When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
- Peter Drucker
Notable Quotables
I’m not a macroeconomics person.
- Bill Gates
We asked ourselves what we wanted this company to stand for. We didn’t want to just sell shoes. I wasn’t even into shoes – but I was pasionate about customer service.
- Tony Hsieh
Procrastination is the bad habit of putting of until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.
- Napoleon Hill
A leader once convinced a particular action is the right one, must have the determination to stick with it and be undaunted when the going gets rough.
- Ronald Reagan
If you want to take the island, you have to burn the boats.
- David Nilssen
[On the Nike name in 2011] I quite like it now.
- Phil Knight
I first thought maybe I’d do a banjo presentation record, where I’d play a couple of songs and get a bunch of other players to do the rest. Then I realized I had enough of my own songs to do an album of them.
- Steve Martin
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
- Jeff Bezos
Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.
- Robert J. Sawyer
Relaxation and Recreation The most relaxing recreating forces are a healthy religion, sleep, music, and laughter. Have faith in God—learn to sleep well— Love good music—see the funny side of life— And health and happiness will be yours.
- Dale Carnegie
On Facebook, the definition of great content is not the content that makes the most sales, but the content that people most want to share with others.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
A Timid Trapeze Artist Is a Dead Trapeze Artist.
- Seth Godin
You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success.
- Zig Ziglar
The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.
- Timothy Ferriss
Word of mouth works now, much more than ever. @-reply every single person.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
- Bill Gates
Tip 29 – A good Accountant is not just a scorekeeper.
- Jack Nadel
From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce.
- Thomas Edison
Save someone’s face once and your influence with him rises. Save his face every time you can, and there is practically nothing he won’t do for you.
- Dale Carnegie
Does it make sense to go to college, or should I instead be a plumber?
- Michael Bloomberg
Americans believe cotton is best, but we’ve invented new fabrics that will change your lifestyle.
- Tadashi Yanai
When nobody else celebrates you, learn to celebrate yourself. When nobody else compliments you, then compliment yourself. It’s not up to other people to keep you encouraged. It’s up to you. Encouragement should come from the inside.
- Joel Olsteen
and the rare individual who honestly satisfies this heart hunger will hold people in the palm of his or her hand”
- Dale Carnegie
A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.
- Timothy Ferriss
I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.
- Thomas Edison
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
When SAP, and, specifically Hasso Plattner, said they’re going to build this in-memory database and compete with Oracle, I said. God, get me the name of that pharmacist, they must be on drugs.
- Larry Ellison
Investing in courage and determination was an easy decision for me.
- Ben Horowitz
At the same time, we invested more than €4 billion, in property, plant and equipment, software, and research and development. The capital expenditure ratio is again expected to be around 6 percent in the current fiscal year.
- Elmar Degenhart
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
Many people say the privatisation was unfair: that is true – it was unfair. That is a fact: some people became rich and others did not. Unfair does not mean illegal, but it was inevitably unfair.
- Vladimir Potanin
Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean giving up familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, and relationships that have lost their meaning.
- John C. Maxwell
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
- Seneca
Starbucks represents something beyond a cup of coffee.
- Howard Schultz
Employees were invited to send complaints or suggestions directly to him and he always took an interest in their affairs. He was the best employer of his time, instituting hospitalization and retirement pensions. He was a fine boss if workers abided by the rules, but if they did something foolish, like show interest in a union, they promptly forfeited his sympathy. Rockefeller never acknowledged the legitamacy of organized labor, nor did he tolerate union organizers on his premises.
- Ron Chernow
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
- Dale Carnegie
If you can’t make 40% on your money in Russia, you’re a fool.
- Simon Reuben
Being a winner is much different from having the potential to win. Everyone has the potential, it’s what you do with that potential that really matters.
- Zig Ziglar
When you have the right staff, potential skyrockets.
- Napoleon Hill
Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.
- John C. Maxwell
I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was… an arctic wilderness.
- Steve Martin
At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study.
- Ben Horowitz
Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?
- Ray Kroc
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
- Winston Churchill
Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship…the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
- Peter Drucker
[In January 2011] I think Twitter is so unique that we must stay independent.
- Jack Dorsey
Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.
- Mark Zuckerberg
This presents a very curious phenomenon. There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines. If you haven’t identified the mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion, the unimportant becomes the important. Even if you know what’s critical, without deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks forced upon you (or invented, in the case of the entrepreneur) will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiae jumps in to replace.
- Timothy Ferriss
We’ll make cloud computing announcements because, you know, if orange is the new pink, we’ll make orange blouses. I mean, I’m not gonna fight this thing … well, maybe we’ll do an ad. Uh, I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing, other than market … you know, change the wording on some of our ads.
- Larry Ellison
New World Group believes that the desire to change and surmount the status quo will be the key to advancement and progression.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
- Steve Jobs
I am a huge bull on this country. We will not have a double-dip recession at all. I see our businesses coming back almost across the board.
- Warren Buffett
While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.
- Ray Kroc
People define Christianity differently. I think a large portion of our population are Christians, they’re not all growing in their faith, they’re not all active, but I believe that a lot of people believe in Jesus and believe that he is their Lord and Savior.
- Joel Olsteen
In order for us to have a future that’s exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we’re a space-bearing civilization.
- Elon Musk
Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money, non-monopolists can’t.
- Peter Thiel
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
What a great thrill it will be for fans of all generations to see these NASCAR superheroes together again at Atlanta Motor Speedway. With 405 victories between them, each and every one played an integral role in making NASCAR the tremendous success it is today.
- Ed Clark
Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.
- Peter Drucker
I have found from costly experience that it is much easier to analyze the facts after writing them down. In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us reach a sensible decision. As Charles Kettering puts it: A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
- Dale Carnegie
Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.
- Seth Godin
I hope you will take good care of your health, this is religious duty, and you can accomplish so much for the world if you keep well and strong.
- John D. Rockefeller
Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.
- Dale Carnegie
Of course, the challenge of being the initiator is that you’ll be wrong. You’ll pick the wrong thing, you’ll waste time, you’ll be blamed. This is why being an initiator is valuable. Most people shy away from the challenge. They’ve been too abused, they’re too fearful, they hold back, they’re happy to let someone else take the heat. Initiative is scarce. Hence valuable. Ditch digging is not scarce. It’s not hard at all to find manual labor at minimum wage, which is precisely why manual labor gets paid minimum wage. It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.
- Seth Godin
I have the courage to surround myself with people who are smarter than me.
- Andrew Carnegie
If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments.
- Zig Ziglar
We don’t mature momentarily, but over the long-term.
- John C. Maxwell
Eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.
- Bill Gates
All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can’t worry about it, you can’t panic when you look at the stock market’s decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.
- Larry Ellison
Residential property prices will pick up steadily.
- Lee Shau Kee
The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb.
- Peter Thiel
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
America is built around this premise that you can do it, and there are an awful lot of people who are unlikely to have done it who did.
- Michael Bloomberg
Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
- Dale Carnegie
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
- Mark Twain
There is always room for those who can be relied upon to delivery the goods when they say they will.
- Napoleon Hill
To me, it’s OK to have differences. But we don’t have to be mad about it. You know? And I think that’s where sometimes we get so passionate that we – you know, it turns into anger.
- Joel Olsteen
India has the potential to be our biggest market in Asia, bigger than China, in as much as two to five years.
- John Chambers
The interesting products out on the Internet today are not building new technologies. They’re combining technologies. Instagram, for instance: Photos plus geolocation plus filters. Foursquare: restaurant reviews plus check-ins plus geo.
- Jack Dorsey
When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world
- George Washington Carver
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
- Bill Gates
With comedy, you have no place to go but more comedy, so you’re never off the hook.
- Steve Martin
We saw – we conducted the experiment. I mean, it’s been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we’re gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs.
- Larry Ellison
Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
- Steve Jobs
Relationships are leverage. If you give value to someone else first, you have leverage.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.
- Warren Buffett
Everything in our society is so purposeful.
- Sara Blakely
Young people in China and Hong Kong are the future of the motherland.
- Cheng Yu-tung
My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had — everyday I’m learning something new.
- Richard Branson
Indeed, if there is any one secret” to an enduring great company, it is the ability to manage continuity and change—a discipline that must be consciously practiced, even by the most visionary of companies.
- James C. Collins
I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way.
- Steve Wozniak
Money will buy you a bed, but not a good night’s sleep, a house, but not a home, a companion, but not a friend.
- Zig Ziglar
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
- Steve Jobs
The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.
- Oprah Winfrey
Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.
- Bill Gates
Problem-solving becomes a very important part of our makeup as we grow into maturity or move up the corporate ladder.
- Zig Ziglar
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
The safest plan, and the one most sure of success for the young man starting in life, is to select the vocation which is most congenial to his tastes.
- P.T. Barnum
