I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.
- Elon Musk
Notable Quotables
Always go to the expert.
- Jack Nadel
The habit of doing more than is necessary can only be earned through practice.
- Seth Godin
We cannot continue. Our pension costs and health care costs for our employees are going to bankrupt this city.
- Michael Bloomberg
There is no shoe school, so where do you recruit people for a company that develops and markets running shoes? The running track… We and the consumer were one and the same.
- Phil Knight
Effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information. Little is worse than a manager who can’t cut bait.
- Jack Welch
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
You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.
- Andrew Carnegie
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
The work relationship has to be based on mutual respect. Psychological despotism is basically contemptuous—far more contemptuous than the traditional Theory X. It does not assume that people are lazy and resist work, but it assumes that the manager is healthy while everybody else is sick. It assumes that the manager is strong while everybody else is weak. It assumes that the manager knows while everybody else is ignorant. It assumes that the manager is right, whereas everybody else is stupid. These are the assumptions of foolish arrogance.
- Peter Drucker
A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast. Good news travels slow.
- Ben Horowitz
People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.
- Elon Musk
The construction arm of the Group always firmly adheres to the principle of ‘People is our priority’ and deploys a vast amount of resources to quality facilities and training of staff to ensure a safe and good working environment.
- Lee Shau Kee
The road to comfort is crowded and it rarely gets you there. Ironically, it’s those who seek out discomfort that are able to make a difference and find their footing.
- Seth Godin
And obviously, from our own personal point of view, the principal challenge is a personal challenge.
- Richard Branson
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
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
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply.
- Stephen R. Covey
For good or for ill, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power and fleets and armies, however vital and important, must accept a subordinate rank.
- Winston Churchill
Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
- Winston Churchill
It’s tangible, it’s solid, it’s beautiful. It’s artistic, from my standpoint, and I just love real estate.
- Donald Trump
One of [Bill] Bowerman’s more legendary innovations is the Waffle outsole, which he discovered by pouring rubber into a waffle iron.
- Phil Knight
Nothing happens until something is sold.
- Joe Ricketts
If you’re a Wal-Mart of a Meijer you can draw the shoppers without using signs to advertise your specials, … But when you’re a little guy, you really depend on those signs.
- Michael Ward
Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work.
- Bill Gates
To all of us comes that moment in life when we are literally tapped on the shoulder to do a very special thing unique to ourselves and our talents. What a pity if that moment finds us unprepared.
- Winston Churchill
If you are going to be successful, you must develop persistence. How do you do that? It is not easily condensed in one simple statement, but one thing you can be sure of is that your must define your purpose.
- Zig Ziglar
Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.
- Peter Drucker
You need editors, not brand managers,who will push the envelope to make [a brand media property] go forward.
- Seth Godin
John, never lend money to your friends; it will spoil your friendships.
- John D. Rockefeller
Computers already have enough power to outperform people in activities we used to think of as distinctively human. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Jeopardy!’s best-ever contestant, Ken Jennings, succumbed to IBM’s Watson in 2011. And Google’s self-driving cars are already on California roads today. Dale Earnhardt Jr. needn’t feel threatened by them, but the Guardian worries (on behalf of the millions of chauffeurs and cabbies in the world) that self-driving cars “could drive the next wave of unemployment.
- Peter Thiel
When you make a TV show, they always say you’re a guest in someone’s home. Online, you’re a guest in someone’s face. So that’s why I try to make it sound and look and feel very inviting and attractive, because I know that I’m in your face.
- Jerry Seinfeld
No one has any idea what’s next… the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it’s delaying the recovery.
- Stephen Wynn
All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.
- Brian Tracy
I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.
- Reid Hoffman
We must restore the emotional relationship that people have to the idea of America, that no matter where you come from, no matter where you live, that you have access to the same opportunities that somebody who is born in privilege.
- Howard Schultz
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, and do more and become more, you are a leader.
- John Quincy Adams
When you learn to listen to your fear, you’ve found a compass that can show you what matters.
- Seth Godin
We’re not in the fashion business, as the Wall Street Journal wrote the other day. We’re in the sports business, and there’s a big difference.
- Phil Knight
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.
- Winston Churchill
The challenge is this: training creative, independent, and innovative artists is new to us.
- Seth Godin
What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away.
- Jack Dorsey
Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they’ve succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.
- Ben Horowitz
Since most people have not been taught how to make mistakes and learn from them, they either avoid making mistakes altogether, which is a bigger mistake, or they make a mistake but fail to find the lesson from the mistakes.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.
- Dale Carnegie
Do not wait: the time will never be ‘just right’. Start where you stand, and work whatever tools you may have at your command and better tools will be found as you go along.
- Napoleon Hill
What you sow you reap. What you give.
- Zig Ziglar
I think my father is nearly perfect. I think he’s quite handsome, except a bit fat.
- Gina Rinehart
It’s different when you’re trying to turn something around, especially something that you built, at a time when so many constituents – the media, Wall Street, competitors, ex-employees – are all saying that Starbucks’s best days are behind it, and that Schultz is never going to be able to bring it back.
- Howard Schultz
If a hurricane strikes, we can blame the president for not being there; we can blame Congress and FEMA; we can blame the state governments; but in the end, it’s the mayors and the local city governments that have to be prepared for emergencies and be prepared to act.
- Michael Bloomberg
The mainstream is always under attack.
- Bill Gates
Much like us, our customers are rigorously working to improve their profitability and capacity for innovation. For us, this means doing everything possible when it comes to efficiency, effectiveness, and innovations – and all that on the basis of the highest quality. After all, quality creates trust – and trust creates orders. In short, we need to constantly become better and better at the high level we are already operating at.
- Elmar Degenhart
A man should never neglect his family business.
- Walt Disney
Well, today the Grammys is much much better than the Oscars. I think the differences in the shows are that the Grammys are much wilder. The Oscars is much more people in the industry. And people dress wilder, I think, at the Grammys.
- Steve Martin
People have been indoctrinated so completely by their jobs that they don’t want to know how something works, they’re willing to accept that perhaps the laws of nature don’t work as they expect, and by the way, can I have the remote?
- Seth Godin
The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves
- Ray Kroc
Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles.
- Peter Thiel
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
His friends, drunk to the point of speaking in tongues, were asleep.
- Timothy Ferriss
A Timid Trapeze Artist Is a Dead Trapeze Artist.
- Seth Godin
The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.
- Thomas Edison
I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
- Peter Thiel
In this early period, Rockefeller was a chronic worrier who labored under a great deal of self-imposed stress. Though not versed in the scientific side of refining, he often excercised a direct managerial role in the plant. With fluctuating market conditions, he sometimes needed shipments to New York with great dispatch and personally rushed down to the railroad tracks to motivate the freight handlers. I shall never forget how hungry I was in those days. I stayed out of doors day and night; I ran up and down the tops of freight cars, when necessary; I hurried up the boys.
- Ron Chernow
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Play like you’re ten points behind in the final quarter. I’ve always heard this defined as operational cadence – creating a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm of doing business that drives the relentless pursuit of results. Whatever I’ve learned about creating a sense of urgency started when I worked for Howard Davis at Tracy Locke. He really knew how to push people. Everything had to be done yesterday. And I was one of the people who go pushed. Howard was a master of intimidation. Everyone knew if you didn’t give him what he wanted, he was going to find another way to get it, and if your weren’t part of the solution then you were part of the problem. The clients loved Howard because they knew he’d kill for them (and none of us wanted to be killed). It wasn’t always comfortable, but it taught me the value of constantly putting pressure on myself and the people who work for me. In corporate America, pressure is a way of life, so rather that resist it or merely accept it, you have to learn to use it as a personal motivator.
- David Novak
If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.
- Napoleon Hill
Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.
- Dale Carnegie
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
- Bill Gates
Poor people ride the bus, because they value money more than time.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Nobody’s ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there’s some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.
- Richard Branson
Self-control – the man who cannot control himself can never control others. Self-control sets a mighty example for one’s followers, which the more intelligent will emulate.
- Napoleon Hill
God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days. Why should you and I?
- Dale Carnegie
I am a normal guy.
- Vagit Alekperov
When a study was made a few years ago on runaway wives, what do you think was discovered to be the main reason wives ran away? It was lack of appreciation.
- Dale Carnegie
If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another…so they follow.
- Seth Godin
No matter how many times you get knocked down, keep getting back up. God sees your resolve. He sees your determination. And when you do everything you can do, that’s when God will step in and do what you can’t do.
- Joel Olsteen
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
The profile of homebuyers in Hong Kong is becoming more diverse and a wider range of marketing channels is thus needed to promote the Group’s Hong Kong property projects.
- Lee Shau Kee
The U.S. has done a great job improving productivity. We’re making a lot more steel in Dearborn with fewer people. The unions have accepted much better work rules.
- Alexei Mordashov
No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.
- Andrew Carnegie
The biggest cowards are managers who don’t let people know where they stand.
- Jack Welch
When overtaken with the temporay feelings of potential failure, burn all of your bridges of retreat, thus making retreat impossible.
- Napoleon Hill
When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
- Steve Jobs
Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!
- Steve Wozniak
The lizard isn’t listening and the lizard doesn’t care.
- Seth Godin
TAKE CARE OF THE PEOPLE, THE PRODUCTS, AND THE PROFITS—IN THAT ORDER.
- Ben Horowitz
Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a particularly visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore.
- Peter Thiel
Everything about my journey to get Spanx off the ground entailed me having to be a salesperson – from going to the hosiery mills to get a prototype made to calling Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. I had to position myself to get five minutes in the door with buyers.
- Sara Blakely
If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary’s. In fact a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk of the taxes.
- Michael Bloomberg
Over the course of your career, your Detroit will surely call you at one point or another. If you can go, that’s great. If you can’t, make peace with the reasons why.
- Jack Welch
A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn’t dramatic.
- Ray Dalio
We see no indications in the marketplace that the radical Internet business transformation in practices like customer service, supply-chain management, employee training, empowerment, and e-commerce that is taking place around the world today is slowing — in fact, we believe it is accelerating globally.
- John Chambers
Uncontrolled Desire For Something For Nothing.
- Napoleon Hill
So what we do every Monday is review the whole business…I put out an agenda – 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.
- Steve Jobs
Every one of us gets through the tough times because somebody is there, standing in the gap to close it for us.
- Oprah Winfrey
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
- Albert Einstein
A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.
- John D. Rockefeller
Certainly the caffeine in coffee, whether it’s Starbucks or generic coffee, is somewhat of a stimulant. But if you drink it in moderation, which I think four or five cups a day is, you’re fine.
- Howard Schultz
We’d love to be involved with the creation of something very special, something quite large and something quite exciting.
- Richard Branson
My first large-scale community development opportunity was the formation of the Mission Viejo Co. – a partnership with the O’Neill Family, who owned Rancho Mission Viejo. As the young president of the company, I had the responsibility for master planning, master building and implementing the new community’s development plans.
- Donald Bren
