Notable Quotables

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

If You Have A Lemon, Make A Lemonade That is what a great educator does. But the fool does the exact opposite. If he finds that life has handed him a lemon, he gives up and says: I’m beaten. It is fate. I haven’t got a chance. Then he proceeds to rail against the world and indulge in an orgy of selfpity. But when the wise man is handed a lemon, he says: What lesson can I learn from this misfortune? How can I improve my situation? How can I turn this lemon into a lemonade?

- Dale Carnegie

Be there for your kids. Later, when you need them, they’ll be there for you.

- Zig Ziglar

We live in a culture that relishes tearing others down. It’s ultimately more fulfilling, though, to help people reach their goals. Instead of feeling jealous, remember: If God did it for them, He can do it for you.

- Joel Olsteen

Historians will record 1998 as a time when the impossible happened in Asia

- Cheng Yu-tung

We’re all obsessed with ideas because ideas, not products, are the engine of our new economy.

- Seth Godin

We see no indications in the marketplace that the radical Internet business transformation in practices like customer service, supply-chain management, employee training, empowerment, and e-commerce that is taking place around the world today is slowing — in fact, we believe it is accelerating globally.

- John Chambers

Leadership isn’t something that people hand to you. … [i]t’s a gradual process, one where you take responsibility years before you are given authority. And that’s something we can teach.

- Seth Godin

I was the night foreman of a galvanizing factory, which is hot and smelly and dirty and miserable.

- Ronald Perelman

I have no interest in going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids. I’m just not that kind of dude.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

You are safer here tonight than you would be on the streets of any other city in the world.

- Michael Bloomberg

If you cannot persuade people to do things, you simply will not be a success because you are not an island unto yourself. Everything in life is about persuading people to do what you want them to do.

- David Robinson

Tell your child, your spouse, or your employee that he or she is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you have destroyed almost every incentive to try to improve.

- Dale Carnegie

I feel like money makes you more of who you already are.

- Sara Blakely

Transparency in the traditional school might destroy it.

- Seth Godin

We believe that it is better to give one a rod to fish rather than just dole out fish to them.

- Henry Sy

Mike suggested that we might want to turn our stockholders’ meetings into an event, and we went along with him.

- Sam Walton

The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it’s enormously useful in life.

- Larry Ellison

If you find yourself plagued by a recurrent worry, train yourself to think of something else. Your conscious mind can concentrate on only one thought at a time, and driving the negativity away will free you up to move forward again.

- Harvey Mackay

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

- Bill Gates

A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

- Richard Branson

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

- Steve Wozniak

I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

- Bill Gates

This is a learning in the business life that first of all you need to have commitment, dedication and passion for what you are doing.

- Lakshmi Mittal

A great accomplishment shouldn’t be the end of the road, just the starting point for the next leap forward.

- Harvey Mackay

In any new business, someone has to have a vision. You are as good as the people around you. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Identify your core community and go from there. Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to. In my experience it often takes as long as five years to make a business work. Partners can fail you. Staff may not execute properly. You could be too far ahead of the market. SO you have to be willing to hand in there and make it happen. From the founding of Phat Farm in 1992 until 1997, I lost money. By my account, I experienced $10 million in losses. But today Phat Farm is visible, it is imitated and it generates hundreds of millions of dollars. It took time, but good ideas often do need time to take off. Being an entrepreneur requires instinct, fortitude and the ability to accept that the world does not run on your schedule. Sometimes you just have to believe.

- Russell Simmons

People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.” There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold.

- Peter Thiel

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

- Peter Drucker

Your job should make you want to get out of bed

- Tony Hsieh

People who do not succeed have one distinguishing trait in common. They know all the reasons for failure, and have what they believe to be air-tight alibis to explain their lack of achievement: 1) If I had the money… 2) If I could get the job… 3) If I had been given a chance… 4) If I were younger… 5) If I were older… 6) If I only had a better education… 7) If I could just save some money… 8) If I lived in a big city… 9) If I were not so fat… 10) If my talents were better known… 11) If I didn’t have a past… 12) If I had my own business… 13) If I had the courage…

- Napoleon Hill

I’ve been blessed to find people who are smarter than I am, and they help me to execute the vision I have.

- Russell Simmons

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.

- Bill Gates

I think the advantage of democracy is that it makes us less dependent on a group of leaders.

- Azim Premji

How you see your future is much more important than what happened in your past.

- Zig Ziglar

My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people.

- Bill Gates

Try to maximize the number of people that can benefit from an individual contribution.

- Lee Shau Kee

You have to get lost in the woods of your own doing and discover a way out. You have to find the right path over the creek, under the rock-whatever mechanism is good for your body’s size and your stride and your cadence and your tolerance for wet or cold or humid weather. That kind of learning comes from having a tolerance for failure, and extracting lessons from your failures.

- Marc Ecko

We all know now that the 747 became the flagship jumbo jet of the airline industry, but the decision looks much different from the perspective of the late 1960s. Yet—and this is the key point—Boeing was willing to make the bold move in the face of the risks. As in Boeing’s case, the risks do not always come without pain.

- James C. Collins

I’ve talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 had one thing in common: They all wanted validation…I would tell you that every single person you will ever meet shares that common desire.

- Oprah Winfrey

How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?

- Seth Godin

There is no such thing in the world as luck. There never was a man who could go out in the morning and find a purse full of gold in the street to-day, and another to-morrow, and so on, day after day: He may do so once in his life; but so far as mere luck is concerned, he is as liable to lose it as to find it.

- P.T. Barnum

It was definitely kind of surprising to see us come out and run the ball because we usually like to pass to start the game and put up some quick points. But tonight, we had real good balance offensively. We ran and passed the ball well, which kept them off balance all night.

- Jack Taylor

Here’s how I work: It’s 2013, and most marketers are operating like it’s 2009. I’m always trying to market like it’s 2015, but not like it’s 2020. A lot of my contemporaries who understand where the world is going, go too far out, and aren’t practical. I have always prided myself on being visionary, with a heavy practicality.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Southwest consistently turns a profit because they have an employee ownership program that gives their employees a sense of ownership that is very real. When the company does well financially, the employees do well financially. When the company struggles, the employees struggle.

- Clay Clark

Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as His divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen.

- Winston Churchill

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas, but the image is that they all come from the top. I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

- Bill Gates

You have to take away some of tax breaks for the wealthy, and you have to cut back on some entitlements. Because, unless we do all of these things, it just doesn’t work. And what’s good theater and what’s good politics isn’t necessarily good economic policy.

- Michael Bloomberg

Checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized.

- Atul Gawande

It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product. If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.

- Peter Thiel

I don’t believe that government is good at picking technology, particularly technology that is changing. By the time you get it done and go through democracy, it’s so outdated.

- Michael Bloomberg

I built a steel plant from the grassroots, so I learned all the nuts and bolts. When there was a problem, I would be able to guide them, though I am not a technical person.

- Lakshmi Mittal

The Law of Crappy People states: For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.

- Ben Horowitz

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

- Bill Gates

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn’t get bigger or heavier.

- Bill Gates

If you believe in quality, you can’t just tell everybody We believe in quality! You’ve got to pay bonuses based on quality. You’ve got to let everyone in the organization know that they are being judged on quality.

- Jack Welch

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

- Thomas Edison

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

Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

- Bill Gates

But the three rules I always stuck with were 1) Be on time 2) No profanity and 3) Never criticize a teammate.

- David Novak

My biggest crisis is that I don’t understand what young people like.

- Ma Huateng

Salvation and Christ’s love is a gift. You don’t earn it. You’ve got to receive that gift.

- Joel Olsteen

Globally, business and government leaders are beginning to dramatically transform their traditional business models into Internet economy business models, … Customers are increasingly seeking Cisco’s expertise to help them through this transformation.

- John Chambers

I think we are not serious about attacking the long-term debt problem, and that’s one of the things that he’s going to have to find a way to get on the agenda.

- Michael Bloomberg

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM – and they keep track of this – is a little over four years.

- Bill Gates

I wish I could do a lot of things different. I’m not going to tell you what they are, but if I had a list of all my films right now, I’d go, ‘Okay, I’ll cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out.’ Really. But I’ve made over 40 films. How can I not have some losers in there?

- Steve Martin

Sometimes you may have to trade places with someone who is hurting.

- Joel Olsteen

Most people have never thought through how they’re going to allocate their time. You need to make a decision in advance.

- Clayton M. Christensen

People say that globalisation has negative aspects, but I don’t believe globalisation is bad. It’s criticised from a western perspective, but if you put yourself in the shoes of people in the developing world, it provides an unprecedented opportunity.

- Tadashi Yanai

The reason you might choose to embrace the artist within you now is that this is the path to (cue the ironic music) security.

- Seth Godin

We provide food that customers love, day after day after day. People just want more of it.

- Ray Kroc

In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will.

- Bill Gates

What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.

- Admiral Jim Stockdale

…Treasure what it means to do a day’s work. It’s our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it’s certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day’s work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you’ll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.

- Seth Godin

Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful’.

- Warren Buffett

The connected economy of ideas demands that we contribute initiative. And yet we resist, because our lizard brain, the one that lives in fear, relentlessly exaggerates the cost of being wrong.

- Seth Godin

You know, if it’s a three-way race, the public has more choice than if it’s a two-way race, and has more choice in a two-way race than a one-way race.

- Michael Bloomberg

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

- Joel Olsteen

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.

- Peter Thiel

The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is “value” to the customer?), standardizing the “product,” designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.

- Peter Drucker

The spirit of Southwest Airlines is exuberant, it’s caring, it’s dedicated, it’s diligent, it’s fun, it’s rewarding, it’s a joy.

- Herb Kelleher

My Golden Rule of Networking is simple: Don’t keep score.

- Harvey Mackay

The one thing coaches cannot tolerate… is the individual who grows arrogant because he excelled at a lower level and believes he has nothing else to learn.

- Zig Ziglar

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

I absolutely don’t have $20 billion. But I’d love to, right?

- Jack Ma

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

The idea is to have relationships where you make money and the other guy makes money, too. That’s how a business keeps its team together.

- Russell Simmons

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

- Steve Jobs

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