A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.
- James C. Collins
Notable Quotables
I like the book. Do you have a problem with that? … I just think it’s a great story of somebody who stood up for what they believe in.
- Travis Kalanick
If parents pass enthusiasm along to their children, they will leave them an estate of incalculable value….
- Thomas Edison
Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.
- Peter Thiel
Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.
- Walt Disney
People in tough times – it doesn’t mean they don’t have a great attitude.
- Joel Olsteen
My role has been to pick good people and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.
- Sam Walton
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
If I’d had some set idea of a finish line, don’t you think I would have crossed it years ago?
- Bill Gates
Our economy now rewards artists far more than any other economy in history ever has.
- Seth Godin
The only time I really become discouraged is when I think of all the things I would like to do and the little time I have in which to do them.
- Thomas Edison
Don’t let what you don’t know scare you, because it can become your greatest asset. And if you do things without knowing how they have always been done, you’re guaranteed to do them differently.
- Sara Blakely
No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.
- Winston Churchill
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
No, I’m not settling here. I’m going to keep pressing forward.
- Joel Olsteen
I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.
- Elon Musk
Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.
- Elon Musk
If I want a better-than-average career, I can’t simply ‘go with the flow’ and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but make no intention-driven actions toward that outcome. If they would just do something most people would find that they get some version of the outcome they’re looking for. That’s been my secret. Stop wishing and start doing.
- Timothy Ferriss
An enterprise shall help the people overcome all difficulties to savor the fruit to be borne on the motherland, come rain or shine.
- Cheng Yu-tung
My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.
- Steve Wozniak
Mitt – what I speak to Mitt Romney about is jobs. What I speak to Mitt Romney about is China, because he’s got a great view on China and how they’re trying to destroy our country by taking our jobs and making our product and manipulating their currency, so that it makes it almost impossible for our companies to compete.
- Donald Trump
I think my story says that, when women are given the chance and the opportunity, that we can achieve a lot. We deliver.
- Sara Blakely
Lack of Concentration Of Effort.
- Napoleon Hill
Politicians make decisions in favor of their interest groups or their supporters back in their hometowns.
- Tadashi Yanai
Don’t do the natural thing, the impulsive thing. That is usually wrong.
- Dale Carnegie
The competitive advantages the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion. All of these attributes are choices, not talents, and all of them are available to you.
- Seth Godin
I’m not a big believer in trying to jam stuff down somebody’s throat: ‘You’re going to do it my way.’ I’d rather show by example and live my life and have people say, ‘You know what, I want to live like Joel has. He’s got peace and joy, and he seems content.’
- Joel Olsteen
Being excellent is hard. So when you have something hard to do, remember you are being excellent. Do you want to be remembered for being good or great?
- Lee Cockerell
Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires.
- Seth Godin
You’ve been destined to live in victory, destined to overcome, destined to leave your mark on this generation.
- Joel Olsteen
It says in Romans 5:17, We are to reign in life as kings.” When God looks at us He doesn’t see us defeated, barely getting by, or just taking the leftover positions. Not at all. God sees you as a king. He sees you as a queen. You have His royal blood flowing through your veins. You and I are supposed to reign in life. Do you know what that word reign means? It means, time in power.” God said we’re to reign how long? In life. That means as long as you’re alive that is your time in power. You don’t have a two-year term like a mayor, a four-year term like a president. Your term is to reign every single day, to be victorious, to rise to new levels, to accomplish great things.
- Joel Olsteen
If you can’t fail, it doesn’t count.
- Seth Godin
When you acknowledge God, He will go before you and make the crooked places straight.
- Joel Olsteen
Schools have figured this out. They need shortcuts in order to successfully process millions of students a year, and they’ve discovered that fear is a great shortcut on the way to teaching compliance.
- Seth Godin
The better at communicating you are, and the more people you communicate to, the better your cash flow will be.
- Robert Kiyosaki
By providing the systems that make the Internet work, Cisco is playing a major role in helping customers thrive in the explosive Internet economy. As a result, we are growing faster than all of our key competitors and have been the fastest growing and most profitable company in the history of the computer industry.
- John Chambers
You’re never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.
- Bill Gates
The U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar, the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro.
- Peter Thiel
Much to learn you still have…my old padawan… This is just the beginning!
- Yoda
Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.
- Seth Godin
Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.
- Timothy Ferriss
Where did your art go while you were tweeting?
- Seth Godin
In my weekly staff meeting, I inserted an agenda item titled “What Are We Not Doing?
- Ben Horowitz
Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.
- Reed Hastings
I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving.
- Steve Martin
Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds.
- Zig Ziglar
What’s happening is that the two groups assume that the nature of the debate is really a matter of disagreement about their own sides’ core issues. Each side is assuming that people in the other group oppose what they hold most dear to themselves – what’s most important to their side – but in fact their adversaries really don’t oppose them.
- John Chambers
[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 boss would be present at the beginning of each session, laying out the rationale for the Work-Out. He or she would also commit to two things: to give an on-the-spot yes or no to 75 percent of the recommendations that came out of the session, and to resolve the remaining 25 percent within thirty days. The boss would then disappear until the end of the session, so as not to stifle open discussion, returning only at the end to make good on his or her promise.
- Jack Welch
When your art fails, make better art.
- Seth Godin
The way to achieve happiness is to try for perfection that is impossible to achieve, and spend the rest of your life trying to achieve it.
- Winston Churchill
A change is as good as a rest.
- Winston Churchill
We do not need to teach students to embrace the status quo.
- Seth Godin
The good-will of a business which is losing money is not worth much.
- Ron Chernow
The POSITIVE THINKER sees the INVISIBLE, feels the INTANGIBLE, and achieves the IMPOSSIBLE.
- Winston Churchill
In every organization everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear.
- Seth Godin
It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming.
- Timothy Ferriss
In the beginning, I thought mobile search was not much different from Web search. It’s just a smaller screen, a slower speed; it’s all the bad things. When I thought about mobile Internet, it’s all the disadvantages.
- Robin Li
I’d learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.
- Ben Horowitz
We can be certain that cities around the world will compete for the jobs that the next revival of the financial services industry will bring.
- Michael Bloomberg
Why is this mediocre? We love to point out how broken our systems are. We enjoy getting angry at hotels or government agencies or airlines that are so obviously doing a poor job. Idiots! But we almost never look at merely mediocre products and wonder why they aren’t great. Mediocre services or products do what they’re supposed to, but have set the bar so low that it’s hardly worth the energy to cross the street to buy them. A resolute generic sameness pervades this mediocrity. Why isn’t every restaurant meal a fabulous buy for the money? Why isn’t every tax dollar spent with the intensity and focus it could be spent with? It seems as though we are willing to accept mediocre as long as the product, the service, or the organization isn’t totally broken.
- Seth Godin
Leaders never outgrow the need to change.
- John C. Maxwell
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.
- Sam Walton
You’ve got to visualize where you’re headed and be very clear about it. Take a polaroid picture of where you’re going to be in a few years
- Sara Blakely
There’s a belief that you’re supposed to be poor, and suffering, and show your humility. I just don’t see the Bible that way. I see that God came and Jesus died so that we might live an abundant life and be a blessing to others.
- Joel Olsteen
Most good ideas are already out there, and to learn about them, all you have to do is ask the right people.
- David Novak
In the end, Mockler and the board were proved right, stunningly so. If a shareflipper had accepted the 44 percent price premium offered by Ronald Perelman on October 31, 1986, and then invested the full amount in the general market for ten years, through the end of 1996, he would have come out three times worse off than a shareholder who had stayed with Mockler and Gillette.20 Indeed, the company, its customers, and the shareholders would have been ill served had Mockler capitulated to the raiders, pocketed his millions, and retired to a life of leisure.
- James C. Collins
The abundance mindset makes it easier to be graceful.
- Seth Godin
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
- Dale Carnegie
A false transaction using my own people to buy the flat? I’ll make a bet with you. For every $10,000 you put down, I’ll wager $1 million.
- Lee Shau Kee
The best way a mentor can prepare another leader is to expose him or her to other great people.
- John C. Maxwell
In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming found that a mysterious antibacterial fungus had grown on a petri dish he’d forgotten to cover in his laboratory: he discovered penicillin by accident. Scientists have sought to harness the power of chance ever since. Modern drug discovery aims to amplify Fleming’s serendipitous circumstances a millionfold: pharmaceutical companies search through combinations of molecular compounds at random, hoping to find a hit.
- Peter Thiel
Love is a promise delivered already broken.
- Steve Martin
The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.
- Bill Gates
we can not prepare for defeat and expect to live a life in Victory.
- Joel Olsteen
There’s a difference between telling people what to do and inciting a movement.
- Seth Godin
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
We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do.
- Dale Carnegie
The person who gets the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.
- Dale Carnegie
Many of America’s and New York’s sons and daughters are around the world fighting for the freedoms that the Statue of Liberty stands for.
- Michael Bloomberg
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
- Bill Gates
Respect people’s wishes.
- Jack Dorsey
Law of Clarity – If you can’t explain what you sell to a ten-year old child then you don’t know what you sell.
- Jerry Vass
Life is a self-fulfilling prophecy
- Chris Humphrey
Things get much easier if one jumps on the bandwagon of existing trends.
- Lei Jun
In the 1960s, if you were a blue collar worker or uneducated, and you had an injury on the job, the company basically dismissed you.
- Howard Schultz
You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.
- Jeff Bezos
Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.
- Bill Gates
If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.
- Bill Gates
If you don’t let people flourish in their jobs, why are they going to stay?
- Joel Olsteen
With every obstacle that has happened to me in my life, my brain immediately says, ‘Where is the hidden blessing?’ In starting a business and growing a business, every day is learning how to manage obstacles.
- Sara Blakely
It is very likely that Hong Kong has reached the end of the tunnel and the bright sunshine is not far from us.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Excepting for reading my numbers on Saturday morning and going to our regular meetings, I don’t have much of a routine for anything else. I always carry my little tape recorder on trips, to record ideas that come up in my conversations with the associates. I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.
- Sam Walton
Desire Is Born With Vision.
- Zig Ziglar
Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
By June this year, the [Henderson] Group had sold approximately 9,500 residential units totally around HK$21 billion in aggregate value.
- Lee Shau Kee
GE’s businesses turned in a terrific first quarter. Our products and services are being well received in unusually robust global markets.
- Jack Welch
It’s a lot cheaper to be a pirate than a pioneer.
- Tim Redmond
God will not pour fresh, creative ideas and blessing into old attitudes.
- Joel Olsteen
[Luke:] I can’t believe it. [Yoda:] That is why you fail.
- Yoda
