Notable Quotables

If I hadn’t given my money away, I’d have had more than anyone else on the planet.

- Bill Gates

One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice.

- Seth Godin

If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.

- Timothy Ferriss

You are going to survive. And good things are going to start to happen again. And one day you are going to look back and this will not even be such a bad thing.

- Dale Carnegie

I worry about losing a real talent. I hate losing a great leader more than anything. I also hate it when I have to manager out a good person for poor performance or for simply doing something that is not in sync with our values. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life and I’ve had to do it more than once, is fire a friend.

- David Novak

The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers Their name alone can practically guarantee hit records.

- Richard Branson

If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.

- Winston Churchill

PR is gift-wrapping. If you package a bracelet in a Tiffany box, it will have a higher perceived value than if you presented it in a Kmart box.

- Michael Levine

Smith never wavered. Twenty-five years later, Kimberly-Clark owned Scott Paper outright and beat Procter & Gamble in six of eight product categories.12 In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.

- James C. Collins

For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’, just do it and correct course along the way.

- Timothy Ferriss

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft

- Bill Gates

Disneyland will never be the completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.

- Walt Disney

In absorbing companies, Rockefeller was secretive and asked them to continue operating under their original names and not divulge their Standard Oil Ownership. They were instructed to retain their original stationary, keep secret accounts, and not allude on paper to their Cleveland connection.

- Ron Chernow

I’m a reverend and a pastor. A pastor of the church. I go by usually pastor

- Joel Olsteen

Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.

- Jack Welch

Expect the unexpected. And whenever possible, be the unexpected. I try to live by that on a daily basis.

- Jack Dorsey

I think I meant that, given the circumstances of my childhood, I had the illusion that it’s easier to be alone. To have your relationships be casual and also to pose as a solitary person, because it was more romantic. You know, I was raised on the idea of the ramblin’ man and the loner.

- Steve Martin

The memory of my mother will always be a blessing to me….

- Thomas Edison

People easily confuse skill with personality.

- Jerry Vass

If you always think about your dreams or goals, work steadfastly towards them and continue to challenge yourself, you will definitely be able to realise those dreams or goals.

- Tadashi Yanai

When you look at the dark side, careful you must be. For the dark side looks back.

- Yoda

The fastest and best way to build value for your business is to build your people

- Clay Clark

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

- Henry Ford

Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

- Bill Gates

The group has continued to dedicate itself to its core businesses in property, infrastructure development, hotel operations and telecommunications. As for our operations in China, we expect to reap good returns from the investments in infrastructure, government housing and city core redevelopment projects as time goes by. Our strategic foothold in telecommunications will allow us to become an important player in the telecom industry.

- Cheng Yu-tung

You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down.

- Reid Hoffman

Becoming a member of the new rich is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.”Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness.”By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.

- Timothy Ferriss

On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, ‘What God do you pray to?’ What beliefs do you hold?’

- Michael Bloomberg

I think that the first thing is you should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don’t know what the future is going to hold.

- Ray Dalio

I’m optimistic about the country. I’m optimistic about the American people.

- Howard Schultz

When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal.

- Napoleon Hill

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

- Joel Olsteen

When my sister and I came along, my father’s political life was completely over. He ran for president the year I was born. So that was the end of it. He had been congressman first, then governor, before all that. So when we came along, he was running the Dayton newspaper.

- Anne Cox Chambers

Many marriages would be better if the husband and wife clearly understood that they’re on the same side.

- Zig Ziglar

We have more than six and one-half times the level of wealth of our non-millionaire neighbors, but, in our neighborhood, these nonmillionaires outnumber us better than three to one. Could it be that they have chosen to trade wealth for acquiring high-status material possessions?

- Thomas J Stanley

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

- Winston Churchill

If you’ve found some way to educate yourself about engineering, stocks, or whatever it is, good employers will have some type of exam or interview and see a sample of your work.

- Bill Gates

You either trust someone day one until they prove you wrong, or you say, ‘I don’t trust you until you show me I can trust you.’ I’m the latter.

- Charles Ergen

OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me ‘Trey’ because I’m William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I’m also known.

- Bill Gates

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean, if a few drops of ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Steve Jobs didn’t really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don’t deny that.

- Steve Wozniak

But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you’re confident that you’ll catch a bird flying by. It’s an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn’t come by, but a few times it does.

- Reed Hastings

The best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.

- Peter Drucker

Everybody starts with creating or acquiring certain property in order to create the material to work with. When we started our business, we thought first of all about development, how to grow, and we managed to do this, even with all the difficulties and all the difficult rules that were implemented in Russia at that time.

- Vladimir Potanin

I’m a bit of a P. T. Barnum. I make stars out of everyone.

- Donald Trump

I think what we’re lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.

- Howard Schultz

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM – and they keep track of this – is a little over four years.

- Bill Gates

The real problem when working with a consultant, a therapist or a coach isn’t that we don’t know what to do. The real problem is that we don’t want to change our mind.

- 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

Mr Churchill, to what do you attribute your success in life? Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down

- Winston Churchill

Specifically, the following things that cause no trouble when you are small become big challenges as you grow: Communication Common knowledge Decision making.

- Ben Horowitz

Success is the maximum utilization of the ability you have.

- Zig Ziglar

Hay dos errores que podemos cometer en el camino hacia la verdad. No recorrer todo el camino, y no empezar.

- Siddhartha Gautama

One of my goals is to inspire everyone I meet to become a better person.

- George Foreman

Remember happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have it depends solely on what you think.

- Dale Carnegie

The quality of our integration will be judged, not by the ultimate costs in hitting our targets, but instead by the level of service we give to our clients throughout the process. That’s kind of my 8-to-5 job. My 5-to-8 job is what’s the next move? Where else in health care do we see inefficiencies, that we see a splintered system with tremendous cost overruns?

- George Paz

Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.

- Andrew Carnegie

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The final relationship that cannot be ignored is with disrupters: They are individuals who cause trouble for sport – inciting opposition to management for a variety of reasons, most of them petty. Usually these people have good performance – that’s their cover – and so they are endured or appeased. A company that manages people well takes disrupters head-on. First they give them very tough evaluations, naming their bad behaviour and demanding it change. Usually it won’t. Disrupters are a personality type. If that’s the case, get them out of the way of people trying to do their jobs. They’re poison.

- Jack Welch

This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, this is just perhaps the end of the beginning.

- Winston Churchill

Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.

- Oprah Winfrey

The Group has always adhered to prudent financial management principles.

- Lee Shau Kee

I come back to the same thing: We’ve got the greatest pipeline in the company’s history in the next 12 months, and we’ve had the most amazing financial results possible over the last five years, and we’re predicting being back at double-digit revenue growth in fiscal year ’06.

- Steve Ballmer

I’ve got the greatest job in the world. There’s no other job in government where cause and effect is so tightly coupled where you can make a difference every day in so many different ways and in so many different people’s lives. It’s a great challenge.

- Michael Bloomberg

It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.

- Jeff Bezos

A peace talk is always difficult, always complicated.

- Jack Ma

Be grateful for what you have and stop complaining – it bores everybody else, does you no good, and doesn’t solve any problems.

- Zig Ziglar

I failed the LSAT. Basically, if I had not failed, I’d have been a lawyer and there would be no Spanx. I think failure is nothing more than life’s way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating.

- Sara Blakely

What makes a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers. 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

When you were made a leader you weren’t given a crown, you were given the responsibility to bring out the best in others.

- Jack Welch

Whoever renders service to many puts himself in line for greatness – great wealth, great return, great satisfaction, great reputation, and great joy

- Jim Rohn

Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.

- Oprah Winfrey

This was a decision we reached after a number of years speaking to the human rights groups, and specifically people who really cared about China on human rights. I understand why other people might have other views.

- Sergey Brin

You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.

- Dale Carnegie

The way to become rich is to put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.

- Andrew Carnegie

Though the external environment is still fraught with uncertainties, mainland China, which has been less affected by the global financial tsunami, is expected to keep growing from strength to strength despite fine tuning of its moderately loose monetary policy on concerns of overheating in the property sector and inflation risk.

- Lee Shau Kee

At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.

- Seth Godin

I can’t read a computer screen and never use a calculator. It’s all in my head and by hand.

- Simon Reuben

What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

- Clayton M. Christensen

I once dieted so religiously I quit eating in church.

- Zig Ziglar

If I complain about a traffic jam, I have no one to blame but myself.

- Stephen Wynn

Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.

- Jack Welch

There is a revolution happening, and within two years I think that Wi-Fi and Netflix will be built into all the televisions.

- Reed Hastings

Do you know of the water and the moon? The river flows endlessly, yet it never disappears. The moon waxes and wanes, yet it never grows bigger or smaller. Therefore, if you look in the eyes of change, everything in this world changes in an instant. But if you look in the eyes of stability, everything in the world, including humanity, is eternal. Dozens of worlds have demonstrated precisely the truth of the changing universe. The changes of the water and the moon happen on their appearances, but never on their physical natures. Therefore, whether changes happen depends on people’s mind and view. Since nothing remains permanent in the world, change is just the eternal fact.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

- Seth Godin

Without passion, you don’t have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

- Donald Trump

Don’t let any opportunity lead you away from serving God. That’s a price that’s too high to pay.

- George Foreman

Outside of your relationship with God, the most important relationship you can have is with yourself. I don’t mean that we are to spend all our time focused on me, me, me to the exclusion of others. Instead, I mean that we must be healthy internally—emotionally and spiritually—in order to create healthy relationships with others. Motivational pep talks and techniques for achieving success are useless if a person is weighed down by guilt, shame, depression, rejection, bitterness, or crushed self-esteem. Countless marriages land on the rocks of divorce because unhealthy people marry thinking that marriage, or their spouse, will make them whole. Wrong. If you’re not a healthy single person you won’t be a healthy married person. Part of God’s purpose for every human life is wholeness and health. I love the words of Jesus in John 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” God knows we are the walking wounded in this world and He wants the opportunity to remove everything that limits us and heal every wound from which we suffer. Some wonder why God doesn’t just “fix” us automatically so we can get on with life. It’s because He wants our wounds to be our tutors to lead us to Him. Pain is a wonderful motivator and teacher! When the great Russian intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was released from the horrible Siberian work camp to which he was sent by Joseph Stalin, he said, “Thank you, prison!” It was the pain and suffering he endured that caused his eyes to be opened to the reality of the God of his childhood, to embrace his God anew in a personal way. When we are able to say thank you to the pain we have endured, we know we are ready to fulfill our purpose in life. When we resist the pain life brings us, all of our energy goes into resistance and we have none left for the pursuit of our purpose. It is the better part of wisdom to let pain do its work and shape us as it will. We will be wiser, deeper, and more productive in the long run. There is a great promise in the New Testament that says God comes to us to comfort us so we can turn around and comfort those who are hurting with the comfort we have received from Him (see 2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Make yourself available to God and to those who suffer. A large part of our own healing comes when we reach out with compassion to others.

- Zig Ziglar

The first is the result of a decision to act—to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth—to not do something—wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences.

- Timothy Ferriss

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

- Elon Musk

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

- Elon Musk

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

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