Notable Quotables

The most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”

- Ben Horowitz

Being productive gives people a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that loafing never can.

- Zig Ziglar

About half of our wives do not work outside the home. The number-one occupation for those wives who do work is teacher.

- Thomas J Stanley

Last I looked – and I’m not a candidate – but last time I checked reading about the Constitution, the Electoral College has nothing to do with parties, has absolutely nothing to do with parties. It’s most states are winners take all.

- Michael Bloomberg

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

Students of public speaking continually ask, How can I overcome self-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before an audience? Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that some horses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at the thundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing a farmer’s wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse as the train goes by? How would you cure a horse that is afraid of cars—graze him in a back-woods lot where he would never see steam-engines or automobiles, or drive or pasture him where he would frequently see the machines? Apply horse-sense to ridding yourself of self-consciousness and fear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying. You can never attain freedom from stage-fright by reading a treatise. A book may give you excellent suggestions on how best to conduct yourself in the water, but sooner or later you must get wet, perhaps even strangle and be half scared to death. There are a great many wetless bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim in them. To plunge is the only way.

- Dale Carnegie

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.

- Bill Gates

The thing you fear most has no power. Your fear of it is what has the power. Facing the truth really will set you free.

- Oprah Winfrey

[On stopping working and focussing 100% on his company Nike] I was still teaching accounting, but the next year, I told Penny [married in 1968] if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I’m going to go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000. I said, that ‘s close enough.

- Phil Knight

Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.

- Dale Carnegie

I think you have a danger of regulating, putting regulations in place which will mean there will be no press in 10 years to regulate.

- Rupert Murdoch

I think every Internet user likes personalization.

- Ma Huateng

Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.

- Peter Drucker

I feel like my message is to let people know that God is a good God, that He’s on their side, and no matter what happens, He has a great plan for them.

- Joel Olsteen

The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.

- Peter Thiel

believe God is going before my child lining up the right people to come across his path, taking away the wrong people, breaking every force of darkness, opening his eyes to every deception, and giving him the wisdom to make good choices to fulfill his destiny.” The Scripture tells us that the people of Israel.

- Joel Olsteen

Plan and execute your first failure so that you no longer have to fear it.

- John C. Maxwell

1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward.2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

- Peter Thiel

Entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.

- Peter Drucker

However, when you add competition to consume scarce resources, it’s hard to see how a global plateau could last indefinitely. Without new technology to relieve competitive pressures, stagnation is likely to erupt into conflict. In case of conflict on a global scale, stagnation collapses into extinction.

- Peter Thiel

Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

- Dale Carnegie

Well, all comedy starts with anger. You get angry, and its never for a good reason, right? You know its not a good reason. And then you try and work it from there.

- Jerry Seinfeld

If Alibaba cannot become a Microsoft or Wal-Mart, I will regret it for the rest of my life.

- Jack Ma

Some things you can only learn in the struggle. When it’s easy, when everything is going your way, that doesn’t take any faith.

- Joel Olsteen

Complaints are your best learning opportunity

- Bill Gates

If salespeople don’t probe well for background information, they don’t know how to launch the presentation.

- Jerry Vass

Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.

- Warren G. Tracy

We’re running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere… can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.

- Elon Musk

The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.

- Ben Horowitz

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

Being a great leader means sometimes pissing people off.

- Colin Powell

The millionaires and billionaires who chose to invest in Australia are actually those who most help the poor and our young. This secret needs to be spread widely.

- Gina Rinehart

Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.

- Warren Buffett

Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.

- Benjamin Franklin

One of the great things about Lanai is that the weather is always fabulous. Always 82 degrees and sunny. The problem is that, like California now, Lanai needs more water.

- Larry Ellison

The skill sets it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, a successful marketer, or a relevant celebrity is a different skill set than you needed ten years ago, even though that was the skill set that mattered for decades.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep form meddling with them while they do it.

- Theodore Roosevelt

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

- Jeff Bezos

Motivation doesn’t last, neither does shower. That why we need it everyday.

- Zig Ziglar

I enjoy myself a lot but I derive my joy from working. I believe in hard work and one of my business success secret is hard work.

- Aliko Dangote

Happiness does not depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.

- Dale Carnegie

You have to understand your own personal DNA. Don’t do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Without passion, you don’t have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

- Donald Trump

Dr. Franklin says “it is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself I should not care for fine clothes or furniture.

- P.T. Barnum

If you and I go around grumbling about ingratitude, who is to blame? Is it human nature—or is it our ignorance of human nature? Let’s not expect gratitude. Then, if we get some occasionally, it will come as a delightful surprise. If we don’t get it, we won’t be disturbed. Here is the first point I am trying to make in this chapter: It is natural for people to forget to be grateful; so, if we go around expecting gratitude, we are headed straight for a lot of heartaches.

- Dale Carnegie

I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way.

- Steve Wozniak

A remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers and warmed and cheered all our hearts.

- Winston Churchill

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.

- Walt Disney

Google’s done a super good job on search. Apple’s done a great job on the iPod.

- Bill Gates

He has always been like this. His mind works ten times faster than everybody’s else’s. I mean he just gets going and stays two or three jumps ahead, and he’s quick to go with what’s on his mind. If he gets something in his mind that needs to be done – regardless of what else might have been planned – the new idea takes priority, and it has to be done now. Everybody has their angenda already scheduled, and then bang! He just calls a meeting on something. (on CEO leadership and management with speed)

- Loretta Boss Parker

After its return to China, Hong Kong has become an inseparable part of this large country by exerting its business strengths to become a vital member of the country and developing its four pillar industries, namely finance, commerce, shipping and professional services.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP.

- Peter Thiel

I’d work in the store all day, then take off around closing and drive that windy road over the Mississippi River, and then into Tennessee with an old homemade trailer I had hitched to my car. I’d stuff that car and trailer with whatever I could get good deals on – usually on soft lines, ladies panties and nylons, men’s shirts and I’d bring them back, price them low and just blow that stuff out of the store.

- Sam Walton

Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.

- Peter Thiel

Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it’s a powerful metaphor: in business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.

- Peter Thiel

The three Rs in educationare reading, writing and arithmetic. Without these basic skills, learning becomes almost impossible. In a similar way, business starts with a relationship. You are then judged by the results. Rewards spring from the results.

- Jack Nadel

It’s hard to improve public education – that’s clear.

- Bill Gates

Where you start is not as important as where you finish.

- Zig Ziglar

Disneyland will never be the completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.

- Walt Disney

No company should depend on one person no matter how that person is smart or genius, whether it’s Apple or News Corp, or Citibank or any other company in the world.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.

- Winston Churchill

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

- Ben Horowitz

My God, these guys don’t even know what the return-on-investment will be on this thing.

- James C. Collins

On behalf of the employees of Cisco, we send our deepest sympathy and condolences to all of those affected by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, … This has been a crushing blow to the residents of the Gulf Coast and we stand by them, ready to help.

- John Chambers

Becoming a member of the new rich is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.”Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness.”By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.

- Timothy Ferriss

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

- Peter Drucker

Where is the love that will overlook a person’s faults?

- Joel Olsteen

You have to have a dream, whether big or small. Then plan, focus, work hard and be very determined to achieve your goals.

- Henry Sy

In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren’t management books out there that could help me.

- Ben Horowitz

What most people know but don’t realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn’t there, we’d be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.

- Elon Musk

I tell people that we must have the courage to share what we feel, but no one follows me.

- Tadashi Yanai

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

- Henry Ford

We believe our growth rate indicates that Cisco continues to gain market share against our traditional competitors in most product sectors.

- John Chambers

We have a very wide range of content, but the brand-newest movies, what’s happening with those is a $30 pay-per-view option – not from Netflix but from DirecTV and others – of movies that are in the theater.

- Reed Hastings

The habit of doing more than paid for. One of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness upon the part of the leader to do more than he requires of his followers.

- Napoleon Hill

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 got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

- Mark Zuckerberg

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

- Winston Churchill

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don’t read much anymore.

- Steve Martin

Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate?

- Larry Page

Tip 49 – The trip to success should be as much fun as arriving at the destination.

- Jack Nadel

Cupcakes The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor. The third time, you might improvise and screw up. Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can. At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen. Others merely plod along. They’re cooks, not chefs. A cook follows a recipe. A chef invents one. We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs.

- Seth Godin

There should be order if the development of the cyber world is to be sustainable.

- Ma Huateng

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 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

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

Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s roof when your own doorstep is unclean.

- Confucius

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the ‘naturals’, the ones who somehow know how to teach.

- Peter Drucker

Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it.

- John Naisbitt

Maintain a pragmatic approach, keep up with the multitude of trials and strive to remain its level of attainment in order for achieving sound performance and scaling new heights.

- Cheng Yu-tung

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