Anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
How has being realistic” or responsible” kept you from the life you want? How has doing what you should” resulted in subpar experiences or regret for not having done something else?
- Timothy Ferriss
Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.
- Winston Churchill
Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.
- Elon Musk
The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.
- Nolan Bushnell
There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, ‘The government’s corrupt,’ and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.
- Bill Gates
To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.
- Peter Drucker
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Be grateful for what you have and stop complaining – it bores everybody else, does you no good, and doesn’t solve any problems.
- Zig Ziglar
Your job isn’t to do your job. Your job is to decide what to do next.
- Seth Godin
Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it: if you are sick you should not take it.
- Henry Ford
It seems like a good cause. I’ve been watching it on TV and, it makes me want to help.
- Ed Clark
About one in five of us is retired. About two-thirds of us who are working are self-employed. Interestingly, self-employed peoplemake up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires.
- Thomas J Stanley
Sure I am this day we are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us.
- Winston Churchill
I think that maybe inside any business, there is someone slowly going crazy.
- Michael Gerber
Establish a core value that drives the business and helps promote it in perpetuity.
- Ben Horowitz
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
- Charles Darwin
Obstacles can’t stop you. Problems can’t stop you. Most of all, other people can’t stop you. Only you can stop you.
- J. Gitomer
This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
- Winston Churchill
In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.
- Sid Caesar
Shaw once remarked: If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.
- Dale Carnegie
You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.
- Zig Ziglar
Selling and delivering a product is at least as important as the product itself.
- Peter Thiel
Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.
- Elon Musk
If you do everything that everyone else does in business, you’re going to lose. The only way to really be ahead, is to ‘be different’.
- Larry Ellison
We allow no geniuses around our Studio.
- Walt Disney
The question isn’t ‘What do we want to know about people?’ It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?
- Mark Zuckerberg
A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn’t exactly been one of moderation.
- Donald Trump
Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man’s character.
- Thomas Edison
Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.
- Larry Ellison
If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.
- John D. Rockefeller
If you treat your wife like a thoroughbred, you’ll never end up with a nag.
- Zig Ziglar
That’s one of our biggest challenges – getting the people to the product immediately in a consistent way.
- Jack Dorsey
When two partners always agree, one of them is not necessary. If there is some point you haven’t thought about, be thankful if it is brought to your attention.
- Dale Carnegie
Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.
- Warren Buffett
I believe people have to follow their dreams – I did.
- Larry Ellison
If you look – look at – I mean, look at what’s going on with your gasoline prices. They’re going to go to $5, $6, $7 and we don’t have anybody in Washington that calls OPEC and says, ‘Fellas, it’s time. It’s over. You’re not going to do it anymore.’
- Donald Trump
Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
- Peter Thiel
Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash. How’s that for incentive to be effective and efficient?
- Timothy Ferriss
Kids instinctively know – although they will argue to the contrary – that they really are not mature enough to make good decisions on some important issues.
- Zig Ziglar
I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I’ve tried to really stress that.
- Larry Page
With a decrease in the number of pirates, there has been an increase in global warming over the same period. Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates. Even more compelling: Somalia has the highest number of Pirates AND the lowest Carbon emissions of any country. Coincidence?
- Timothy Ferriss
With the intensity of the first three NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series races at Atlanta Motor Speedway, fans have been treated to exciting finishes each race. Fans can expect nothing less than the same for the John Deere 200.
- Ed Clark
We vote for a presidential candidate without saying, “Why not run the country for a month and then we’ll see . .
- Seth Godin
The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Find something that you enjoy doing
- Jack Nadel
Being nice to people is just 20% of providing good customer service. The important part is designing systems that allow you to do the job right the first time. All the smiles in the world arent going to help you if your product or service is not what the customer wants. –
- Service Profit Chain
The great thing is we’re going to have a lot of new facilities, where the others were 10 years old or older. That’s a plus for the fans. The new State Road 20 is going to open. That’s a huge addition for us, probably one of the biggest things that’s happened since we bought the track in 1990.
- Ed Clark
Play by the rules, but be ferocious.
- Phil Knight
More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.
- Peter Drucker
The challenge is to focus on the work, not on the fear that comes from doing the work.
- Seth Godin
No effort has been spared in ensuring the best designs for all our projects.
- Lee Shau Kee
My advice for an entrepreneur just starting out is to differentiate yourself. Why are you different? What’s important about you? Why does the customer need you?
- Sara Blakely
For those that have fixed exchange-rate regimes, you will need a greater amount of foreign reserves. That’s the case in Belize, it’s the case in the Eastern Caribbean zone and it’s also the case in Barbados. In those cases, the level of reserve coverage is one of credit weakness. Where you have a bit more flexibility in the exchange rate ? for instance, Jamaica ? you would require a smaller amount of international reserves.
- John Chambers
I shopped for body shapers for the first time in my life and I was horrified. They were thick – it was like wearing workout clothes and they all had a leg band on one side that showed through the pants.
- Sara Blakely
Strong is Vader. Mind what you have learned. Save you it can.
- Yoda
Momentum is a little fragile, and when people got excited before, they were disappointed, … But this is the most positive guidance we’ve given in eight quarters, going into a seasonally challenging quarter.
- John Chambers
The essential thing to know about the Dip is that it’s there. Knowing that you’re facing a Dip is the first step in getting through it.
- Seth Godin
We were old sinners – but when we came to Christ we are not sinners anymore.
- Joel Olsteen
It is always your next move.
- Napoleon Hill
Try not to be a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
- Albert Einstein
Fear is the Fatal killer of Desire.
- Zig Ziglar
I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent….
- Thomas Edison
I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.
- Larry Ellison
I believe that everyone is the keeper of a dream – and by tuning into one another’s secret hopes, we can become better friends, better partners, better parents, and better lovers.
- Oprah Winfrey
Never forget that people are your greatest asset.
- John Maxwell
Any business today that embraces the status quo as an operating principle is going to be on a death march.
- Howard Schultz
The problem with New Year’s resolutions – and resolutions to ‘get in better shape’ in general, which are very amorphous – is that people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn’t work. I don’t care if you’re a world-class CEO – you’ll quit.
- Timothy Ferriss
Starting a company is a very tough thing. There’s a friend of mine, Bill Lee, whose phrase is ‘starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.’ So you should certainly expect that it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be harder than getting a job somewhere by a pretty good margin and the odds of you losing the money that you invested or your friends invested is pretty high. I mean, those are just the basic facts. So if you don’t mind things being really hard and high risk, then starting a company is a good idea. Otherwise, it’s probably unwise. It will certainly stress you out. So I think you have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.
- Elon Musk
Always have something to say. The man who has something to say and who is known never to speak unless he has, is sure to be listened to.
- Dale Carnegie
The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.
- Dale Carnegie
There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.
- Winston Churchill
The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you’ve got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don’t give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.
- Jack Ma
The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.
- Bill Gates
One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.
- Dale Carnegie
It’s not going out to people who aren’t going to go shopping. You’ve already got the people who are shopping.
- Jack Taylor
The most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.
- Ben Horowitz
A narrow mind and a fat head invariably come on the same person.
- Zig Ziglar
One thing that most comic artists avoid is showing decisions. They show action, sure, and they show results, but they don’t show (because it’s difficult to show) the hero or the villain making a choice.
- Seth Godin
Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.
- John Wayne
NO PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT OR EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK PROCESS Your company now employs twenty-five people and you know that you should formalize the performance management process, but you don’t want to pay the price. You worry that doing so will make it feel like a “big company.” Moreover, you do not want your employees to be offended by the feedback, because you can’t afford to lose anyone right now. And people are happy, so why rock the boat? Why not take on a little management debt? The first noticeable payments will be due when somebody performs below expectations: CEO: “He was good when we hired him; what happened?” Manager: “He’s not doing the things that we need him to do.” CEO: “Did we clearly tell him that?” Manager: “Maybe not clearly . . .” However, the larger payment will be a silent tax. Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving. In a vacuum of feedback, there is almost no chance that your company will perform optimally across either dimension. Directions with no corrections will seem fuzzy and obtuse. People rarely improve weakness they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance.
- Ben Horowitz
But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
- Jeff Bezos
Pick the best people, face the reality (the way it is), speak with candor to everything, never lose sight of the relationship with the constituency.
- Jack Welch
If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if you – the probable outcome is failure.
- Elon Musk
The techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist.
- Clayton M. Christensen
People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
- Timothy Ferriss
Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.
- Peter Thiel
I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.
- Elon Musk
Discontent is the first necessity of progress.
- Thomas Edison
Following a period of drastic market fluctuations in Asia during the summer months of the previous year, economies in the region gradually improved and stabilised during the financial year.
- Lee Shau Kee
Time is more valuable than money, because time is irreplaceable.
- John C. Maxwell
I am someone who tweets about what I have for breakfast, what I have for lunch, what I have for dinner, and for 99.99999 percent of the world, it’s useless. It’s meaningless. But for my mother, she loves it.
- Jack Dorsey
Certainly, we continue to bring in new people. We’ll hire, net new, over 4,000 people this year, and attract great people into the company. I’m very bullish about the employee base and what it can accomplish.
- Steve Ballmer
Where I get my energy is: ‘How can I make it better?’
- Sara Blakely
The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m not panicking, and I’m not scared, I’ve been through the Gulf War, the Asia crisis, and the Russian crisis.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Love is a promise delivered already broken.
- Steve Martin
Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
- Steve Jobs
These two chefs will play an important role in managing the company’s growing appetites.
- Sergey Brin
