It takes a leader to create momentum. Followers catch it. And managers are able to continue it once it has begun. But creating it requires someone who can motivate others, not who needs to be motivated. Harry Truman once said, If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. But for leaders, that statement should be changed to, If you can’t make some heat, get out of the kitchen.
- John Maxwell
Notable Quotables
We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like 10 or 20 years from now.
- Peter Thiel
Learn from the past, but don’t live there. Build on what you know so that you don’t repeat mistakes. Resolve to learn something new every day. Because every 24 hours, you have the opportunity to have the best day of your company’s life.
- Harvey Mackay
You are at the top when: You have made friends with your past, are focused on the present, and are optimistic about your future.
- Zig Ziglar
If we only have great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Economic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation.
- James C. Collins
Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that’s right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that’s better than television in terms of social connectivity.
- Reid Hoffman
I think of L.A. as truly the melting pot. It’s basically a mini-country unto itself.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.
- John F. Kennedy
Lay out what you’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
- David Novak
It is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing what it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot . .
- Zig Ziglar
A magnificent blueprint, a loyal team and a well-coordinated organization… the same applies from ruling a country to maintaining a family.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who’s going to build.
- Larry Ellison
Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.
- Seth Godin
I think what we’re lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.
- Howard Schultz
Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don’t believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you’re likely to have issues.
- Larry Page
Chinese people, young people, they don’t go shopping a lot in department stores. All department store guys hate me. They say business is bad because of Jack.
- Jack Ma
If you go out looking for friends, you’re going to find they are very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.
- Zig Ziglar
When it’s too easy to get money, then you get a lot of noise mixed in with the real innovation and entrepreneurship. Tough times bring out the best parts of Silicon Valley.
- Sergey Brin
In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins – not through strength, but through persistence.
- Buddha
Look back in forgiveness, forward in hope, down in compassion, and up with gratitude.
- Zig Ziglar
Foreign politicians don’t have resources – or limited resources. It’s useless dealing with them.
- Wang Jianlin
According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.
- Bill Gates
She said, ‘My family is OK, John, but we lost everything.
- John Chambers
The factory has programmed that adventurous impulse out of us. The economic imperative of the last century has been to avoid risk, avoid change, and most of all, avoid exploration and the new. An efficient factory fears change because change means retooling and risk and a blip in productivity. Sure, we’ll put up with change if we have to, and welcome the predictable incremental change of productivity improvement, but please leave us alone when it comes to the word “bold.” Avoiding risk worked then but doesn’t work now. Now “what’s next?” is in fact the driving force for individuals and for organizations. Ever onward, ever faster.
- Seth Godin
Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt.
- Seth Godin
Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.
- Yoda
To me, this is about preserving history and making it available to everyone
- Sergey Brin
Passion is everything. In fact, you’ve got to be borderline fanatical about what you do.
- Chris Gardner
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
- John Wooden
You can follow your favorite company or organization. You can also mix that in with your family and your social network and talk about all these interests in real time. That’s the value, not the brand ‘Twitter.’ Twitter just provides the venue for it.
- Jack Dorsey
Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model.
- Michael Gerber
God never said that we wouldn’t have unfair situations, that we wouldn’t experience loss. But He promised if we would stay in faith, He would restore everything that was stolen.
- Joel Olsteen
Show a real interest in his problem and helping him solve it.
- Jack Nadel
I think faith is incredibly important because you will become overwhelmed with what’s happening and you will have waves of grief, but when you turn to your faith, I believe God will give you waves of grace to get through it.”- Joel Osteen
- Joel Olsteen
If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
- Winston Churchill
If your thinking is limited, then your life is going to be limited.
- Joel Olsteen
A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.
- John C. Maxwell
[In April 2013] Being anonymous is an important part of democracy. I think it’s a critical part of democracy.
- Jack Dorsey
The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.
- Warren Buffett
Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It’s time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must.
- Seth Godin
The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.
- Jeff Bezos
The order for the seats amounted to $90,000. Who do you suppose got the order—James Adamson or one of his competitors? From the time of this story until Mr. Eastman’s death.
- Dale Carnegie
Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.
- Bill Gates
The path of least resistance makes all rivers, and some men, crooked.
- Napoleon Hill
If you think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself.
- Woodrow Wilson
Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.
- Ben Horowitz
I wanted to be a tailor to craft products.
- Jack Dorsey
High expectations are the key to everything.
- Sam Walton
It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.
- Seth Godin
The secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda.
- John C. Maxwell
Monotony is the awful reward of the careful.
- A. G. Buckham
We found that for leaders to make something great, their ambition has to be for the greatness of the work and the company, rather than for themselves.
- James C. Collins
Sales were limited by how many shoes we had, shoes were limited by how many dollars we had to order them.
- Phil Knight
Only men of character are trusted.
- Zig Ziglar
When I hear Mitt Romney say that he believes that Jesus is the Son of God, that He’s the Christ, raised from the dead, that He’s his savior – that’s good enough for me.
- Joel Olsteen
The Curveball. This approach appeals to the media’s innate curiosity. Whereas a fastball stresses logic over emotion, the curveball stresses emotion over logic.
- Michael Levine
The work relationship has to be based on mutual respect. Psychological despotism is basically contemptuous—far more contemptuous than the traditional Theory X. It does not assume that people are lazy and resist work, but it assumes that the manager is healthy while everybody else is sick. It assumes that the manager is strong while everybody else is weak. It assumes that the manager knows while everybody else is ignorant. It assumes that the manager is right, whereas everybody else is stupid. These are the assumptions of foolish arrogance.
- Peter Drucker
Time is your most precious asset.
- Robert Kiyosaki
At the same time, you have to look for detractors among the group because one bad seed can be like a leak in the dime that leads to a major flood. The best thing you can do when you find someone like that is to fire him as quickly as possible!
- David Novak
You’re either remarkable or invisible.
- Seth Godin
true love is always backed up with actions.
- Joel Olsteen
There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
But each country has to advance and move at its own speed.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
You will never change what you tolerate.
- Joel Olsteen
I used to have this debate with Steve Jobs, and he would always say, ‘You guys are doing too much stuff.’ He did a good job of doing one or two things really well. We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.
- Larry Page
I started the site when I was 19. I didn’t know much about business back then.
- Mark Zuckerberg
There is a kind of intolerant spirit now abroad which arises out of the growing power of party and other machinery — a spirit which resents individual opinion, which clamours for uniformity and political Test Acts.
- Winston Churchill
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
Our business is diversified across many sectors, be it supermarkets or finance. We can invest in many areas.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
The difference between being mediocre and magical is often the difference between letting people take creative risk and holding them too tightly accountable. Accountability is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important.
- Ben Horowitz
I always say that the real success of Wine Library wasn’t due to the videos I posted, but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep form meddling with them while they do it.
- Theodore Roosevelt
If David our CEO, devotes so much of his time to this, then all this stuff about teamwork and learning how to be a great leader must be pretty important.
- David Novak
Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital – the world’s best talents and greatest ideas.
- Jack Welch
School districts in the US don’t adopt technology very quickly.
- Reed Hastings
De-escalating the rivalry post-merger wasn’t easy, but as far as problems go, it was a good one to have.
- Peter Thiel
Branding is what people think about you before they even know you.
- Bryan Smith
The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.
- Jeff Bezos
The most frightful of all spectacles is the strength of the civilization without its mercy.
- Winston Churchill
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Perhaps your challenge isn’t finding a better project or a better boss. Perhaps you need to get in touch with what it means to feel passionate. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.
- Seth Godin
I give away something up to $500 million a year throughout the world promoting Open Society. My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It’s their work that I’m supporting. So it’s not me doing it.
- George Soros
The choice is between two ways of life: between individual liberty and State domination, between concentration of ownership in the hands of the State and the extension of ownership over the widest number of individuals, between the dead hand of monopoly and the stimulus of competition, between a policy of increasing restraint and a policy of liberating energy and ingenuity, between a policy of levelling down and a policy of opportunity for all to rise upwards from a basic standard.
- Winston Churchill
But the three rules I always stuck with were 1) Be on time 2) No profanity and 3) Never criticize a teammate.
- David Novak
I think you have a danger of regulating, putting regulations in place which will mean there will be no press in 10 years to regulate.
- Rupert Murdoch
Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
- Dale Carnegie
I don’t think it’s a big deal to show opera glasses to someone searching for binoculars that you somehow infer is a woman. But you don’t want to pop up ads for H.I.V. drugs on someone’s page, because you inferred they have H.I.V., when their boss is standing there looking at their computer
- Sergey Brin
I think it’s funny to be delicate with subjects that are explosive.
- Jerry Seinfeld
There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.
- Elon Musk
Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.
- Winston Churchill
My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.
- Henry Ford
If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores. That’s the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart’s success.
- Sam Walton
I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.
- Bill Gates
I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them.
- Sam Walton
People suck at following advice. Even the most effective people in the world are terrible at it. There are two reasons: 1. Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. There has been no Harajuku Moment. 2. There are no reminders. No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change. Consistent tracking, even if you have no knowledge of fat-loss or exercise, will often beat advice from world-class trainers.
- Timothy Ferriss
When York’s son, hitherto Earl of March, learned that his father’s cause had devolved upon him he did not shrink. He fell upon the Earl of Wiltshire and the Welsh Lancastrians, and on February 2, 1461, at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, near Hereford, he beat and broke.
- Winston Churchill
The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.
- Bill Gates
We made a disastrous move into casual shoes.
- Phil Knight
