The hazards of imitative competition may partially explain why individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.
- Peter Thiel
What kind of business world are we living in?
- Jack Ma
Think about how Google talks about its business. It certainly doesn’t claim to be a monopoly.
- Peter Thiel
We are the safest large city in America, but any crime rate is too high.
- Michael Bloomberg
It’s the power of the brand. We’ve never formally advertised.
- Sara Blakely
The plot is certainly sensational, but it hardly represents what actually happened. It is difficult to believe that the European emigrants by whom America has been populated took away with them all the virtues and left behind them all the vices of the races from which they had sprung; or that a few generations of residence on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to create an order of beings definitely superior in morals, in culture, and in humanity to their prototypes in Europe. The American.
- Winston Churchill
I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.
- Timothy Ferriss
I’ve always been very happy. I’ve always been easy going and I’ve always been very encouraging, it’s just my personality.
- Joel Olsteen
[On the Nike logo] I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.
- Phil Knight
The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat.
- Napoleon Hill
A CEO’s job is to supervise all systems and to indentify weaknesses before the weaknesses turn into system failures. This can happen in many different ways, but it is exceptionally disconcerting when you company is growing rapidly. Your sales are increasing, your product of service is getting attention from the media, and suddenly you can’t deliver. Why? Uusually, it’s because your systems imploded from the increased demand. You didn’t have enough phone lines, or operators answering the phones. You didn’t have enough production capacity or enough hours in the week to meet the demand; or you didn’t have the money to build the product or hire additional help. Whatever the reason, you missed the opportunity to move your business to the next level of success due to failure of one of your systems…At each new level of growth, the CEO must start planning the systems needed to support the next level of growth, from phone lines to lines of credit for production needs. Systems drive both cash flow management and communication. As your systems get better, you or your employees will have to exert less and less effort. Without well-designed and successful operating systems, your business will be labor intensive. Once you have well-designed and successful operating systems, you will have a saleable business asset.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.
- Dale Carnegie
Being a good company is an end in itself.
- Ben Horowitz
Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you.
- James C. Collins
Los líderes son vulnerables, no controladores, y nos llevan a un lugar nuevo, no a la seguridad barata, rápida y sumisa.
- Seth Godin
The guerrilla is a cheapskate. She knows that every dollar allocated to marketing is essential, and she doesn’t plan to waste a penny. But she’s not foolish. When necessary, she hires the best designers, media planners, and experts in the business—she realizes that the best is often the cheapest in the end.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
People who smile tend to manage, teach and sell more effectively, and to raise happier children.
- Dale Carnegie
When a person starts to talk about their dreams, it’s as if something bubbles up from within. Their eyes brighten, their face glows, and you can feel the excitement in their words.
- John C. Maxwell
while you can buy your way to growth, you absolutely cannot buy your way to greatness.
- James C. Collins
Checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized.
- Atul Gawande
God didn’t make a mistake when He made you. You need to see yourself as God sees you.
- Joel Olsteen
The number of units that were sold by the Group including those for which the Group acted as sales agent summed up to 2,960 residential units, amounting to approximately HK$9.2 billion in total sales proceeds.
- Lee Shau Kee
We’ve been able to go deep rather than broad.
- Jack Dorsey
To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.
- Sam Walton
There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.
- Jeff Bezos
Everything we do is about getting people to be more open, more creative, more courageous.
- Jack Dorsey
The Benefits are about the Buyer’s stuff – what your products or services do for Buyers. Do the Benefits make them feel better about life – give them power; make them sexier, prettier, richer, more comfortable or secure, smarter, more competitive? Do they save time, money, fear or hassle?
- Jerry Vass
I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
- Bill Gates
Culture is one of the most precious things a company has…So you must work harder on it than anything else.
- Herb Kelleher
Doing a mall is not only construction of the physical place, what’s important is the merchandising mix.
- Henry Sy
Churchill kept perspective on the crowds that gathered to hear him speak by conceding they would be twice as big if gathered to see him hanged.
- Winston Churchill
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
Nature is truly wonderful. Only man is truly foul.
- Thomas Edison
In a climate of tight budgets, reduced workforces and stiff competition, internal training can be a great substitute for costly offsite workshops and conferences.
- Harvey Mackay
Maintain ‘baseball cards’ and/or ‘believability matrixes’ for your people. Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.
- Ray Dalio
It was always a challenge for me to prove that a Russian financial investor can be as successful in the West as back at home in Russia.
- Alisher Usmanov
When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.
- Walt Disney
Positive thinking is more than just a tagline. It changes the way we behave. And I firmly believe that when I am positive, it not only makes me better, but it also makes those around me better.
- Harvey Mackay
To grow your company explosively you must have leaders, not just efficient managers.
- John Maxwell
most cold calls didn’t get to the intended person for one reason: gatekeepers. If I simply made all my calls from 8:00–8:30 A.M. and 6:00–6:30 P.M., for a total of one hour, I was able to avoid secretaries and book more than twice as many meetings.
- Timothy Ferriss
Most of us don’t invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.
- Sam Walton
Use money to make money. Save your ‘first bucket of gold.’ or small fortune – but then use it for investments. Don’t just park money in the bank.
- Lee Shau Kee
I like the word ‘autopilot’ more than I like the word ‘self-driving.’ ‘Self-driving’ sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. ‘Autopilot’ is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.
- Elon Musk
I’ve been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that’s kind of a religious belief. I mean, it’s at least a moral belief.
- Bill Gates
You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart.
- Thomas J Watson
Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.
- John C. Maxwell
If you’re going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don’t work.
- Seth Godin
The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability… When the leader demonstrates vulnerability and sensibility and brings people together, the team wins.
- Howard Schultz
I wanted to be an artist. They see the world in a very different way.
- Jack Dorsey
If you run a company, you will experience overwhelming psychological pressure to be overly positive. Stand up to the pressure, face your fear, and tell it like it is.
- Ben Horowitz
War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
- Winston Churchill
Change is the price of progress.
- Napoleon Hill
When a man has accumulated a sum of money, accumulated it within the law, the Government has no right to share in its earnings.
- John D. Rockefeller
Some of the things I see around town are just disgusting.
- Jack Taylor
Anyone that makes me a quarter of a billion dollars, I like.
- Carl Icahn
I’m not for gay marriage, but I’m not for discriminating against people.
- Joel Olsteen
I was the only westerner to succeed in a place that’s like a toilet, and you always come out of a toilet with a smell.
- David Reuben
Today, not starting is far, far worse than being wrong. If you start, you’ve got a shot at evolving and adjusting to turn your wrong into a right. But if you don’t start, you never get a chance.
- Seth Godin
If something is expensive to develop, and somebody’s not going to get paid, it won’t get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
- Bill Gates
[On a company founder.] A founder is not a job, it’s a role, it’s an attitude. And it’s something that can happen again, and again, and again. In fact it has to happen, again and again and again. Otherwise we would not move forward.
- Jack Dorsey
Beverages have to be created. And they’re created by looking at what trend is in, say, the fashion industry – what color’s hot right now.
- Howard Schultz
Es interesante que cuando Jesús quiso animar a sus seguidores a expandir su visión, les recordó que no se echa vino nuevo en odres viejos”.2 Jesús estaba diciendo que no puedes tener una vida abundante con actitudes restringidas. Esa.
- Joel Olsteen
I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial… I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.
- Winston Churchill
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
Some people do really find fault like there’s a reward for it.
- Zig Ziglar
Encouragement is the fuel on which hope runs.
- Zig Ziglar
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). At the other extreme, a lone genius.
- Peter Thiel
This is just going to be a great event and we have an outstanding speaker.
- Jack Taylor
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
- Henry Ford
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.
- Timothy Ferriss
I am amazed that CNN can’t get its act together.
- Rupert Murdoch
As an entrepreneur, I try to push the limits. Pedal to the metal.
- Travis Kalanick
My conclusion on Freewill and predestination- they are identical.
- Winston Churchill
Globally, business and government leaders are beginning to dramatically transform their traditional business models into Internet economy business models, … Customers are increasingly seeking Cisco’s expertise to help them through this transformation.
- John Chambers
When you are committed to doing what’s right, you are sowing seeds for God’s blessings. You will never go wrong by taking the high road and doing more that is required.
- Joel Olsteen
Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.
- Yoda
No genuine leader is ever too busy to do anything which may be required of him in his capacity as leader. When a man, whether he is a leader of followers, admits he is too busy to change his plans, or to give attention to any emergency, he admits his inefficiency. The successful leader must be the master of all details connected with his position.
- Napoleon Hill
We’re extremely adroit at hiding our fear. Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we’re afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason.
- Seth Godin
I think we are not serious about attacking the long-term debt problem, and that’s one of the things that he’s going to have to find a way to get on the agenda.
- Michael Bloomberg
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
- Steve Jobs
Facing a market which awaited exploration and development, the Group decided to become a pioneer in its economic reform by taking up the responsibility to engage in the development of the Mainland.
- Cheng Yu-tung
First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.
- Peter Thiel
If you’re going to buy a real book, a paper book, there better be a good reason. Perhaps scarcity is one of those reasons.
- Seth Godin
I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
- Winston Churchill
Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.
- Peter Thiel
I am so disturbed by kids who spend all day playing videogames.
- Larry Ellison
You have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.
- Phil Knight
Failures are life’s way of nudging you and letting you know you are off course. Trying new things and not being afraid to fail along the way are more important than what you learn in school.
- Sara Blakely
One out of every five page views in the United States is on Facebook!
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.
- Oprah Winfrey
My revenue was $4 million my first year in business, off of one $20 item.
- Sara Blakely
It was definitely kind of surprising to see us come out and run the ball because we usually like to pass to start the game and put up some quick points. But tonight, we had real good balance offensively. We ran and passed the ball well, which kept them off balance all night.
- Jack Taylor
I have never known a concern to make a decided success that did not do good, honest work, and even in these days of fiercest competition, when everything would seem to be a matter of price, there lies still at the root of great business success the very much more important factor of quality. The eff …
- Andrew Carnegie
Ideas are cheap. The difficult part is finding the team to execute them.
- Raymond Kwok
Kickstarter eliminates the risk that publishers and booksellers face. They have limited resources and limited shelf space, and Kickstarter is proof to them that something is going to work.
- Seth Godin
We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.
- Winston Churchill
In the years to come, that lure of partnership helped us attract a lot of good managers, but I don’t believe that we ever had one who bought more stock than Willard. And of course he feels pretty good about it today. – Sam Walton (on human resources, hiring, early history of Wal-Mart)
- Sam Walton
Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.” Everyone around the table nodded assent. “Then,” continued Mr. Sloan, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.
- Peter Drucker
