Notable Quotables

Don’t go in and tell somebody else how to run their business.

- Carl Icahn

I see this as my humanitarian legacy. We’re prepared to pay billions.

- Sheldon Adelson

the more ‘Yeses’ we can, at the very outset, induce, the more likely we are to succeed in capturing the attention for our ultimate proposal.

- Dale Carnegie

I never worry because I know who I am and I know Whose I am.

- Zig Ziglar

…Treasure what it means to do a day’s work. It’s our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it’s certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day’s work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you’ll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.

- Seth Godin

Definite planning even went beyond the surface of this planet: NASA’s Apollo Program began in 1961 and put 12 men on the moon before it finished in 1972.

- Peter Thiel

In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we’d go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father’s televised service for 17 years.

- Joel Olsteen

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

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

In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases.

- Bill Gates

The Chinese who left the mother country had to struggle, and that became a culture of its own, passed on… through each generation. Because we have no social security, the overseas Chinese habit is not to spend a lot and to make a lot of friends.

- Lee Shau Kee

When the pressure is on, great leaders are at the their best.

- Napoleon Hill

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

The best way to predict the Future is with a Great, Unique Abilities Team

- Terry Powell

[Medco] had a different culture with respect to spending money. I believe health care demands that we be as frugal as possible and pay money for things that matter. We’re pretty frugal. Everybody has the same size offices. Everybody has the same size cube. There are no perks.

- George Paz

I would like to be remembered, if I am remembered at all, as being a catalyst for change in the world, change for good.

- Rupert Murdoch

It’s what we wrestle with every single day. The intersection of comfort, danger, and safety. The balancing act between vulnerability and shame. The opportunity (or the risk) to do art. The willingness to take responsibility for caring enough to make a difference and to have a point of view.

- Seth Godin

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 job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it’s a job.Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.I call the process of doing your art ‘the work.’ It’s possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that’s how you become a linchpin.The job is not the work.

- Seth Godin

To grow your company explosively you must have leaders, not just efficient managers.

- John Maxwell

Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

- Napoleon Hill

You need to be around people who know more than you and have more talent than you. Don’t be intimidated by them, be inspired.

- Joel Olsteen

I’m very, very bullish about our prospects, and as I tell our board, as I tell our employees, this is the time to invest. There’s so much opportunity. Let’s just invest in that opportunity, and really get after it.

- Steve Ballmer

Pick the best people, face the reality (the way it is), speak with candor to everything, never lose sight of the relationship with the constituency.

- Jack Welch

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

You don’t need a big close, as many sales reps believe. You risk losing your customer when you save all the good stuff for the end. Keep the customer actively involved throughout your presentation, and watch your results improve.

- Harvey Mackay

2006, I started ‘WineLibrary TV.’ To build ‘WineLibrary TV,’ I started using Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter in 2008.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

You cannot perform in a manner inconsistent with the way you see yourself.

- Zig Ziglar

About 80% of our locations are second-generation. In other words, the building used to be, say, a Wal-Mart that moved out to become a Super Wal-Mart, or a Kmart that closed. It seems that such a site becomes available almost every year in every city.

- David Green

General and undifferentiated pitches don’t say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of many others.

- Peter Thiel

Crash diets don’t work.They don’t work for losing weight, they don’t work for making sales quota and they don’t work for getting and keeping a job.The reason they don’t work has nothing to do with what’s on the list of things to be done (or consumed). No, the reason they don’t work is that they don’t change habits, and habits are where our lives and careers and bodies are made.

- Seth Godin

If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them—not that they are working for you.

- Sam Walton

If you say you want to automate cars and save people’s lives, the skills you need for that aren’t taught in any particular discipline. I know – I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.

- Larry Page

Applied Faith – Faith is a state of mind through which your aims, desires, plans and purposes may be translated into their physical or financial equivalent.

- Napoleon Hill

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without vicory there is no survival.

- Winston Churchill

When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.

- Zig Ziglar

From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.

- Elon Musk

I believe if you keep your faith, you keep your trust, you keep the right attitude, if you’re grateful, you’ll see God open up new doors.

- Joel Olsteen

The question isn’t ‘What do we want to know about people?’ It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?

- Mark Zuckerberg

We want the brand to stand for the same thing all over the world

- Phil Knight

The entrepreneur builds an enterprise, the technician builds a job.

- Michael Gerber

We’re seeing an explosion in new approaches, new models and new forms of interaction. This growth comes from change, insight and exploration, not obedience.

- Seth Godin

IQ is a commodity, data is a commodity. I’m far more interested in watching people interact at a restaurant with their smartphone. We can all read ‘Tech Crunch,’ ‘Ad Age.’ I would rather be living in the trenches. I would rather be going to Whole Foods in Columbus Circle to watch people shop with their smartphones.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Every sale has 5 basic obstacles: need, money, hurry, desire, trust.

- Zig Ziglar

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

- Warren Buffett

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.

- Peter Thiel

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.

- Dale Carnegie

Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

- Dale Carnegie

The most common cause of fear of old age is associated with the possibility of poverty.

- Napoleon Hill

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

- Bill Gates

Wonder what your customer really wants? Ask. Don’t tell.

- Lisa Stone

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

- Zig Ziglar

You cannot get into business for the fashion of it.

- Azim Premji

The student who elects to risk it all—which is nothing—to establish an online video rental service that delivers $5,000 per month in income from a small niche of Blu-ray aficionados, a two-hour-per-week side project that allows him to work full-time as an animal rights lobbyist.

- Timothy Ferriss

Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don’t show up. They want to be missed when they’re gone.

- Seth Godin

None of us got to where we are alone. Whether the assistance we received was obvious or subtle, acknowledging someone’s help is a big part of understanding the importance of saying thank you.

- Harvey Mackay

I have the courage to surround myself with people who are smarter than me.

- Andrew Carnegie

While we remain cautious about the implications of a brief pause in the current 10-year expansion of the U.S. economy, we believe that Cisco has never been better positioned to help our customers solve their two most important business issues: Increasing productivity and creating new sources of revenue.

- John Chambers

You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war. – To Neville Chamberlain

- Winston Churchill

the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19

- James C. Collins

If you believe as I do that you were born to win, you’re going to have to find your fears and start facing them.

- Zig Ziglar

If you wish to build a powerful personal network, branch out. Build a diverse network of professional contacts that includes people that don’t look like you, sound like you, speak like you or have your background, education or history. The only thing they should have in common with you and the other people in your network is that they should be really good at what they do. Create a personal network like that, and you’ll have a network that can help you succeed at anything.

- Ivan Misner

I’m much more concerned about America than the Democratic Party.

- Howard Schultz

When you give up yourself, that’s when you will feel the true spirit of Christmas. And that’s giving that’s serving others and that’s when you feel fulfilled.

- Joel Olsteen

The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative.

- Peter Thiel

Just as ships are built to sail the seas and planes to fly the heavens, so is man created for a purpose.

- Zig Ziglar

People are using Windows PCs more than they watch TV now.

- Bill Gates

Even with cameras being very cheap, one thing that researchers noticed was that you look really bad in a videoconference image because the lighting is bad and you get shadows and things.

- Bill Gates

I’m not looking for a legacy, and you’ll never shut up the critics. I’ve been around 50 years. When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.

- Rupert Murdoch

IT’S SAID that you can only live life forward and understand it backward.

- Jack Welch

The mistake that’s so easy to make is to get greedy as you choose your hive, to say, “this product is for everyone” or “anyone can benefit from this idea.” Well, there are seven billion people on the planet, so it’s unlikely your comment is correct; even if it is, there’s little chance that a virus would spread across a hive that big.

- Seth Godin

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

- Bill Gates

This generation… they have a different attitude. Instead of sitting and watching something, they want to be a part of it – they’re very hedonistic and sensual.

- Stephen Wynn

For every ailment under the sun, There is a remedy, or there is none; If there be one, try to find it; If there be none, never mind it.

- Dale Carnegie

It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future..

- Yoda

It is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.

- Winston Churchill

A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

- Mark Zuckerberg

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