One of [Bill] Bowerman’s more legendary innovations is the Waffle outsole, which he discovered by pouring rubber into a waffle iron.
- Phil Knight
Notable Quotables
Friends are made my many acts and lost by only one.
- Harvey Mackay
the average person is more interested in his or her own name than in all the other names on earth put together.
- Dale Carnegie
I believe in Judaism, I was raised a Jew, I’m happy to be one – or proud to be one.
- Michael Bloomberg
At the end of the day … Nexium is Nexium, Lipitor is Lipitor, drugs are drugs, and it shouldn’t matter that much who’s counting to 30.
- George Paz
You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.
- Jack Ma
The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.
- Jeff Bezos
If I have seen further it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
- Sir Isaac Newton
Tip 49 – The trip to success should be as much fun as arriving at the destination.
- Jack Nadel
Small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).
- Peter Thiel
When advice is freely given, the receiver is free to use it as he or she sees fit.
- Harvey Mackay
Success is determined by your daily agenda
- John Maxwell
“Pick me, pick me” acknowledges the power of the system and passes responsibility to someone else to initiate. Even better, “pick me, pick me” moves the blame from you to them. If you don’t get picked, it’s their fault, not yours. If you do get picked, well, they said you were good, right? Not your fault anymore. Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.
- Seth Godin
You can look at the situation and feel victimized. Or you can look at it and be excited about conquering the challenges and opportunities it presents.
- Jack Welch
We obviously are getting to be one of the largest players in the industry, so it’s hard to grow faster than that number, … But we’re very, very pleased with the last quarter results of 53 percent year-over-year. That’s on the upside, so I wouldn’t get too optimistic when it goes above 50 percent, just like we encouraged people two years ago, when it went below 30 percent growth for us, not to get too pessimistic.
- John Chambers
Residential properties that were sold by the Group summed up to around 5,800 units and amounted to approximately HK$12.8 billion.
- Lee Shau Kee
President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy.
- Harold Hamm
Common mission trap for companies: trying to be all things to all people at all times.
- Jack Welch
I’m a constant learner. You need to be a constant student because things change and you have to change and grow. And I emphasize the word ‘grow.’
- Zig Ziglar
I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.
- Bill Gates
Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.
- Ben Horowitz
All was there—the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit ofthe world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.
- Winston Churchill
Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have.
- Thomas Edison
The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.
- Bill Gates
What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.
- Peter Thiel
You cannot perform in a manner inconsistent with the way you see yourself.
- Zig Ziglar
Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.
- Seth Godin
Play the game for more than you can afford to lose . . . only then will you learn the game.
- Zig Ziglar
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
- Mark Twain
Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.
- Ben Horowitz
If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.
- Dale Carnegie
If I hadn’t given my money away, I’d have had more than anyone else on the planet.
- Bill Gates
You learn how to be book smart in school, but you better not forget that you also need to be street smart.
- Harvey Mackay
Thomas Edison had only three months of schooling during his entire life. He did not lack education, neither did he die poor. Henry Ford had less than a sixth grade schooling but he has managed to do pretty well for himself financially.
- Napoleon Hill
If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.
- Ben Horowitz
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
- John F. Kennedy
2006, I started ‘WineLibrary TV.’ To build ‘WineLibrary TV,’ I started using Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter in 2008.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
- Winston Churchill
If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that’s a good discussion. Maybe that’s the way to help close the deficit.
- Bill Gates
The greatest thing about being a comedian is knowing other comedians. And you get to talk to them. Its the most fun.
- Jerry Seinfeld
We got to know a lot of investors and know what they like and don’t like. Through many co-investments opportunities, we have built trust among these investors. So when it came to investing in Xiaomi, things were a lot easier.
- Lei Jun
Humility is becoming a lost art, but it’s not difficult to practice. It means that you realize that others have been involved in your success.
- Harvey Mackay
This is why so many small and medium-sized businesses don’t use tools that bigger firms take for granted. It’s not that small business proprietors are unusually backward or that good tools don’t exist: distribution is the hidden bottleneck.
- Peter Thiel
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.
- Winston Churchill
Maturity is often more absurd than youth and very frequently is most unjust to youth.
- Thomas Edison
I’ve always thought if we don’t want to enforce laws on the books, we should remove them from the books. But when you have laws, you breed contempt if you don’t enforce them.
- Michael Bloomberg
There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.
- Napoleon Hill
Good executives never put off until tomorrow what they can get someone else to do today.
- John C. Maxwell
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
- Winston Churchill
When you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, the day will come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.
- Zig Ziglar
All human beings are the same. In the United States, people come from all over the world, all races, all backgrounds. And they’re all doing what they want, many scoring huge successes. When I saw that, I became more open. It freed my soul.
- Masayoshi Son
Once I did bad and that I heard ever. Twice I did good, but that I heard never.
- Dale Carnegie
All successful people ‘think on paper.’
- Brian Tracy
If you end your training now — if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did — you will become an agent of evil.
- Yoda
Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.
- Seth Godin
I would rather have people think we’re confused than let our competitors know what we’re going to do.
- Larry Page
One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!
- Winston Churchill
Consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.
- Seth Godin
Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.
- Jim Collins
Since all of them overestimated the competition, no one even showed up.
- Timothy Ferriss
I flunked my exam for university two times before I was accepted by what was considered my city’s worst university, Hangzhou Teachers University. I was studying to be a high school English teacher. In my university, I was elected student chairman and later became chairman of the city’s Students Federation.
- Jack Ma
You must focus on WIN. What’s important now.
- Lee Cockerell
Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.
- Clayton M. Christensen
The [Henderson] Group possesses substantial recurrent income.
- Lee Shau Kee
Living in the moment brings you a sense of reverence for all of life’s blessings.
- Oprah Winfrey
We’re introducing separate rooms with double beds in all our planes so people can actually go with their partner and have a proper night’s sleep.
- Richard Branson
We all know far too many stories where the third generation just destroys everything that the first two have built up, and I certainly hope my family are different because I’ve worked too hard and my father has worked too hard for it to be given away.
- Gina Rinehart
A blow that would kill a civilized man soon heals on a savage. The higher we go in the scale of life, the greater is the capacity for suffering.
- Dale Carnegie
There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we’ve got a system that allows them to do it.
- Warren Buffett
The doctors actually told my family there was a five percent chance of me living.
- Ed Clark
I remember clearly when the financial plan – If i may call it so – of my life was formed. It was out in Ohio, under the ministration of a dear old minister who preached, Get money; get it honestly, and then give it away wisely. I wrote that down in a little book.
- Ron Chernow
Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one.
- Peter Thiel
What you receive is directly connected to what you believe.
- Joel Olsteen
Mormonism is a little different, but I still see them as brothers in Christ.
- Joel Olsteen
Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.
- George Soros
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
Cleantech shows the result: hundreds of undifferentiated products all in the name of one overbroad goal.
- Peter Thiel
Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.
- Elon Musk
Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice.
- Dale Carnegie
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
- Henry David Thoreau
About three million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
- Bill Gates
I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn’t turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book.
- Steve Martin
Too often we judge people based on our own backgrounds and experiences, but when you understand people’s stories, it’s easier to understand their demeanor.
- Joel Olsteen
Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.
- Jerry Seinfeld
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
The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.
- Thomas Edison
We used to think that everything started in the lab. Now we realize that everything spins off the consumer.
- Phil Knight
Separate performance from people.
- David Robinson
We’re really going after truly creating sustainability of a disease-free state, creating a complete system for managing cancer patients for life, so that you can manage from onset of disease all the way through.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
I think that, ah, I’m a very goofy sort of person in many ways.
- Jeff Bezos
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
- Bill Gates
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln
The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses.
- Napoleon Hill
In the beginning, I was so chintzy I really didn’t pay my employees well.
- Sam Walton
There’s no mystery in business success. If you do each day’s task successfully and stay faithfully within these natural operations of commercial laws which I talk so much about and keep your head clear, you will come out all right.
- John D. Rockefeller
If you have the character to hang in there when its tough, you will develop or acquire every other characteristic necessary to WIN in the game of life.
- Zig Ziglar
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That’s the fundamental thing.
- Ben Horowitz
Strong managers who make tough decisions to cut jobs provide the only true job security in today’s world. Weak managers are the problem. Weak managers destroy jobs.
- Jack Welch
