Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don’t recover because trust is broken. And if you’re not honest at the point where you’re breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
- Timothy Ferriss
Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!
- Timothy Ferriss
Learn to say No to the good so that you can say Yes to your best.
- John Maxwell
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
When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
Victorious leaders, share an inability to accept defeat.
- Napoleon Hill
Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.
- Bill Gates
If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.
- Steve Martin
Nothing I do is done by popular demand.
- Steve Martin
When you expect your employees to act like adults, they generally do. If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.
- Ben Horowitz
Believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.
- Seth Godin
In short, I conceive that a great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.
- Dale Carnegie
All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.
- Walt Disney
The path of least resistance makes all rivers, and some men, crooked.
- Napoleon Hill
The real opportunity for success lies within the person and not in the job.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.
- Bill Gates
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
- Confucius
What you study is more important than how you study. Students are subordinate to materials, much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong material, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn’t matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn’t matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency material. Material beats method.
- Timothy Ferriss
There is no such thing as a good tax.
- Winston Churchill
People were expecting Rouge to go bankrupt, so there was a lot of anxiety. The corporate culture problem was even worse than in Russia. And at the same time, the work rules were more difficult.
- Alexei Mordashov
An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.
- Ben Horowitz
Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.
- Napoleon Hill
The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.
- Dale Carnegie
There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.
- Dale Carnegie
Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ is my go-to song to pump myself up if I’m having a tough time or if I get really nervous right before a speech.
- Sara Blakely
One must marry one’s feelings to one’s beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one’s life.
- Napoleon Hill
I think when companies are struggling, they don’t want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren’t interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it’s like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That’s slanted the whole thing quite a bit.
- Ben Horowitz
But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.
- Dale Carnegie
The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.
- Michael Dell
The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).
- Peter Thiel
We can consider 140 characters to be the full story, but it’s not. It’s just a caption. A headline for something broader.
- Jack Dorsey
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.
- Malcolm X
If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.
- John D. Rockefeller
You can make a positive out of the most negative if you work at it hard enough.
- Sam Walton
The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s difficult for any single company to develop all the applications and services.
- Ma Huateng
If you cannot read all your books…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 you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.
- Winston Churchill
Perks are good, but they are not culture.
- Ben Horowitz
If plan A” fails — remember you have 25 letters left.
- Chris Guillebeau
The most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?
- Peter Thiel
IT’S SAID that you can only live life forward and understand it backward.
- Jack Welch
Perhaps the most important thing that I learned as an entrepreneur was to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things that I did wrong or might do wrong.
- Ben Horowitz
The economy in Hong Kong remained on a declining path. Occurrence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (‘SARS’) in March this year led to a sharp drop in consumer spending and an increasing unemployment rate. The decline in the economy resulted in downward adjustment in the property market.
- Lee Shau Kee
Relatively few people should start companies.
- Reid Hoffman
Being financially rich and having the ability to live like a millionaire are fundamentally two very different things.
- Timothy Ferriss
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
- Timothy Ferriss
My father died during open-heart surgery on March 29 of my senior year in college. I was getting set to go to law school. I remember sitting in the waiting room when the doctor walked in. I said to myself, The worst possible thing just happened. What will you do?
- Stephen Wynn
Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.
- Steven Spielberg
Pacifists become militants. Freedom fighters become tyrants. Blessings become curses. Help becomes hindrance. More becomes less.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
The failure to strangle Bolshevism at its birth and to bring Russia, then prostrate, by one means or another, into the general democratic system lies heavy upon us today.
- Winston Churchill
With the casino and the beds, our passengers will have at least two ways to get lucky on one of our flights.
- Richard Branson
He was contradicting everything he’d taught us about not running sick and making it worse. I knew it was just to make me acknowledge that his word was law, no matter how arbitrary. But that didn’t make it any easier to take. I was so mad I ran a personal record.
- Phil Knight
Failing is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night.
- Zig Ziglar
When you have the right staff, potential skyrockets.
- Napoleon Hill
You are the only person on earth who can use your ability. It’s an awesome responsibility.
- Zig Ziglar
You have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.
- Phil Knight
A wise man is a confirmed optimist.
- Andrew Carnegie
Pain, suffering, death I feel. Something terrible has happened. Young Skywalker is in pain. Terrible pain.
- Yoda
What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.
- Dave Thomas
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
- Jeff Bezos
To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.
- Ben Horowitz
Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a particularly visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore.
- Peter Thiel
Many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t.
- Peter Thiel
What is the 20% of my belongings that I use 80% of the time? Eliminate the other 80% in clothing, magazines, books, and all else. Be ruthless – you can always repurchase things you can’t live without.
- Timothy Ferriss
It is not the rich man’s son that the young struggler for advancement has to fear in the race for life, nor his nephew, nor his cousin. Let him look out for the dark horse in the boy who begins by sweeping out the office.
- Andrew Carnegie
It would be nice to design a real briefcase – you open it up and it’s your computer but it also stores your books.
- Steve Wozniak
Just because something didn’t work out your way, or somebody disappointed you, that does not change who you are.
- Joel Olsteen
Anyone would fight for things that matter, true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter
- Peter Thiel
When I hung in, he saw character, and that was the end of it. Later, it was funny to watch him hazing other guys the same way – funny after you’d been through the cycle.
- Phil Knight
Play long enough and you might get lucky. In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.
- Ben Horowitz
Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.
- Ben Horowitz
If you end your training now — if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did — you will become an agent of evil.
- Yoda
I always want to listen to people and receive good criticism, but I just don’t have to answer to them; I have to answer to God.
- Joel Olsteen
The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits. There is just less competition for bigger goals.
- Timothy Ferriss
Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.
- Richard Branson
Failure to deliver on committments is, in the end, unacceptable.
- Jack Welch
You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself.
- Seth Godin
Although I don’t have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way.
- Bill Gates
I remember thinking quite logically that I didn’t want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.
- Bill Gates
You think Yoda stops teaching, just because his student does not want to hear? A teacher Yoda is. Yoda teaches like drunkards drink, like killers kill.
- Yoda
The only career worth pursuing is the one that turns your crank.
- Jack Welch
There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.
- Dale Carnegie
That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity.
- Beryl Markham
There is far more opportunity than there is ability.
- Thomas Edison
I don’t want people in China to have deep pockets but shallow minds.
- Jack Ma
The Western world loves liberalisation, provided it doesn’t affect them.
- Azim Premji
Too many companies think they want to do a video blog to sell merchandise, but if you turn your site into QVC, you lose. I have an audience that trusts me. It’s about building a global brand – not selling four more bottles of Pinot Grigio.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.
- Elon Musk
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
When you focus on being a blessing, God makes sure that you are always blessed in abundance.
- Joel Olsteen
Fear is faith in reverse.
- Zig Ziglar
The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.
- Bill Gates
Like biological evolution, ‘survival of the fittest’ during the course of reformation is to adapt to changes in the surrounding environment and make changes accordingly.
- Cheng Yu-tung
An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn’t have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.
- Jack Welch
My revenue was $4 million my first year in business, off of one $20 item.
- Sara Blakely
