If you don’t have a competitive advantage — don’t compete.
- Jack Welch
Notable Quotables
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.
- Napoleon Hill
The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers’ needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager’s business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.
- Peter Drucker
As it happened, we did extraordinarily well with our Newport Wal-Mart, and it wasn’t too long before the old Ben Franklin store I had run on Front Street had to close its doors. You can’t say we ran that guy – the landlord’s son – out of business. His customers were the ones who shut him down. They voted with their feet. Quite a few smaller stores have gone out of business during the time of Wal-Mart’s growth. Some people have tried to turn it into this big controversy, sort of a Save the Small-Town Merchants deal, like they were whales or whooping cranes of something that has the right to be protected…If you become a large-scale success it’s Katie bar the door. Suddenly, you make a very convenient villian because everybody seems to love shooting at who’s on top.
- Sam Walton
Like fire across the galaxy the Clone Wars spread. In league with the wicked Count Dooku, more and more planets slip. Against this threat, upon the Jedi Knights falls the duty to lead the newly formed army of the Republic. And as the heat of war grows, so, to, grows the prowess of one most gifted student of the Force.
- Yoda
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
- Peter Drucker
I wasn’t satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement.
- Donald Trump
You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.
- Gary Keller
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
Don’t confuse selling with art.
- Jack Taylor
It is very important to grasp that Level 5 leadership is not just about humility and modesty. It is equally about ferocious resolve, an almost stoic determination to do whatever needs to be done to make the company great.
- James C. Collins
We do benefit from the fact that once we say we’re going to do it, people believe we can do it, because we have the resources. Google helps in that way: There aren’t many funding mechanisms like that.
- Larry Page
At the start of each new day, remind yourself: I am talented. I am creative. I am greatly favored by God. I am equipped. I am well able. I will see my dreams come to pass.” Declare those statements by faith and before long, you will begin to see them in reality.
- Joel Olsteen
I’ve been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that’s kind of a religious belief. I mean, it’s at least a moral belief.
- Bill Gates
The “non-profit” institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its “product” is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their “product” is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.
- Peter Drucker
We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
- Winston Churchill
In order to sell a product or a service, a company must establish a relationship with the consumer. It must build trust and rapport. It must understand the customer’s needs, and it must provide a product that delivers the promised benefits.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
All your ideas may be solid or even good .. But you have to Actually EXECUTE on them for them to matter.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligent and honest purpose as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.
- Thomas Edison
The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.
- Jack Welch
The question you should be asking isn’t, What do I want? or What are my goals? but What would excite me?
- Timothy Ferriss
If a hurricane strikes, we can blame the president for not being there; we can blame Congress and FEMA; we can blame the state governments; but in the end, it’s the mayors and the local city governments that have to be prepared for emergencies and be prepared to act.
- Michael Bloomberg
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
I think the positive competition between states in India is one of the most positive dynamics that the country has.
- Bill Gates
Try not to become a man of success, but rather a man of value.
- Albert Einstein
People at Facebook are fairly used to the press being nice to us or not nice to us.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.
- Dale Carnegie
Some city-council people are really awesome, but most are uninspired. I meet with them as little as possible.
- Travis Kalanick
As knowledge is acquired it must be organized and put into use, for a definate purpose, through practical plans. Knowledge has no value except that which be gained from its application toward some worthy end.
- Napoleon Hill
I don’t like paying taxes, but I like sleeping at night.
- Leonardo Del Vecchio
Churchill used words for different purposes: to argue for moral and political causes, to advocate courses of action in the social, national and international spheres, and to tell the story of his own life and that of Britain and its place in the world.
- Winston Churchill
Life is 10% of what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.
- John C. Maxwell
As he brooded over how to raise the money, he was informed by his father that he had always intended to give each of his children $1,000.00 at age twenty-one, and he now offered to advance John the money. But, John, he added lest his son expect miracles, the rate is ten. Having just retrieved a thousand dollars from Hewitt, Bill might have been looking for a high return on these idle funds. John knew his father too well to plead for a gift and accepted the 10 percent loan, which was higher than the prevailing rate. So on April 1, 1858 backed up by this borrowed money, John D. Rockefeller left Isaac Hewitt and joined the partnership of Clark and Rockefeller at 32 River Street (in Cleveland). At eighteen, he was catapulted to a partner’s rank in a commission house. It was a great thing to be my own employer, said Rockefeller. Mentally I swelled with pride – a partner in a firm with $4,000 capital! The moment was fraught with meaning for him and after his first day at work, he went back to the Cheshire Street house, fell to his knees, and implored the Lord to bless his new enterprise.
- Ron Chernow
An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.
- Elon Musk
Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.
- Benjamin Franklin
A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball.
- Peter Thiel
You need to have extraordinary wisdom to be the forerunner.
- Ma Huateng
The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
Nothing remains permanent in the world, change is just the eternal fact.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I’m not looking for a legacy, and you’ll never shut up the critics. I’ve been around 50 years. When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.
- Rupert Murdoch
If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.
- John D. Rockefeller
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.
- Winston Churchill
My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure
- Abraham Lincoln
The Secret Make up your mind that no matter what comes your way, no matter how difficult, no matter how unfair, you will do more than simply survive. You will thrive in spite of it.
- Joel Olsteen
Customers have different need states and life experiences.
- Howard Schultz
If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary’s. In fact a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk of the taxes.
- Michael Bloomberg
We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.
- Elon Musk
It’s easier for investors and bosses to spend time and money going after a proven market, even though proven markets are the hardest to break into.
- Seth Godin
I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.
- Winston Churchill
Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.
- Bill Gates
So what we do every Monday is review the whole business…I put out an agenda – 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.
- Steve Jobs
We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
- Peter Drucker
There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.
- Peter Thiel
The Western world loves liberalisation, provided it doesn’t affect them.
- Azim Premji
I felt like Samson with a fresh haircut. But that dream of what the company could be sustained me.
- Ray Kroc
A great accomplishment shouldn’t be the end of the road, just the starting point for the next leap forward.
- Harvey Mackay
The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure, but to build one that is worthy of enduring.
- Jim Collins
I now eat four Brazil nuts and one tablespoon of almond butter first thing upon waking.
- Timothy Ferriss
We all need a check up from the neck up to avoid stinkin’ thinkin’ which ultimately leads to hardening of the attitude.
- Zig Ziglar
They need to avoid coming at us head-on, and do their own thing better than we do ours. It doesn’t make any sense to try to underprice Walmart on something like toothpaste. That’s not what they customer is looking to a small store for anyway. Most independents are best off, I think, doing what I prided myself on doing for many years as a storekeeper, getting out front on the door and meeting everyone of the customers. Let them know how much you appreciate them, and that register yourself. That little personal touch is so important for an independent merchant because no matter how hard Walmart tries to duplicate, ad we try awfully hard, we can’t really do it.
- Sam Walton
Some conflicts are simply territorial. For instance, I’ve rarely met a marketing person who wanted to raise prices and I’ve rarely met a finance person who wanted to lower prices.
- David Novak
The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.
- Dale Carnegie
People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet – how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.
- Jeff Bezos
Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.
- Walt Disney
The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
- Peter Thiel
I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy.
- Og Mandino
Simplicity scales. Complexity does not.
- David Nilssen
In periods of stress and grief, not only does your mind do funny things, you say things that surprise you.
- Phil Knight
Work as though you would live forever, and live as though you would die today. Go another mile!
- Og Mandino
Establish good internal controls over the handling of cash. The people who record the cash receipts on the bank deposits must be different from those who post it to the accounts receivable and general ledger.
- Robert Kiyosaki
It’s almost unfathomable how much I still have to learn. Learning never ends…I always have another mountain to climb is what keeps you going.
- David Novak
Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.
- Santana
At Uniqlo, we’re thinking ahead. We’re thinking about how to create new, innovative products… and sell that to everyone.
- Tadashi Yanai
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
- Albert Einstein
MAY 31 The Power of Your Words Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit. PROVERBS 18:21 NASB OUR WORDS have tremendous power and are similar to seeds. By speaking them aloud, they are planted in our subconscious minds, take root, grow, and produce fruit of the same kind. Whether we speak positive or negative words, we will reap exactly what we sow. That’s why we need to be extremely careful what we think and say. The Bible compares the tongue to the small rudder of a huge ship, which controls the ship’s direction (see James 3:4). Similarly, your tongue will control the direction of your life. You create an environment for either good or evil with your words, and if you’re always murmuring, complaining, and talking about how bad life is treating you, you’re going to live in a pretty miserable world. Use your words to change your negative situations and fill them with life.
- Joel Olsteen
When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?
- Jack Welch
I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.
- Joel Olsteen
What I know is that if you do work that you love, and the work fulfills you, the rest will come.
- Oprah Winfrey
Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.
- Aristotle
My father worked all the time.
- Michael Bloomberg
Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
- Winston Churchill
The dove is my emblem…. I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it…. I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill…
- Thomas Edison
I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way.
- Steve Wozniak
We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we’re in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There’s no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either.
- Steve Ballmer
The U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar, the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro.
- Peter Thiel
Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day.
- Peter Thiel
99.5 percent of the people that walk around and say they are a social media expert or guru are clowns. We are going to live through a devastating social media bubble.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Everything we did we were setting the tone for the world.
- Steve Wozniak
The Group is well positioned to meet the challenges ahead and will as ever continue to pursue higher growth.
- Cheng Yu-tung
We live in an age where everything is based on the short term.
- Howard Schultz
There’s this great quote…which says ‘The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.’
- Jack Dorsey
At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.
- Steve Wozniak
Love him or hate him, Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money.
- Donald Trump
So here we are.
- Seth Godin
Someday, man will harness the rise and fall of the tides, imprison the power of the sun, and release atomic power.
- Thomas Edison
American Dream – and it says that you should graduate from high school, graduate from college, get married, find a job with good benefits, have sex with your spouse two times per week, buy a home with a mortgage, get a pet, go on vacation two times per year, have two kids, invest in mutual funds and IRAs, recycle when possible, and aim to retire early in your mid-fifties to early sixties, if you are lucky. I don’t know about you, but for me it’s kind of hard to be passionate about that American Dream.
- Clay Clark
a greater way. Take a few minutes every day to dream big dreams; close your eyes, and envision your dreams coming to pass. Envision yourself out of debt. Envision yourself breaking that addiction. Envision your marriage being more fulfilled. Envision yourself rising to new levels in your career. If you can establish that picture in your heart and mind, then God can begin to bring it to pass in your life.
- Joel Olsteen
Our lives change in two ways :through the people we meet and the books we read.
- Harvey Mackay
