Let’s think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it’s okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea… well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you’re not gonna get people coming up with ideas.”
- Elon Musk
Notable Quotables
A half-billion-dollar subsidy was unthinkable in the mid-2000s. It’s unthinkable today. There was only one moment where that was possible, and Tesla played it perfectly.
-
Well, yes, I’ve fired a lot of people. Generally I like other people to fire, because it’s always a lousy task. But I have fired many people.
- Donald Trump
When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this – you haven’t.
- Thomas Edison
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
- Winston Churchill
I attract a crowd, not because I’m an extrovert or I’m over the top or I’m oozing with charisma. It’s because I care.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Get your fire back.
- Joel Olsteen
We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.
- Winston Churchill
God, I’m not going to look at what I don’t have. I’m looking unto you. I know in my weakness, you show up the strongest.
- Joel Olsteen
The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That’s approaching evil.
- Jeff Bezos
Success always demands a greater effort.
- Winston Churchill
If there is to be a low-cost Uber, Uber will be the low-cost Uber.
- Travis Kalanick
The person who has technical knowledge plus the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people—that person is headed for higher earning power.
- Dale Carnegie
Figure out what the impact areas are in your business.
- Chet Holmes
Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.
- Bill Gates
No matter how many times people say it – ‘Oh, I’m just writing this for myself’ ‘Oh, I’m just doing this for myself’ – nobody’s doing it for themselves! You’re doing it for an audience. So whether I’m performing or writing a book or playing music, it’s definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way, definitely.
- Steve Martin
The son has not caught me in bed for 50 years.
- Thomas Jefferson
I believe that those who stay in faith are highly favored. You need to prepare for an exceeding, abundant, above-and-beyond life; a life where people go out of their way for no reason to be good to you; a life where you get promoted even though you weren’t the most qualified; a life where you find yourself in the right place at the right time.
- Joel Olsteen
The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.
- Michael Dell
Christopher Colombus’ big mistake was that he was looking for a trade route to China, and accidentally bumped into America, the richest, most powerful country in the world.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I was never the smartest guy in the room. From the first person I hired, I was never the smartest guy in the room. And that’s a big deal. And if you’re going to be a leader – if you’re a leader and you’re the smartest guy in the world – in the room, you’ve got real problems.
- Jack Welch
Don’t worry about failure, you only have to be right once.
- Drew Houston
Contrary to popular belief, I don’t spend a whole lot of time following soccer. But as I have traveled around the world to better understand global development and health, I’ve learned that soccer is truly universal. No matter where I go, that’s what kids are playing. That’s what people are talking about.
- Bill Gates
With comedy, you have no place to go but more comedy, so you’re never off the hook.
- Steve Martin
Baseball is like cricket, and I grew up in a country where they had cricket. So I understand cricket, soccer and basketball. I played basketball at the club level and a little bit in college, so that’s why I’m a basketball fanatic.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Before you can be sure of your ability to transmute DESIRE into its monetary equivalent, you will require SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE of the service, merchandise or profession which you intend to offer in return for fortune.
- Napoleon Hill
Security has to happen at the infrastructure.
- John Chambers
If you want to reap financial blessings, you have to sow financially.
- Joel Olsteen
Fulfilling the vision of the Irvine Ranch master plan has been a lifetime dedication and lifetime passion, and I am hopeful the heritage of our Irvine stewardship will live on in many new ways.
- Donald Bren
It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.
- Jeff Bezos
The few who knew what might be learned, Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show, And reveal their feelings to the crowd below, Mankind has always crucified and burned.
- Peter Thiel
The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application.
- Larry Ellison
He listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.
- Ron Chernow
The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.
- Seth Godin
I own a home in Kyoto, Japan actually on the temple on grounds in Nanzenji that is going to become a Japanese art museum.
- Larry Ellison
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
- Steve Jobs
When launching something new, you have to go for it—“playing not to lose” can never be an option.
- Jack Welch
I love great music and art, but I think ‘cubist’ songs and paintings are hideous.
- Thomas Edison
No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.
- Andrew Carnegie
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
The customer reaction to Dell going private has been a lot more positive than I would have ever imagined. Customers see it as – ‘You don’t have to be distracted. Now you can totally focus on your business.’ So they see it as a positive.
- Michael Dell
When you are truly interested in other people, you will learn what they are interested in and if they have a need for your product. If they like you, and most people like folks who take an interest in them, they’ll help you find people who do need what you have to sell, even if they don’t.
- Zig Ziglar
You know, if you look back in the 1930s, the money went to infrastructure. The bridges, the municipal buildings, the roads, those were all built with stimulus money spent on infrastructure. This stimulus bill has fundamentally gone, started out with a $500 rebate check, remember. That went to buy flat-screen TVs made in China.
- Michael Bloomberg
Now that we had a name, we had to have a trademark for the side of the shoe. It was 1971, and Ford had spent $2 million getting a trademark. We didn’t have $2 million, so I went by the graphic arts department at Portland State, and there was a woman there saying, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get enough money for the dress for this prom,’ And I said, ‘I have a job for you.’ I paid her $2 an hour, and she spent 17 and a half hours. So $35 and she came up with what is now the swoosh.
- Phil Knight
You must unlearn what you have learned.
- Yoda
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
- Zig Ziglar
It never hurts a fool to appear before an audience, for his capacity is not a capacity for feeling.
- Dale Carnegie
Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose…
- Thomas Edison
Don’t panic.
- David Novak
Media companies focused on things like creating great stories whereas technology companies focused on creating a better way of doing things. We began to think about new ideas and about forming a new company.
- Ben Horowitz
The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake- you can’t learn anything from being perfect.
- Adam Osborne
The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage
- Warren Buffett
The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That’s a bittersweet ending.
- Timothy Ferriss
Take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.
- Peter Thiel
Hong Kong has, throughout it’s history, experienced periods of uncertainties… I believe that the virtues of Hong Kong people – diligent, flexible and entrepreneurial – will once again overcome the obstacles before us.
- Cheng Yu-tung
You don’t build a business –you build people– and then people build the business.
- Zig Ziglar
I was born in a family with a strong military background, so I chose to be a soldier.
- Wang Jianlin
The future of your organization depends on motivated human beings selflessly contributing unasked-for gifts of emotional labor.
- Seth Godin
The breadth and maturity of our own businesses is allowing us to weather the prevailing storms.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Measuring and establishing facts at every step of the process. Without facts, assumptions and misperceptions will defeat whatever reason and good judgment can be brought to effort
- Service Profit Chain
What I most identify with is effortless fashion, looking as if someone’s not put a lot of effort into their look.
- Sara Blakely
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
Success is about being where we are supposed to be and doing what we need to be doing.
- David Robinson
As one’s fortunes are reduced, one spirit must expand to fill the void.
- Winston Churchill
I’m a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome. I don’t believe in equal outcome because unfortunately life’s not like that. It would be a pretty boring place if it was. But I really believe in equal opportunity. Equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great education.
- Steve Jobs
In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
India is more of an aid recipient than a provider of aid.
- Bill Gates
I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.
- Bill Gates
We should remember it wasn’t so long ago that confidence in New York was in short supply.
- Michael Bloomberg
I always follow 4E’s wrapped in a ‘P’.
- Jack Welch
People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.” There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold.
- Peter Thiel
Love to learn—hate to be taught.
- Winston Churchill
Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Success comes to those who have an entire mountain of gold that they continually mine, not those who find one nugget and try to live on it for fifty years.
- John C. Maxwell
Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software.
- Larry Ellison
I don’t think you should spend your life praying for things, but I do believe you should thank God for what He’s given you… but I think the scripture teaches us that we can pray for our dreams, pray for the big things… he’s not a small God; this God is incredible.
- Joel Olsteen
You can’t manage what you can’t measure.
- Peter Drucker
I know if I stopped hosting ‘Wine Library TV,’ we’d probably lose 75 percent of our audience, but the remaining 25 percent is still a big number.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it’s simply a poor use of resources.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered – the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.
- Larry Page
I started getting more and more active around immigration reform because this was such a waste of lives, such a waste of potential, such a waste for our country not to have the human capital that we developed – geared toward improving our entire society.
- Laurene Powell Jobs
Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.
- Warren Buffett
The best teacher is very interactive.
- Bill Gates
Well, it’s very clear that the Arab population is rising because they’d like to have a say in the running of their affairs, running of their government, and this is very legitimate.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for them.
- Dale Carnegie
Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even in purely financial terms.
- Peter Thiel
How has being realistic” or responsible” kept you from the life you want? How has doing what you should” resulted in subpar experiences or regret for not having done something else?
- Timothy Ferriss
Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
- Elon Musk
By fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected.
- Dale Carnegie
China is a government-oriented economy. No one can say he can run his business entirely without government connections. Anybody who says that he or she can do things alone… is a hypocrite.
- Wang Jianlin
Nobody ever accused me of wisdom of any kind, let alone conventional.
- Phil Knight
Being educated in the United States gave me a good understanding of American culture. I think I got a lot of influence from the entrepreneurial mind in the United States.
- Masayoshi Son
I love art, I love design, and I love seeing that intersection of technology and the teams that work on it.
- Jack Dorsey
The worst day of a man’s life is when he sits down and begins thinking about how he can get something for nothing.
- Thomas Jefferson
Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That’s why there’s the old saw: location, location, location.
- Jeff Bezos
I hate recording all the shows for the week in one day, because I want to be able to mention current events and pop culture. If Madonna punches Britney in the face today, I want to reference that on ‘Wine Library TV’ tomorrow. Monday’s episode is always the best, because it’s hot off the press.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.
- Richard Branson
Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.
- Reid Hoffman
Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it’s really let us down.
- Bill Gates
Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.
- Ray Dalio
