You can’t move people to action unless you first move them with emotion. The heart comes before the head…to lead yourself use your head, to lead others use your heart.
- John Maxwell
Notable Quotables
Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.
- Elon Musk
There’s a belief that you’re supposed to be poor, and suffering, and show your humility. I just don’t see the Bible that way. I see that God came and Jesus died so that we might live an abundant life and be a blessing to others.
- Joel Olsteen
You must go through the process before you get the product.
- Paul Pressey
Being a good company is an end in itself.
- Ben Horowitz
Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.
- Seth Godin
By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited… The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.
- Bill Gates
The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there.People will follow.
- Seth Godin
Use what you have to get what you want.
- Jack Nadel
I’ve seen the promised land, and there is good news. You can have it all.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
- Winston Churchill
Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.
- Reid Hoffman
The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward.
- Winston Churchill
I’m concerned a little bit with the culture of celebrating the fundraise. My dad taught me that when you borrow money it’s the worst day of your life.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).
- Timothy Ferriss
Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
- Jack Nadel
I am so disturbed by kids who spend all day playing videogames.
- Larry Ellison
People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.” There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold.
- Peter Thiel
I had this very rich sense of how the metropolis was living and breathing.
- Jack Dorsey
All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.
- John C. Maxwell
The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.
- Andrew Carnegie
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
As soon as we associate reading with a test, we’ve missed the point.
- Seth Godin
Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.
- Napoleon Hill
I feel good about being able to take bluegrass on to television like ‘Letterman’ and ‘The View,’ and I’ve heard nice things about being able to do that. I really haven’t felt any negativity toward me or my music.
- Steve Martin
Start believing today that things are going to change for the better. Your best days are still out in front of you.
- Joel Olsteen
The mainstream is always under attack.
- Bill Gates
I can go into restaurants and a whole table will get up and clap if they recognize me, because they love Fox News. Other places – or even the same place – people will turn the other way.
- Rupert Murdoch
I think it’s fair to say that our distribution system today is the envy certainly of everyone in our industry, and in alot of others as well…We’ve spend almost $700 million builing up the current computer and satellite systems we have….You can’t generate sales unless you have the product there when the customer wants it.The math is pretty simple: if we both sell the same goods for the same price at retail, we’ll earn 2.5 percent more profit than they will right there.
- Sam Walton
Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
The Secret Make up your mind that no matter what comes your way, no matter how difficult, no matter how unfair, you will do more than simply survive. You will thrive in spite of it.
- Joel Olsteen
China is a government-oriented economy. No one can say he can run his business entirely without government connections. Anybody who says that he or she can do things alone… is a hypocrite.
- Wang Jianlin
Niklas Zennstroem has a thorough background as a successful entrepreneur with extensive expertise in areas such as IT and online.
- Stefan Persson
The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.
- Sergey Brin
I swore I would never get involved in another startup ever again in my entire life.
- Larry Ellison
In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.
- Reed Hastings
The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
When you find an idea that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue.
- Josh James
Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy, profit from folly rather than participate in it.
- Warren Buffett
A successful manager told me that stopped wearing a watch. She found that the work was so immersive, anchoring it to whatever hour it happened to be was pointless. The watch reminded her of the rigors of appointments and the status quo, while her goal was to be there, right here, right now, in the moment, and to do the work in front of her. The watch had no role in doing that right, so, for now, it’s gone.
- Seth Godin
If you end your training now — if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did — you will become an agent of evil.
- Yoda
With the right pitch, you’ll get no argument. This is where the salesmanship comes in…It requires of you a substantial degree of self-confidence to pull it off, but your belief in your own project will help you muster that.
- Michael Levine
The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
- Ben Horowitz
If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.
- Winston Churchill
It is one thing to see the forward path and another to be able to take it. But it is better to have an ambitious plan than none at all.
- Winston Churchill
Yeah, well I think anyone who likes fast cars will love the Tesla. And it has fantastic handling by the way. I mean this car will crush a Porsche on the track, just crush it. So if you like fast cars, you’ll love this car. And then oh, by the way, it happens to be electric and it’s twice the efficiency of a Prius.
- Elon Musk
In the 1970s, Japan moved into the U.S. turf with its televisions, cars, chips, and steel. But if you think about it, the only business Japan destroyed was the U.S. television industry.
- Fujio Mitarai
I feel a lot of people listen to what I have to say.
- Donald Trump
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
It’s a lot cheaper to be a pirate than a pioneer.
- Tim Redmond
One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.
- Ben Horowitz
One of the cornerstones of what I believe will be the future is wave after wave of applications.
- John Chambers
Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic. The best way to approach a potential break is simple: Confide in them honestly but tactfully and explain your concerns. If they bite back, your conclusions have been confirmed. Drop them like any other bad habit. If they promise to change, first spend at least two weeks apart to develop other positive influences in your life and diminish psychological dependency. The next trial period should have a set duration and consist of pass-or-fail criteria. If this approach is too confrontational for you, just politely refuse to interact with them. Be in the middle of something when the call comes, and have a prior commitment when the invitation to hang out comes. Once you see the benefits of decreased time with these people, it will be easier to stop communication altogether.
- Timothy Ferriss
Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.
- Oprah Winfrey
Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers. And once they arrive at Goldman, they find that even inside finance, everything is indefinite. It’s still optimistic—you wouldn’t play in the markets if you expected to lose—but the fundamental tenet is that the market is random; you can’t know anything specific or substantive; diversification becomes supremely important.
- Peter Thiel
I love great music and art, but I think ‘cubist’ songs and paintings are hideous.
- Thomas Edison
Respect people’s wishes.
- Jack Dorsey
Show a real interest in his problem and helping him solve it.
- Jack Nadel
Somehow over the years people have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was… just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. But…it was an outgrowth of everything we’d been doing since [1945]…. And like most overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.
- James C. Collins
We only get to play this game one time…one life.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
What’s happening is that the two groups assume that the nature of the debate is really a matter of disagreement about their own sides’ core issues. Each side is assuming that people in the other group oppose what they hold most dear to themselves – what’s most important to their side – but in fact their adversaries really don’t oppose them.
- John Chambers
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
- Steve Jobs
Everybody has a product to sell.
- Peter Thiel
Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
- Confucius
I remember one time I didn’t want to spend any money on motels so we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor of one of our guys’ houses. His furniture hadn’t gotten there yet.
- Sam Walton
Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.
- John C. Maxwell
Bordeaux would be naive not to recognize that Robert Parker was driving the brand equity. If the next generation doesn’t care about Chateau Pichon-Lalande, then you have a problem.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.
- John C. Maxwell
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
Team Together / Team Apart means you respect the final decision even if you would do something diffently, and make it happen with positive energy.
- David Novak
Disruption is like an earthquake. Disruption has no purpose. It has not values. It has no organizing principle. It has no direction and it has no leadership… This is not what we want to bring into the world. What we want to bring into the world is revolution.
- Jack Dorsey
Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.
- Winston Churchill
To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.
- Bill Gates
Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
- Warren Buffett
Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.
- Rupert Murdoch
STARTUP THINKING New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.
- Peter Thiel
Three-fourths of the people you will ever meet are hungering and thirsting for sympathy. Give it to them, and they will love you.
- Dale Carnegie
The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%.
- Andrew Carnegie
I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police…No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.
- Winston Churchill
The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.
- Warren Buffett
My biggest wish is for government, the private sector and all of us to work together to make the Philippines the best tourism destination in Southeast Asia.
- Henry Sy
Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellow the warm sunshine of praise.
- Dale Carnegie
It’s easy to dream about it … Much harder to execute it ….Work!
- Gary Vaynerchuk
[On Twitter and Japan] We’ve had massive success in Japan… In Japan, it’s not 140 characters, it’s 140 words. So you could write a little mini-novel. This is a whole story in the universe.
- Jack Dorsey
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
Because ideas have to be original only with regard to their adaptation to the problem at hand, I am always extremely interested in how others have used them….
- Thomas Edison
For me, learning to my control my temper has been a lifelong process. So has the process of being will to take risks, make mistakes and be grateful for the other person, even if I may no longer speak to or do business with that person. When I reflect back on my life, I would say that it is this mental attitude that has made me the most money, has brought me the most success, and has ultimately allowed me to have the most magic in my life.
- Robert Kiyosaki
You can learn from everybody.
- Sam Walton
Live an active life among people who are doing worthwhile things, keep eyes and ears and mind and heart open to absorb truth, and then tell of the things you know, as if you know them. The world will listen, for the world loves nothing so much as real life.
- Dale Carnegie
Other people’s successes are good news – for them and for you. Good for you because they show you a way to go.
- Stephen Wynn
We believe our growth rate indicates that Cisco continues to gain market share against our traditional competitors in most product sectors.
- John Chambers
I think it’s too early to tell.
- John Chambers
Don’t be intimidated as you design your pitch. The fact is that nobody will come to you at first. You must be the aggressor, or you will not be heard.
- Michael Levine
When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I’d get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.
- Jerry Seinfeld
How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world?
- Reed Hastings
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
To me, failure means not trying; failure isnt the outcome. If i have to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘I didnt try that because I was scared,’ that is failure.
- Sara Blakely
Look – this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do – ultimately, you’re at the end.
- Ben Horowitz
All great truths are simple in final analysis, and easily understood; if they are not, they are not great truths.
- Napoleon Hill
