[On a company founder.] A founder is not a job, it’s a role, it’s an attitude. And it’s something that can happen again, and again, and again. In fact it has to happen, again and again and again. Otherwise we would not move forward.
- Jack Dorsey
Notable Quotables
They have done great things within what you would call established American sports. Freddy has the potential to bring soccer almost for the first time into the public’s consciousness. Soccer in the United States isn’t really part of the culture. What it needs, I think, is a superhero, and he clearly could be it. Now, that’s putting a lot of pressure on him, but the kid’s got all the potential to do that.
- Phil Knight
I think it’d be crazy not to have the plan encompass the entire reservoir. If we have (the smaller map), we’ve got a bunch of other folks telling us what they want to see happen in our community.
- Jack Taylor
when praise is specific, it comes across as sincere—not something the other person may be saying just to make one feel good.
- Dale Carnegie
Out of clutter, find simplicity.
- Albert Einstein
You can’t sit there and worry about everything.
- Michael Bloomberg
People buy titles, and not contents of books. By merely changing the name of one book that was not moving his sales on that book jumped upward more a million copies. The inside of the book was no changed in any way. He merely ripped off the cover bearing the title that did not sell, and put on new cover with a title that had box-office value.
- Napoleon Hill
about 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.
- Dale Carnegie
You are what you are and you are where you are because of what has gone into your mind. You change what you are and you change where you are by changing what goes into your mind.
- Zig Ziglar
Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.
- Peter Drucker
Opportunity is walking through your life every day in the form of people you meet.
- Zig Ziglar
Checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized.
- Atul Gawande
My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we’ve had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.
- Bill Gates
Leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.
- Ben Horowitz
The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization…. Such war-making weapons should be developed – but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation.
- Thomas Edison
If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.
- Bill Gates
Xiaomi looks a bit like Apple but is really more like Amazon with some elements of Google.
- Lei Jun
Anyone with a Purpose Can Make a Difference.
- Zig Ziglar
Colleges are the equivalent of the subprime mortgage lenders who…
- Brian Tracy
Hi-tech is best managed by younger people.
- Lee Shau Kee
Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.
- Winston Churchill
Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there.
- Timothy Ferriss
Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
- Dale Carnegie
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
- Robert Frost
The thing for you is a burial permit. You have only to speak and I will see that you get it.
- Dale Carnegie
“What would you do if capital were free?” is a dangerous question to ask an entrepreneur. It’s kind of like asking a fat person, “What would you do if ice cream had the exact same nutritional value as broccoli?”
- Ben Horowitz
Berkshire’s record would have been terrible if Warren didn’t keep learning.
- Charlie Munger
Computing is kind of a mess. Your computer doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know what you’re doing. It doesn’t know what you know.
- Larry Page
This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
- Peter Drucker
For now, if the Hong Kong environment doesn’t change, then in the long term, investing in Hong Kong is best.
- Lee Shau Kee
I was reading an article in the ‘New York Times;’ it talked about being in the zone, and being in the zone you’re so focused that time ceases to exist. It’s when you think, ‘Oh, I’ve been doing this for five hours and didn’t even know it.’ It’s the difference between hard work and going, ’12 o’clock, not moving.’
- Steve Martin
My kids probably started drinking coffee in their late teens.
- Howard Schultz
Our underwear used to just be cotton, but we wanted to see if we could create something out of synthetics.
- Tadashi Yanai
I have a calendar life that is complicated, so I use BusyCal and Google Calendar. I keep two different browsers open to avoid some confusion.
- Steve Wozniak
Pretty much everything will come to him who hustles while he waits. I believe that restlessness is discontent, and discontent is merely the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
- Thomas Edison
You can start from where you are with what you’ve got and go to where it is you want to go.
- Zig Ziglar
Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are fit to be a teacher.
- Confucius
If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was ‘satisfactory,’ I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?
- Bill Gates
Leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.
- Peter Thiel
I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.
- Winston Churchill
We are witnessing a seismic change in consumer behavior. That change is being brought about by technology and the access people have to information.
- Howard Schultz
Every single important thing we do is something we didn’t use to be good at, and in fact, might be something we used to fear.
- Seth Godin
So Bush certainly wasn’t the greatest, and Obama has not done the job. And he’s created a lot of disincentive. He’s created a lot of great dissatisfaction. Regulations and regulatory is going through the roof. It’s almost impossible to get anything done in the country.
- Donald Trump
Whoever renders service to many puts himself in line for greatness – great wealth, great return, great satisfaction, great reputation, and great joy
- Jim Rohn
Desire is the catalyst that enables a person with average ability to compete and win against others with more natural talent.
- Zig Ziglar
Canon is basically a very aggressive company. Our company works on competitive principles. It does not treat people equally, but it does treat them fairly.
- Fujio Mitarai
So much of the downstream revenue is linked to that initial excitement, to how much revenue is produced in the domestic box office. For example, what we pay for a film three years later is highly correlated to how well it did in the box office.
- Reed Hastings
God can take what was meant for my harm and turn it around and use it to my advantage.
- Joel Olsteen
The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which secures for the gifted artists a world-wide fame princes well might envy.
- P.T. Barnum
The indefiniteness of finance can be bizarre. Think about what happens when successful entrepreneurs sell their company. What do they do with the money? In a financialized world, it unfolds like this: • The founders don’t know what to do with it, so they give it to a large bank. • The bankers don’t know what to do with it.
- Peter Thiel
Founding Fathers of U.S. set up processes, checks and balances designed to insure that their values lived on long after their passing.
- Jim Collins
Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not “making friends and influencing people”, that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
- Peter Drucker
You got to be rigorous in your appraisal system. The biggest cowards are managers who don’t let people know where they stand.
- Jack Welch
Properly run startups place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting and the interview process in order to build their talent base. Too often the investment in people stops there.
- Ben Horowitz
Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs.
- Bill Gates
When eagles are silent, parrots begin to chatter.
- Winston Churchill
Starting a new South Indian restaurant is a really hard way to make money. If you lose sight of competitive reality and focus on trivial differentiating factors—maybe you think your naan is superior because of your great-grandmother’s recipe—your business is unlikely to survive.
- Peter Thiel
Don’t take anyone for granted.
- Jack Dorsey
I try to make myself happy, no, because I know that if I’m not happy, my colleagues are not happy and my shareholders are not happy and my customers are not happy.
- Jack Ma
If you say you want to automate cars and save people’s lives, the skills you need for that aren’t taught in any particular discipline. I know – I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.
- Larry Page
A lot of stuff I do out of pure obsessiveness.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
- Henry Ford
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
ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
- Peter Thiel
You may never get to that perfect world that you’re waiting for where everything’s going to be perfect and you got that much money and your house paid off.
- Joel Olsteen
We’re better than the rest of the country but we shouldn’t believe it too much.
- Peter Thiel
Measles will always show you if someone isn’t doing a good job on vaccinations. Kids will start dying of measles.
- Bill Gates
Whether you’re talking about the core consumer or the person on the street, the principle is the same: you have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.
- Phil Knight
When there is no job related stress, you are more aware of your mate and children, if you are a parent.
- Zig Ziglar
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.
- Mark Zuckerberg
God’s desire is that we excel.
- Joel Olsteen
What we maybe should’ve realized sooner was that we are running a political campaign and the candidate is Uber. And this political race is happening in every major city in the world. And because this isn’t about a democracy, this is about a product, you can’t win 51 to 49. You have to win 98 to 2.
- Travis Kalanick
True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
- Helen Keller
Humor is always a risky business.
- Phil Knight
I founded Netflix. I’ve built it steadily over 12 years now, first with DVD becoming profitable in 2002, a head-to-head ferocious battle with Blockbuster and evolving the company toward streaming.
- Reed Hastings
The things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.
- Ben Horowitz
Vision is perhaps our greatest strength… it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.
- Li Ka-shing
If you don’t love what you’re doing with unbridled passion and enthusiasm, you’re not going to succeed when you hit obstacles.
- Howard Schultz
Uncontrolled Desire For Something For Nothing.
- Napoleon Hill
m reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States – for the century, at least.
- Elon Musk
I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly.
- Steve Martin
Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man’s character.
- Thomas Edison
Always deliver more than expected.
- Larry Page
Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work.
- Bill Gates
The missing ingredient for nearly all of the 1,000-plus clients I have worked with directly to improve their businesses is pigheaded discipline and determination. We all get good ideas at seminars and from books, radio talk shows and business-building gurus. The problem is that most companies do not know how to identify and adapt the best ideas to their businesses. Implementation, not ideas, is the key to real success.
- Chet Holmes
As a cure for worrying, work is far better than whiskey. I always found that, if I began to worry, the best thing I could do was focus upon doing something useful and then work very hard at it. Soon, I would forget what was troubling me.
- Thomas Edison
Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
- Dale Carnegie
A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.
- Peter Thiel
You are victors, not victims!
- Joel Olsteen
Some people find fault like there is a reward for it.
- Zig Ziglar
I spend a lot of time reading.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft
- Bill Gates
Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.
- Peter Thiel
Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.
- Ray Kroc
Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he’s hired to do.
- Malcolm Forbes
Eliminate the fear of old age by reaching a decision to accept it, not as a handicap, but as a great blessing which carries with it wisdom, self-control, and understanding not known to youth. Whip the fear of poverty by reaching a decision to get along with whatever wealth you can accumulate without worry. Master the fear of loss of love by reaching decision to get along without love, if that is necessary. Kill that habit of worry in all its forms, by reaching a general, blanket decision that that nothing which life has to offer is worth the price of worry. With this decision comes poise, peace of mind, and calmness of thought which will bring happiness.
- Napoleon Hill
Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.
- Napoleon Hill
You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who cannot pay you back. Make a decision that you will live to give. Be on the lookout each day for somebody you can bless. Don’t’ live for yourself; learn to give yourself away, and your life will make a difference.
- John Bunyan
Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
- Napoleon Hill
Often, it is in trying times that the greatest endeavours are realised.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I do think – as self-serving as it sounds – that I was the right person, given the very, very strong headwind we had from the economy and our own issues, to come back and rewrite the future of the company.
- Howard Schultz
