match.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
It isn’t until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are – not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within – that you can begin to take control.
- Oprah Winfrey
I was uncomfortable with the timing, … We were getting millions less from the federal government for Medicaid and having to search for funds to restore some of those cuts and I just did not think it was right to put a pay raise on the board that would cost tens of millions of dollars.
- Michael Gerber
My strength is programming. I also think my biggest strength is simplification. That’s what I love doing.
- Jack Dorsey
Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.
- Bill Gates
The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.
- Bill Gates
Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.
- Mark Zuckerberg
I don’t want to be liked. I want to be respected.
- Jack Ma
I love art, I love design, and I love seeing that intersection of technology and the teams that work on it.
- Jack Dorsey
With the inherent value in Cabot’s capital program, we recommenced buying shares in late November and early December with the market pull back. We still see a lot of merit and long-term value for the shareholders in looking at COG stock as an investment alternative.
- Dan Dinges
There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.
- Peter Thiel
It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople. In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups: 1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes. This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
Attitude, not Aptitude, determines Altitude.
- Zig Ziglar
When people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options.
- Peter Thiel
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
The air of the English is down-to-earth. They care about details; there’s a tradition, but there’s also a counter-culture: the younger generation versus the older generation and so on. But then that’s well blended into a happy balance and crystallised into common sense.
- Tadashi Yanai
Everything is fraught with danger. I love technology and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.
- Steve Martin
I’m going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.
- Bill Gates
When it comes to social consequences, they’ve got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it’s a difficult task.
- George Soros
We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.
- Steve Jobs
When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.
- Walt Disney
That’s just $30 for two tickets. Racing is a family sport and we strive to make our tickets affordable for any families that want to come watch a race.
- Ed Clark
For me, my father was, and still is, a symbol of qualified persons in the Ministry of Foreign Trade under Soviet conditions.
- Vladimir Potanin
Don’t worry that you can’t seem to come up with sure billion dollar winners at first. Just do projects for yourself for fun. You’ll get better and better.
- Steve Wozniak
Trust your instincts
- Estée Lauder
As CEO, you should have an opinion on absolutely everything. You should have an opinion on every forecast, every product plan, every presentation, and even every comment. Let people know what you think. If you like someone’s comment, give her the feedback. If you disagree, give her the feedback. Say what you think. Express yourself.
- Ben Horowitz
In the short term, the market is a popularity contest. In the long term, the market is a weighing machine.
- Warren Buffett
Structure a deal and create a plan around it.
- Jack Nadel
I made a conscious decision not to tell anyone in my life. Now I tell people–don’t tell anyone your idea until you have invested enough of yourself in it that you are not going to turn back. When a person has an idea at that conception moment, it is the most vulnerable–one negative comment could knock you off course.
- Sara Blakely
Magazines, trade publications and out outlets that relate specifically to your field of interest. If you’re a musician, Billboard, Rolling Stone and Spin top your list; if you’re a chef or restaurateur, the Gourmet or Bon Appetit and the food section of your local paper top yours.
- Michael Levine
Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.
- Peter Drucker
A company is like a shark, it either has to move forward or it dies.
- Larry Ellison
The competitive advantages the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion. All of these attributes are choices, not talents, and all of them are available to you.
- Seth Godin
We have not journeyed all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
- Winston Churchill
The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.
- Anthony Robbins
This is just going to be a great event and we have an outstanding speaker.
- Jack Taylor
I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.
- Bill Gates
What do you want? is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer.
- Timothy Ferriss
Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate?
- Larry Page
If you have a strong informed opinion, don’t keep it to yourself. Try to help people and make the world a better place. If you strive to do anything remotely interesting, just expect a small percentage of the population to always find a way to take it personally. F*ck ’em. There are no statues erected to critics.
- Timothy Ferriss
There are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training. Therefore, training should be the most basic requirement for all managers in your organization. An effective way to enforce this requirement is by withholding new employee requisitions from managers until they’ve developed a training program.
- Andrew Grove
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.
- Richard Branson
Uber is “way more” evil than Google, the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley.
- Peter Thiel
If Wanda can control more than 20 per cent of the world’s three most important film markets – the United States, Europe and China – then it will have an empire with great voice in the industry.
- Wang Jianlin
A good startup should have the potential for great scale built into its first design.
- Peter Thiel
I guarantee you it will not be anyone from the outside.
- Jack Welch
When there is no job related stress, you are more aware of your mate and children, if you are a parent.
- Zig Ziglar
Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
- Confucius
In the 1950s, people welcomed big plans and asked whether they would work. Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris. You can still visit the Bay Model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today it’s just a tourist attraction: big plans for the future have become archaic curiosities.
- Peter Thiel
It’s so easy to tweet from wherever you are.
- Jack Dorsey
When interviewing candidates, it’s helpful to watch for small distinctions that indicate whether they view the world through the “me” prism or the “team” prism.
- Ben Horowitz
Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.
- George Soros
Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.
- Winston Churchill
We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
- Jeff Bezos
To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.
- Peter Thiel
Becoming a member of the new rich is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.”Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness.”By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.
- Timothy Ferriss
Hong Kong has remained a strong financial centre. It has a solid business environment and geographically, it is well located, being next to China. During this time, there is no city that can match it.
- Lee Shau Kee
If you think about computing, there isn’t just one way to compute, just like there’s not just one way to move around. You can have shoes, you can have a car, you can have a bicycle, submarine, rocket, plane, train, glider, whatever. Because you have one doesn’t mean you get rid of another one… But PCs continue to be important.
- Michael Dell
Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it’s a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.
- Ray Dalio
If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.
- Dale Carnegie
Rockefeller preferred to own raw land. In 1873, he invested in seventy-nine scenic acres at Forest Hill, a lovely, thickly wooded spot, crisscrossed by steep ravines and gulleys, just four miles east of his Euclid Avenue home.
- Ron Chernow
You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.
- Winston Churchill
When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.
- Bill Gates
Markets are designed to allow individuals to look after their private needs and to pursue profit. It’s really a great invention and I wouldn’t under-estimate the value of that, but they’re not designed to take care of social needs.
- George Soros
Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. So start each day by thinking of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your future will depend very largely on the thoughts you think today. So think thoughts of hope and confidence and love and success.
- Dale Carnegie
I’m not even sure what it’s getting at … personalities are very wrong although mine is closer … don’t forget that my purpose was inspired by the values of the Homebrew Computer Club along with ideas of the value of such machines and Steve J. wasn’t around and didn’t attend the club so he was the one learning about such social impact of the future.
- Steve Wozniak
I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
- Elon Musk
Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book ‘The Most Powerful Idea in the World.
- Bill Gates
Don’t use your words to describe the situation. Use your words to change the situation.
- Joel Olsteen
Direct your energy toward achieving a goal, and tackle the problems with an emphasis on edging closer to a successful result.
- Harvey Mackay
God, I’m not going to look at what I don’t have. I’m looking unto you. I know in my weakness, you show up the strongest.
- Joel Olsteen
If you want enemies, excel your friends; but if you want friends, let your friends excel you.
- Dale Carnegie
