Notable Quotables

If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.

- Ben Horowitz

A definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.

- Peter Thiel

If your business is not a brand, it is just a commodity.

- Donald Trump

We are interested in others when they are interested in us.

- Dale Carnegie

Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed and quality of those decisions.

- Ben Horowitz

A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.

- Peter Thiel

Giving should be entered into in just the same way as investing. Giving is investing.

- John D. Rockefeller

One of the main reasons that we lose our enthusiasm in life is because we become ungrateful..we let what was once a miracle become common to us. We get so accustomed to his goodness it becomes a routine..

- Joel Olsteen

Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

- Peter Thiel

Don’t kill competition. Competition is healthy for businesses. It keeps you – the entrepreneur – on your toes.

- Aliko Dangote

Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious—but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.

- James C. Collins

The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively – I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook – it sounds trivial, but people matter.

- Reid Hoffman

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

- John C. Maxwell

Sound character provides the power with which a person may ride the emergencies of life instead of being overwhelmed by them. Failure is… the highway to success.

- Og Mandino

If you want to be obsessed to be your best, you must get ride of the negative things that are weighing you down.

- George Foreman

[On someone with a new idea.] The first thing is to draw it out, program it, play with it and get other people playing with it so you can get feedback right away… Once you get that feedback you know if it’s something you should pursue and give more of your attention to, or if it’s something you should put on the shelf for another da

- Jack Dorsey

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.

- Richard Branson

Present my story and the difficulties that I have faced. As an entrepreneur, a CEO.

- Ben Horowitz

It’s not time,” “Take it easy,” “Wait and see,” “It’s someone else’s turn” – none of these stalls are appropriate for a leader in search of change. There’s a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late. The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.

- Seth Godin

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want that on my business card.

- Bill Gates

Every pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, but every optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

- Winston Churchill

I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.

- Jeff Bezos

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

Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.

- Bill Gates

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

- Bob Dylan

I’m a big believer than a great bit is a great bit – if I go and see someone I love, like Robert Klein. I want to hear some classics and some new stuff. But a great stand-up bit takes a long time to really polish and perfect, and they’re beautiful things when they’re done.

- Jerry Seinfeld

A lovely nook of forest scenery, or a grand rock, like a beautiful woman, depends for much of its attractiveness upon the attendance sense of freedom from whatever is low; upon a sense of purity and of romance.

- P.T. Barnum

When you go through enough dark places, you don’t complain about little things. You don’t lose your joy because you got stuck in traffic; you don’t get offended because a coworker was rude to you. You’ve been through too much to let that sour you.

- Joel Olsteen

Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20th.

- Peter Thiel

It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested? Collin’s advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.

- James C. Collins

The protestor I think will speak up for the world’s poorest.

- Bill Gates

I will take as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time.

- Timothy Ferriss

Post-9/11, we saw an immediate uptick in the amount of people in our stores, all over the country. People wanted that human connection. We are not going to fracture the Starbucks experience.

- Howard Schultz

For now, if the Hong Kong environment doesn’t change, then in the long term, investing in Hong Kong is best.

- Lee Shau Kee

If you treat your wife like a thoroughbred, you’ll never end up with a nag.

- Zig Ziglar

When marketing put yourself in the shoes of the customer.

- David Novak

I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus.

- Larry Page

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

- Jack London

To do what you wanna do, to leave a mark – in a way that you think is important and lasting – that’s a life well-lived.

- Laurene Powell Jobs

Learn to speak God’s favor over every area of your life. Remember, the more favor-minded you are, the more of God’s favor you’re going to experience.

- Joel Olsteen

Take one cup of love, two cups of loyalty, three cups of forgiveness, four quarts of faith and one barrel of laughter. Take love and loyalty and mix them thoroughly with faith; blend with tenderness, kindness and understanding. Add friendship and hope. Sprinkle abundantly with laughter. Bake it with sunshine. Wrap it regularly with lots of hugs. Serve generous helpings daily.

- Zig Ziglar

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

You can change everything about your business by changing your thinking about your business.

- Zig Ziglar

I have this system where if I buy three or four new things, I give away three or four things. Sometimes, it’s a very painful system, but shopping is even better when you know that someone else who needs it will be getting. Keep the clothing karma going, I say.

- Sara Blakely

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.

- Steve Jobs

I like sports, and I enjoy playing basketball and lifting weights.

- Joel Olsteen

[In February 2011] We’ve not done a lot of marketing whatsoever. A lot of it has just been word of mouth.

- Jack Dorsey

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

Consider this: you are today what you believed about yourself yesterday. And you will be tomorrow what you believe about yourself right now.

- Joel Olsteen

I know a lot of people are upset by our decision but it is something we have deliberated for a number of years.

- Sergey Brin

The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did

- Ben Horowitz

Execution begins with a vision and your people saying, I understand it. I’m excited about it. I can help make it happen.

- David Novak

I’ve actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don’t mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.

- Elon Musk

Someday, man will harness the rise and fall of the tides, imprison the power of the sun, and release atomic power.

- Thomas Edison

In the game of life, before you get anything out, you must put something in!

- Zig Ziglar

When you have got a thing where you want, it is a good thing to leave it where it is.

- Winston Churchill

Mudhole? Slimy? My home this is!

- Yoda

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

- Jerry Seinfeld

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible.

- Peter Thiel

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

- Ben Horowitz

The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake- you can’t learn anything from being perfect.

- Adam Osborne

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

- Zig Ziglar

It’s OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don’t want them to catch up because we’re slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.

- Bill Gates

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

- Albert Einstein

If David our CEO, devotes so much of his time to this, then all this stuff about teamwork and learning how to be a great leader must be pretty important.

- David Novak

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.

- Bill Gates

To grasp and hold a vision, that is the very essence of successful leadership—not only on the movie set where I learned it, but everywhere.

- Ronald Reagan

You are at the top when: You have made friends with your past, are focused on the present, and are optimistic about your future.

- Zig Ziglar

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

- Anais Nin

Many salespeople feel that selling is warfare: the buyer is the enemy and words are ammunition…The seller’s advances are turned aside because they are so predictable, amateurish and easily deflected.

- Jerry Vass

If we do not have time to do it right the first time when will we have time to come back and do it right again later?

- Lee Cockerell

Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.

- Winston Churchill

I learned about why startups should train their people when I worked at Netscape. People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense.

- Ben Horowitz

The accumulation of great fortunes calls for POWER and power is acquired through highly organized and intelligently directed specialized knowledge, but that knowledge does not necessarily have to be in the possession of the man who accumulates the fortune.

- Napoleon Hill

It is impossible to divide the interest of a country and a company that works on its soil.

- Vagit Alekperov

To be willing to do new things you don’t think you’ll like requires you to prefer the unknown. Not just to tolerate it, but to prefer it. One way to achieve that is to set out to experience things you’re sure you won’t like. To have conversations that are frightening. Becoming generous beyond measure, just to see what happens. And most of all, setting out to fail. Failing helps you see how far is too far, failing helps remind you that failing isn’t fatal, and most of all, failing opens you up to succeeding.

- Seth Godin

When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.

- Ben Horowitz

If my life has had a theme, I suppose it has been a typical American theme in that, for most of it, I have been looking for happiness and success.

- Zig Ziglar

We may get knocked down on the outside, but the key to living in victory is to learn how to get up on the inside.

- Joel Olsteen

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. … The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

- Larry Ellison

If you’re a surfer, you just want to surf. You don’t know if anyone’s going to see you, and you don’t really care if they see you. You just live for that feeling.

- Jerry Seinfeld

My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.

- Reid Hoffman

Long-range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.

- Peter Drucker

I recall that Harry made a trip to San Bernardino about the time we were really starting to roll, and Dick McDonald asked him what he thought the future of McDonald’s would be. Harry told him that one day this company would be bigger than F. W. Woolworth. Dick really did a double take at that. He told me later, ‘I thought you had a genuine nut on your hands, Ray.’ But Harry knew exactly where he wanted to go, and he knew how to get there.

- Ray Kroc

You may think there is a lot wrong with you, but there is also a lot right with you.

- Joel Olsteen

A good startup should have the potential for great scale built into its first design.

- Peter Thiel

The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.

- Bill Gates

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them…let them be your friends.

- Winston Churchill

Andy Andrews is the best speaker I have ever seen.

- Zig Ziglar

L.A. is only where you live, because otherwise it’s just a sprawling mass of everything, and I think if you live in L.A., you get a little network of places you go, and people you see, and when you leave town, you do miss those places and your friends.

- Steve Martin

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