The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure, but to build one that is worthy of enduring.
- Jim Collins
Notable Quotables
By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.
- Bill Gates
God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us.
- Joel Olsteen
Men, women, and children who cannot live on gravity alone need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is, in my opinion, in a business established by the Creator of our nature. If he worthily fulfills his mission and amuses without corrupting, he need never feel that he has lived in vain.
- P.T. Barnum
Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.
- John C. Maxwell
The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naïve optimism.
- Peter Thiel
Esta es la clave: las únicas promesas que se avivarán en su vida y terminarán convirtiéndose en realidad son las promesas en las que usted se levanta y dice: Sí, eso es para mí”. Tiene que entrar en acuerdo con Dios y permitir que eso eche raíz.
- Joel Olsteen
It’s not where you start or even what happens to you along the way that’s important. What is important is that you persevere and never give up on yourself.
- Zig Ziglar
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Just learn from the guys who have already done it well. You need a mentor, a seasoned coach who is willing to share his wisdom and experience with you. Ask someone who has already been successful to guide you.
- George Foreman
Life is 10% of what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.
- John C. Maxwell
My first transistor radio was the heart of my gadget love today. It fit in my hand and brought me a world of music 24 / 7.
- Steve Wozniak
A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.
- John D. Rockefeller
Teams only succeed when the players have a unified vision, no matter how much talent or potential there is.
- John Maxwell
Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.
- Walt Disney
I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.
- John D. Rockefeller
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
- Bill Gates
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success.
- Zig Ziglar
Our road to success has included its shares of ups and downs, as we have had to cope with the often volatile nature of our chosen fields of specialisation. Yet, thanks to the strong foundations established by the dedication and hard work of our employees, we have always been able to weather the storms.
- Cheng Yu-tung
[On the three keys to Twitter’s success.] The first lesson: Draw. The most important thing you can do with an idea: get it out of your head. Second lesson: Luck. Be able to recognize when luck is happening around you. Third lesson: iteration. Originally Twitter asked ‘What’s your status?’ Bonus fourth lesson: know when to stop. Sometimes put the idea away, that idea will often emerge later.
- Jack Dorsey
The most interesting thing about a postage stamp is the persistence with which it sticks to its job.
- Napoleon Hill
Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris.
- Peter Thiel
We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn’t be in this business.
- Jeff Bezos
The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is ‘Don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.’
- Ben Horowitz
Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit
- Napoleon Hill
Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
- Bill Gates
In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.
- Jeff Bezos
Differentiate yourself! Why are you different? What’s important about you? Why does the customer need you?
- Sara Blakely
Why should I clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I acquire.
- Henry Ford
[In February 2011] We’ve not done a lot of marketing whatsoever. A lot of it has just been word of mouth.
- Jack Dorsey
You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it
- Peter Thiel
Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
- Oprah Winfrey
I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.
- Timothy Ferriss
By faith you need to walk like a king, talk like a king, think like a king, dress like a king, smile like a king. Don’t go by what you see. Go by what you know. There is royalty in your DNA. You have the blood of a winner. You were created to reign in life.
- Joel Olsteen
There’s no reason in 2014, to do shit you hate. NONE.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Throughout this quarter of a century, the entrepreneurial outlook, versatility and vision of our employees have remained the crucial elements of our success…
- Cheng Yu-tung
When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Niklas Zennstroem has a thorough background as a successful entrepreneur with extensive expertise in areas such as IT and online.
- Stefan Persson
Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.
- P.T. Barnum
I’m just like so many women – I was frustrated, I had these white pants that I had spent a lot of money on, and you get home and you think, ‘What am I really supposed to wear under this?’ So it was a frustrated consumer moment.
- Sara Blakely
The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
- Jeff Bezos
Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.
- Peter Drucker
There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.
- Bill Gates
We will go forward… we will never go back.
- Michael Bloomberg
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
- Warren Buffett
If we don’t allow ourselves to make mistakes, we will never invest in things that are radical.
- Jeff Clavier
I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I didn’t try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.
- Joel Olsteen
Personally, I enjoy working about 18 hours a day. Besides the short catnaps I take each day, I average about four to five hours of sleep per night.
- Thomas Edison
A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.
- Elon Musk
There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.
- Elon Musk
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
- Winston Churchill
What is a movie star? A movie star is many things. They can be tall, short, thin, or skinny. They can be Democrats… or skinny.
- Steve Martin
Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
- Peter Thiel
Whenever you are speaking, both your passion for your business and your appearance will have a lasting impact on your audience.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The bluegrass community… can be very strict. I didn’t know if I’d be welcomed into the bluegrass community or not, but I think they judge you very fairly… I felt really welcome.
- Steve Martin
Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.
- Colin Powell
I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society.
- Joel Olsteen
The opportunity of a lifetime is to pick yourself. Quit waiting to get picked; quit waiting for someone to give you permission; quit waiting for someone to say you are officially qualified and pick yourself. It doesn’t mean you have to be an entrepreneur or a freelancer, but it does mean you stand up and say, ‘I have something to say. I know how to do something. I’m doing it. If you want me to do it with you, raise your hand.
- Seth Godin
Backed by our conviction, we remain committed to investing wholeheartedly to improve the people’s living conditions, regardless of all uncertainties.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Refrain from throwing the executive under the bus.
- Ben Horowitz
The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
- Mark Zuckerberg
A good intention, with a bad approach, often leads to a poor result.
- Thomas Edison
The principle is competing against yourself. It’s about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before.
- Steve Young
At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.
- Mark Zuckerberg
If you can dream it, you can do it. -Walt Disney
- Walt Disney
I ask every participant to think about who their personal business mentors have been and why. I tell them my own business hero was Andy Pearson and I give them a few Andy stories to illustrate why. Then we break into groups of about twenty to go around in a circle and have each person talk about the person who has mean the most to him…We reconvene in the larger group and discuss some of the traits that were exhibited by the mentors; integrity, passion, inspiration, a positive outlook, and so on. A lot of people said it was someone who, helped me realize what I could achieve or really cared about me as a person. Then I try to get them to go a little deeper. I say, Now suppose that you were a fly on the wall, looking down on this room ten years from now. What would you like people to be saying about you? How would you feel if someone were saying that you were the person who had the greatest impact on his or her professional life?
- David Novak
We have built a company with a business mix and operating system that will allow us to deliver record results in any foreseeable economic climate, … We have just completed a very successful management transition and I’ve never been more confident about the company’s future.
- Jack Welch
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
A factory demands a compliant workforce in order to succeed.
- Seth Godin
Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.
- Ben Horowitz
Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.
- Ray Dalio
I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product.
- Ben Horowitz
Being able to see an activity log of where a kid has been going on the Internet is a good thing.
- Bill Gates
India has the potential to be our biggest market in Asia, bigger than China, in as much as two to five years.
- John Chambers
There is nothing either good or bad.
- William Shakespeare
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
- Winston Churchill
Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.
- John C. Maxwell
Poor people ride the bus, because they value money more than time.
- Robert Kiyosaki
People have been indoctrinated so completely by their jobs that they don’t want to know how something works, they’re willing to accept that perhaps the laws of nature don’t work as they expect, and by the way, can I have the remote?
- Seth Godin
If you look at coffee, tea, food and juice, we think there are inherent opportunities. If you look at health bars or grab-and-go products that are in our stores, we think we can significantly enhance them and make them more widely available.
- Howard Schultz
No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.
- Winston Churchill
It’s not Pinterest where people are putting up pins. You’re changing the way cities work, and that’s fundamentally a third rail. We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an as—hole named Taxi.
- Travis Kalanick
Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.
- Paula Poundstone
The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
- Peter Drucker
The surest foundation of a manufacturing concern is quality. After that, and a long way after, comes cost.
- Andrew Carnegie
Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.
- David Packard
I’m an entrepreneur first and a wine critic second.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Then he fell on his knees and cried out, Lord do not hold this sin against them. When he said this, he fell asleep (he died).
- Acts 7:60
If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.
- Peter Thiel
Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you are ready or not to put this plan into action.
- Napoleon Hill
No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.
- Andrew Carnegie
Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph: a beginning, a struggle and a victory.
- Mahatma Gandhi
About two-thirds of us work between forty-five and fifty-five hours per week.
- Thomas J Stanley
Developing a customer who loves the business so much that they become an unpaid and passionate marketer for the company.
- Clay Clark
Change is the price of progress.
- Napoleon Hill
This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
- Peter Thiel
Write your life story as if it has already happened and live it out using your faith in yourself, and in the reality that you are embracing.
- Clay Clark
Money won’t make you happy… but everybody wants to find out for themselves.
- Zig Ziglar
A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
- Thomas Carlyle
