Meeting Coach Wooden, the most humble leader I’ve ever met, made me think about my ego, about as the wise John Weinberg once put it, the difference between growing and swelling.
- David Novak
Notable Quotables
My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.
- Winston Churchill
Getting knocked down in life is a given. Getting up and moving forward is a choice.
- Zig Ziglar
The only meat I eat is from animals I’ve killed myself.
- Mark Zuckerberg
When your art fails, make better art.
- Seth Godin
It may look impossible, but God can do the impossible. Just because you don’t see anything happening doesn’t mean God is not working.
- Joel Olsteen
Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.
- Peter Thiel
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
Hard feelings pass. Don’t suffer fools or you’ll become one.
- Timothy Ferriss
I always say, ‘To have a big dream requires the same effort as having a small dream. Dream big!’
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
Unleash the power of people. No involvement means no committment.
- David Novak
You’ve got to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have what it takes. God created you to excel, and He’s given you ability, insight, talent, wisdom, and His supernatural power to do so.
- Joel Olsteen
Ahhh! Yoda’s little friend you seek!
- Yoda
Age doesn’t matter, an open mind does.
- Timothy Ferriss
People tend to over-weigh risks on a personal level. It’s one thing if you’ve got a mortgage to pay and kids to support, so that if you were to deviate from your job, well, how are you going to feed your family and pay the rent? That’s understandable, but let’s say you’re young and you’re just coming out of college, what are your risks? You’re not going to starve, certainly not in any kind of modern economy. It’s so easy to earn enough money just to live somewhere and eat food. Very easy to do. So I don’t know what they’re afraid of. Mostly afraid of failure, I think, but people should be less risk averse, when there’s not much at risk.
- Elon Musk
Patience is a key element of success.
- Bill Gates
The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.
- Napoleon Hill
If you can’t retain the people after an acquisition, it’s not worth it.
- John Chambers
In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
- Peter Thiel
Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.
- Dale Carnegie
The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged in the work.
- Peter Drucker
Facing reality sounds simple, but it isn’t. I found it hard to get people to see a situation for what it is and not for what it was, or what they hoped it would be.
- Jack Welch
The basic principle is I command, and my employees carry it out immediately.
- Wang Jianlin
Every person has a longing to be significant, to make a contribution, to be a part of something noble and purposeful.
- John C. Maxwell
Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance.
- Winston Churchill
[On signing up Michael Jordan in 1984 when he was just 21 years old] We could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture.
- Phil Knight
Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.
- Yoda
One can steal ideas, but no one can steal execution or passion.
- Timothy Ferriss
Inflation is taking up the poverty line, and poverty is not just economic but defined by way of health and education.
- Azim Premji
Poke the box How do computer programmers learn their art? Is there a step-by-step process that guarantees you’ll get good? All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works. The box might be a computer or it might be a market or it might be a customer or it might be your boss. It’s a puzzle, one that can be solved in only one way—by poking.
- Seth Godin
Capability means imagination…
- Napoleon Hill
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
The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
- Winston Churchill
The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong questionl
- Peter Drucker
When you go through difficult times, make sure you pass the test. Don’t be stubborn and hardheaded. Recognize that God is refining you, knocking off some of your rough edges. Stand strong and fight the good fight of faith. God has called each of us to be champions; you are destined to win. If you will work with God and keep a good attitude, then no matter what comes against you, the bible says that all things – not just the good things in life, but all things – work together for your good.
- Joel Olsteen
Konosuke Matsushita was a visionary entrepreneur. He started working very young as a teenager, and he eventually created Panasonic to become a truly global company.
- Tadashi Yanai
If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.
- Jack Welch
Even if you do something that others might consider wrong, you should at least be willing to talk about it and tell your parents what you’re doing because you believe it’s right.
- Steve Wozniak
The best way a mentor can prepare another leader is to expose him or her to other great people.
- John C. Maxwell
I have always respected education, which is why I actually went back secretly and taught school for eight years.
- Steve Wozniak
Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.
- Peter Drucker
How will your new job differ from your current job?
- Ben Horowitz
Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.
- Herb Kelleher
It’s not enough to use information for something”—it needs to be immediate and important.
- Timothy Ferriss
China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.
- Bill Gates
The idea would be in my mind – and I know it sounds strange – is that the most important advances in medicine would be made not by new knowledge in molecular biology, because that’s exceeding what we can even use. It’ll be made by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, figuring out a way to get all that information together.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That’s the fundamental thing.
- Ben Horowitz
I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.
- Seth Godin
Some city-council people are really awesome, but most are uninspired. I meet with them as little as possible.
- Travis Kalanick
Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another.
- Seth Godin
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be;
- Winston Churchill
I am a fifty-seven-year-old male, married with three children. About 70 percent of us earn 80 percent or more of our household’s income.
- Thomas J Stanley
If you want to conquer fear, don’t sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
- Dale Carnegie
Market fundamentalists recognize that the role of the state in the economy is always disruptive, inefficient, and generally has negative connotations. This leads them to believe that the market mechanism can take care of all the problems.
- George Soros
And obviously, from our own personal point of view, the principal challenge is a personal challenge.
- Richard Branson
Your list is like a garden, tend it well.
- Michael Levine
Action springs out of what we fundamentally desire.
- Dale Carnegie
The one essential character trait of any leader is personal integrity.
- David Novak
I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
- Jeff Bezos
Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.
- Jeff Bezos
The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline–a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.
- James C. Collins
Every enterprise is a learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levels—training and development that never stop.
- Peter Drucker
Today’s stock price is X, tommorrow’s is up to you.
- Sam Walton
You may think there is a lot wrong with you, but there is also a lot right with you.
- Joel Olsteen
Don’t treat your customers like a bunch of purses and wallets.
- Chris Brogan
My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.
- Jack Ma
War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Every leader’s potential is determined by the people closest to him. No matter what I did with that staff, they would never be able to take the organization to the place we needed to go.
- Napoleon Hill
I had learned that for any big idea you had to sell, sell, sell to move the needle at all.
- Jack Welch
People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.
- Mark Zuckerberg
But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.
- Jeff Bezos
Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new.
- Peter Thiel
If you can discipline yourself to read, you can free up two years of your life for the good stuff!
- Seth Godin
Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.
- Napoleon Hill
You’re either remarkable or invisible.
- Seth Godin
Establish late-payment penalties as part of your terms and conditions and enforce them.
- Robert Kiyosaki
We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas Edison
Personally, I think the failure to really kind of get his arms around this company and this industry led to confusion on behalf of the management team. And I didn’t see that getting any better.
- Phil Knight
I was leading a lot of idea and the vision for where the product was going. Ev [Evan Williams] was funding and supporting what we were doing. He put the shelter over our heads. And Biz [Stone] was just an amazingly creative guy.
- Jack Dorsey
Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.
- Peter Drucker
In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.
- Bill Gates
The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.
- John C. Maxwell
We’ve only been wealthy in this country for 70 years. Who said we ought to have all this? Is it ordained?
- Jack Welch
There is little success where there is little laughter.
- Andrew Carnegie
This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us the latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.
- Mark Zuckerberg
I love being the underdog.
- Howard Schultz
Regardless of what position people originally took, once the decision is made, everyone supports it. That’s why it is critical that no one hold anything back during the discussion.
- Patrick M. Lencioni
One does not leave a convivial party before closing time.
- Winston Churchill
If you believe as I do that you were born to win, you’re going to have to find your fears and start facing them.
- Zig Ziglar
We drink the can, not the beverage
- Seth Godin
Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.
- Napoleon Hill
It is not so much that I am a blue-blooded oligarch: I just don’t feel like an oligarch.
- Vladimir Potanin
I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.
- Charles Dickens
I love the freedom of movement that my phone gives me. That has definitely transformed my life.
- Richard Branson
Great ideas originate in the muscles.
- Thomas Edison
An economy is not a complicated thing, it just has a lot of moving parts.
- Ray Dalio
The responsibility of the leader is to define reality and create hope.
- David Novak
I love art, I love design, and I love seeing that intersection of technology and the teams that work on it.
- Jack Dorsey
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
- Bill Gates
Life’s too short to spend it trying to keep others happy. You can’t please everyone. To fulfill your destiny, stay true to your heart.
- Joel Olsteen
