The lower and individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his potential.
- John Maxwell
Notable Quotables
Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be. If we do our best, we are a success.
- Zig Ziglar
People who are using it to sell things on Craigslist to holding garage sales – campaigns – the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign both used Square to raise funds.
- Jack Dorsey
My strength is programming. I also think my biggest strength is simplification. That’s what I love doing.
- Jack Dorsey
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
When people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options.
- Peter Thiel
The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts.
- James C. Collins
Without a sense of fairness and justice, no leader can command and retain the respect of his followers.
- Napoleon Hill
In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.
- Peter Thiel
Have you ever heard of Gmail? Ever used it? If so, it’s not because Gmail ran a lot of TV ads (they didn’t). It’s because the manifesto of free email got to you.
- Seth Godin
Great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.
- Peter Thiel
It is clothes. It is parts. Therefore, you combine the parts differently to create your own unique expression.
- Tadashi Yanai
Service for the Right Reasons: To Save the Whales, or Kill Them and Feed the Children? Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.
- Oscar Wilde
My biggest concern is that America is drifting towards mediocrity and that people don’t recognize – and by people I’m meaning Washington – don’t recognize the sense of urgency and the fact that I don’t think this is a crisis anymore. I think it’s an emergency.
- Howard Schultz
you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.
- Dale Carnegie
The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
- Warren G. Bennis
Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.
- Seth Godin
Well, yes, I’ve fired a lot of people. Generally I like other people to fire, because it’s always a lousy task. But I have fired many people.
- Donald Trump
I’ve seen the promised land, and there is good news. You can have it all.
- Timothy Ferriss
Life is bigger than processes and overflows and dwarfs them.
- Dale Carnegie
You need editors, not brand managers,who will push the envelope to make [a brand media property] go forward.
- Seth Godin
Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.
- Sam Walton
Tell them to grab on to the career that engages their brain and heart and soul and gives them meaning. Tell them that eventually, the money will come, and if it doesn’t, in time, they will find themselves rich with something money can’t buy. And that, obviously, would be happiness.
- Jack Welch
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
Winners Evaluate Themselves In A Positive Manner And Look For Their Strengths As They Work To Overcome Weaknesses.
- Zig Ziglar
Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.
- Og Mandino
It’s not enough to do good things. You have to let people know what you’re doing.
- Phil Knight
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
A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.
- Peter Drucker
The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.
- George Lucas
A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn’t exactly been one of moderation.
- Donald Trump
[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
Traditional corporations, particularly large-scale service and manufacturing businesses are organized for efficiency. Or consistency. But not joy. Joy comes from surprise and connection and humanity and transparency and new…If you fear special requests, if you staff with cogs, if you have to put it all in a manual, then the chances of amazing someone are really quite low. These organizations have people who will try to patch problems over after the fact, instead of motivated people eager to delight on the spot.The alternative, it seems, is to organize for joy. These are the companies that give their people the freedom (and the expectation) that they will create, connect and surprise. These are the organizations that embrace someone who make a difference, as opposed to searching the employee handbook for a rule that was violated.
- Seth Godin
Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.
- Napoleon Hill
Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.
- Winston Churchill
The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.
- Michael Dell
If you’re brilliant and undiscovered and underappreciated (in whatever field you choose), then you’re being too generous about your definition of brilliant.
- Seth Godin
The thing that I’m going to focus on today is essentially the cloud that has been over Nike’s head over the last couple years.
- Phil Knight
[On the Swoosh] It was 1971 and Ford had spent $2 million getting a trademark. We didn’t have $2 million. So I went by the graphic arts department at Portland State
- Phil Knight
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
- Warren Buffett
Pick a movement. Pick something you believe in. Pick something you want to have an impact in and then question every single thing and be a founder, and be an entrepreneur inside those organizations and inside that movement.
- Jack Dorsey
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
- Winston Churchill
I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
- Bill Gates
We remain confident about the market opportunity ahead of us over the next three to five years.
- John Chambers
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
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
Disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge, not a technological one.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Let’s never try to get even with our enemies, because if we do we will hurt ourselves far more than we hurt them. Let’s do as General Eisenhower does: let’s never waste a minute thinking about people we don’t like.
- Dale Carnegie
[On Howard White] Rather than say to young people that they should have a goal and focus on it, he reverses it: ‘Any road will get you there if you don’t know where you’re going.’ Most often, on reflection, you will grow to understand that what had passed for a funny commnet of the moment has a good deal of wisdom behind it.
- Phil Knight
I’ve always leaned toward a feminine, funky style, even in business settings. I used to paint my nails blue in 1993, before it was mainstream.
- Sara Blakely
The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.
- Napoleon Hill
We are making these changes at a time when we are beginning to see signs that our business is stabilizing.
- John Chambers
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
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
Managing and navigating through a financial crisis is no fun at all.
- Howard Schultz
Health is worth more than learning.
- Thomas Jefferson
Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.
- Winston Churchill
I have this old ’57 Porsche Speedster, and the way the door closes, I’ll just sit there and listen to the sound of the latch going, ‘cluh-CLICK-click.’ That door! I live for that door. Whatever the opposite of planned obsolescence is, that’s what I’m into.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.
- Peter Drucker
If you talk about Cabernet and Merlot-based value between $10 and $25, I will tell you that Bordeaux is the best value in the world.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Improvement is to invent something completely new.
- Peter Thiel
“High expectations are the key to everything.”
- Sam Walton
Some of the things I see around town are just disgusting.
- Jack Taylor
To my mind, there is a solution which has to do with democracy, because democratic governments are subject to the will of the people. So, if the people will it, you can actually create international institutions through the democratic states.
- George Soros
We sold ‘Seinfeld’ all over the world but it was a very specific kind of show. In some countries it went down really well, in others they hated it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
What goes on in Europe concerns us greatly because, if Europe comes apart, the E.U. comes apart, then you’re going to have enormous impact on America, that’s a very big trading partner of ours, and people own securities around the world in this day and age.
- Michael Bloomberg
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
- Jeff Bezos
I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.
- Joel Olsteen
The key to high-quality communication is trust, and it’s hard to trust somebody that you don’t know.
- Ben Horowitz
In tennis, you strike a ball just after the rebound for the fastest return. It’s the same with investment.
- Masayoshi Son
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?
- Winston Churchill
Meeting Coach Wooden, the most humble leader I’ve ever met, made me think about my ego, about as the wise John Weinberg once put it, the difference between growing and swelling.
- David Novak
I think Yahoo is a great company, with great assets.
- Jack Ma
I think we are living in a time where the consumer has lots of choices, whether it’s coffee, newspapers or whatever it is. And there is parity in the market place, and as a result of that, the consumer is beginning to make decisions, not just on what things cost and the convenience of it.
- Howard Schultz
If the merit of the idea is strong, it spreads really quickly no matter who you are or where you are from.
- Jack Dorsey
It’s our faith that activates the power of God.
- Joel Olsteen
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.
- Thomas Edison
More people will yell and wave at you to tell you that you forgot to close the gas cap than the amount of people who will stop to tell you that you are going the wrong direction with your life.
- Clay Clark
Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
- Winston Churchill
You spend so much time in the world of virtual that the actual – which nothing is more actual than stand-up – it’s a painful experience for the audience, and the comedian a lot of time – we miss that.
- Jerry Seinfeld
To create a big company, you need more partners, as it is hard to handle such a project alone. Such projects bring access to the expertise and management resources of the partners, and their connections above all.
- Vladimir Potanin
I don’t like accidental success. It’s what Bill Gates calls ‘random,’ a term he uses with the opposite of respect.
- Masayoshi Son
We modeled our employee stock ownership plan after Sam’s, and it worked well for us.
- Bernie Marcus
On all open platforms, regardless of whether it’s Facebook or the Apple App Store, the largest segment is entertainment and games. It’s the largest revenue segment. And it’s the same for Tencent.
- Ma Huateng
I think it is a sad day for the company and we are going to miss him. But, typically of him, he has planned his own succession immaculately. We will have a dinner and a nice party for him.
- Simon Wolfson
A lot of preachers’ kids are some of the most rebellious kids in the world. I never was like that.
- Joel Olsteen
Starting a company is a very tough thing. There’s a friend of mine, Bill Lee, whose phrase is ‘starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.’ So you should certainly expect that it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be harder than getting a job somewhere by a pretty good margin and the odds of you losing the money that you invested or your friends invested is pretty high. I mean, those are just the basic facts. So if you don’t mind things being really hard and high risk, then starting a company is a good idea. Otherwise, it’s probably unwise. It will certainly stress you out. So I think you have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.
- Elon Musk
But I believe in fair trade, and I will tell you, I have many, many friends heading up corporations, and people that do just business in China, they say it’s virtually impossible. It’s very, very hard to come into China. And yet, we welcome them with open arms.
- Donald Trump
Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there.
- Timothy Ferriss
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.
Certainly there are times in all of our lives when bad things happen, or things don’t turn out as we had hoped. But that’s when we we must a decision that we’re going to be happy inspite of our circumstances.
- Joel Olsteen
Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
- Winston Churchill
Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.
- Henry Ford
I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving.
- Steve Martin
In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.
- Seth Godin
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
- Steve Jobs
Opportunity is often missed because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas Edison
People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete – the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.
- Peter Drucker
When you view marketing from the vantage point of the guerrilla, you realize that it’s your opportunity to help your prospects and customers succeed. They want to succeed at earning more money, building their company, losing weight, attracting a mate, becoming more fit, or quitting smoking. You can help them. You can show them how to achieve their goal. Marketing is not about you. It’s about them. I hope you never forget that.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.
- Elon Musk
