Notable Quotables

Quite or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

- Seth Godin

As technology continues to virtualize money, brick ‘n mortar banks have become as superfluous as traditional bookstores.

- Reid Hoffman

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map—these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock, use a computer, or work with others all day long.

- Seth Godin

The rumours of the demise of the U.S. manufacturing industry are greatly exaggerated.

- Elon Musk

Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they’ll turn out to be right.

- Reed Hastings

We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.

- Larry Page

That’s the true spirit of Christmas, people being helped by people other than me.

- Jerry Seinfeld

India has over 20 percent of the kids born in the world. And they move around a lot.

- Bill Gates

I was about twenty and the Beatles were meditating and I heard about it and they had a center in New York and I came to the center and I learned about it.

- Ray Dalio

At the same time, you have to look for detractors among the group because one bad seed can be like a leak in the dime that leads to a major flood. The best thing you can do when you find someone like that is to fire him as quickly as possible!

- David Novak

I think Yahoo is a great company, with great assets.

- Jack Ma

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

- Winston Churchill

Encouragement and hope are the two most powerful qualities any person can provide to others.

- Zig Ziglar

If you run a company, you will experience overwhelming psychological pressure to be overly positive. Stand up to the pressure, face your fear, and tell it like it is.

- Ben Horowitz

Tweeting is really only good for one thing – it’s just good for tweeting… It is rewarding, because it’s just its own reward. It’s sort of like heaven.

- Steve Martin

What kind of business world are we living in?

- Jack Ma

The Silver Spoon, the best-selling Italian cookbook of the last 50 years.

- Timothy Ferriss

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

- Winston Churchill

I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it’s hard to get them out on the air.

- Steve Martin

At an end your rule is, and not short enought it was!

- Yoda

The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.

- Seth Godin

Purpose is a soft virtue — but it’s what gives you steel in your spine.

- Rich Karlgaard

But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.

- Peter Thiel

If you wait until all the lights are green before you leave home, you’ll never get started on your trip to the top.

- Zig Ziglar

Don’t live worried, frustrated or upset because of what somebody did or what didn’t work out. Come back to a place of peace. It’s not going to work against you; it’s going to work for you.

- Joel Olsteen

You reach a point where you don’t work for money.

- Walt Disney

If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.

- Dale Carnegie

The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.

- Peter Thiel

You guarantee a good meal by picking the recipes well, not by following recipes well.

- Timothy Ferriss

Art changes posture and posture changes innocent bystanders.

- Seth Godin

They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.

- Aldous Huxley

I’ve traveled around the world, and what’s so revealing is that, despite the differences in culture, politics, language, how people dress, there is a universal feeling that we all want the same thing. We deeply want to be respected and appreciated for our differences.

- Howard Schultz

You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.

- Dale Carnegie

We should be able to significantly improve health-care outcomes. The government is needing that. When you look at ACOs [accountable care organizations] and look at what the Obama administration is talking about, in trying to improve quality, that’s exactly what Express Scripts does.

- George Paz

MAY 13 Guard Against Pessimism For the Kingdom of God is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. ROMANS 14:17 NLT I HEARD A STORY ABOUT TWO FARMERS. When the rain fell, one farmer said, Thank You, Lord, for watering our crops.” But the other farmer said, Yeah, but if the rain keeps up, it’s going to rot the roots.” When the sun came out, the positive farmer said, Thank You, Lord, that our crops are getting the vitamins and minerals they need. We’ll have a wonderful harvest this year.” But the negative farmer said, Yeah, but if it keeps up, it’s going to scorch those plants. We’re never going to make a living.” Don’t you know people who are always focused on the negative? Be sure to guard against their negative attitudes infecting your thinking! Stay focused on the positive things in life.

- Joel Olsteen

I swore I would never get involved in another startup ever again in my entire life.

- Larry Ellison

I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I’d imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them.

- Ray Kroc

It takes a leader to create momentum. Followers catch it. And managers are able to continue it once it has begun. But creating it requires someone who can motivate others, not who needs to be motivated. Harry Truman once said, If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. But for leaders, that statement should be changed to, If you can’t make some heat, get out of the kitchen.

- John Maxwell

In business, if you don’t kick and hug, you don’t love.

- Clay Clark

Unhappy Barnes & Noble filed a lawsuit three days before Amazon’s IPO, claiming that Amazon was unfairly calling itself a “bookstore” when really it was a “book broker”.

- Peter Thiel

Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses – it’s progressing. Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set.

- Bill Gates

So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.

- Peter Drucker

We have the brand, and we have the fulfillment capability. Now we had to get the Net, and that’s the easiest part of the game,

- Jack Welch

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

- Henry Kissinger

The thing that I’m going to focus on today is essentially the cloud that has been over Nike’s head over the last couple years.

- Phil Knight

Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars.

- Rupert Murdoch

Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.

- Larry Ellison

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

Not only must you be an artist, must you be generous, and must you be able to see where you can help but you must also be aware. Aware of where your skills are welcomed.

- Seth Godin

If you don’t see yourself as a winner, then you cannot perform as a winner.

- Zig Ziglar

Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are commmon and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields – from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us. That means we need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies. And there is such a strategy – though it will seem almost ridiculous in its simplicity, maybe even crazy to those of us who have spent years carefully developing ever more advanced skills and technologies. It is a checklist.

- Atul Gawande

[On stopping working and focussing 100% on his company Nike] I was still teaching accounting, but the next year, I told Penny [married in 1968] if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I’m going to go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000. I said, that ‘s close enough.

- Phil Knight

The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.

- Peter Drucker

Great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.

- Seth Godin

Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

- Thomas Edison

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.

- Steve Martin

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.

- Bill Gates

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

If you don’t plan your time, someone else will help you waste it.

- Zig Ziglar

The person who knows one thing and does it better than anyone else, even if it only be the art of raising lentils, receives the crown he merits. If he raises all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor of mankind and its rewarded as such.

- Og Mandino

I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.

- Steve Martin

My son is trying to be a sports writer, and my daughter is a college student. She wants to be a comedy writer, and she’s at film school. I discouraged both of them early on from getting involved in Starbucks. I didn’t think it would be fair; plus, they didn’t have any interest anyway.

- Howard Schultz

When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization.

- Peter Thiel

Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation.

- P.T. Barnum

There is a time to provide advice and offer an opinion, and there is a time not to. Don’t be too quick to offer unsolicited advice. It certainly will not endear you to people.

- Harvey Mackay

The courage take tough yes-or-no decisions. Look, the world is filled with gray. Anyone can look at an issue from every different angle. Some smart people can –and will-analyze those angles indefinitely. But effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information.

- Jack Welch

Saudi Arabia has stability. The social contract and the political contract between the king and the rulers and the royal family and the ruled people in Saudi Arabia is very strong and the bondage is so solid.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

- Warren Buffett

Happens to every guy sometimes this does.

- Yoda

Apple has a complex suite of proprietary technologies, both in hardware (like superior touchscreen materials) and software (like touchscreen interfaces purpose-designed for specific materials).

- Peter Thiel

There are only two kinds of employees that I’ve run across in 30 years. There are ones that get results, and ones that make excuses. If you’re in that second camp, you’re not going to like Dish.

- Charles Ergen

The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.

- Peter Thiel

A knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization. It is meant for every one of the men I call executives.

- Peter Drucker

From age 16, I lived and breathed wine. I read every magazine and book about wine.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

One of the cornerstones of what I believe will be the future is wave after wave of applications.

- John Chambers

I had learned that for any big idea you had to sell, sell, sell to move the needle at all.

- Jack Welch

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

There is a hidden blessing in the most traumatic things we go through in our lives. My brain always goes to, ‘Where is the hidden blessing? What is my gift?

- Sara Blakely

I think there’s a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.

- Ben Horowitz

I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.

- Jerry Seinfeld

It is well documented that I am a lifelong football fan. My love of the British game started with the 1966 World Cup.

- Alisher Usmanov

Today, getting people to hear your story on social media, and then act on it, requires using a platform’s native language, paying attention to context, understanding the nuances and subtle differences that make each platform unique, and adapting your content to match.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

- Jeff Bezos

If you are going to be successful, you must develop persistence. How do you do that? It is not easily condensed in one simple statement, but one thing you can be sure of is that your must define your purpose.

- Zig Ziglar

We cannot continue. Our pension costs and health care costs for our employees are going to bankrupt this city.

- Michael Bloomberg

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