Notable Quotables

If you can’t be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can.

- Seth Godin

Don’t sit around depressed and discouraged. Get a new vision for your life.

- Joel Olsteen

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

- Winston Churchill

Experience has taught me,” says Sam Wood, that it is safest to drop, as quickly as possible, people who pretend to be what they aren’t.

- Dale Carnegie

A CEO’s job is to supervise all systems and to indentify weaknesses before the weaknesses turn into system failures. This can happen in many different ways, but it is exceptionally disconcerting when you company is growing rapidly. Your sales are increasing, your product of service is getting attention from the media, and suddenly you can’t deliver. Why? Uusually, it’s because your systems imploded from the increased demand. You didn’t have enough phone lines, or operators answering the phones. You didn’t have enough production capacity or enough hours in the week to meet the demand; or you didn’t have the money to build the product or hire additional help. Whatever the reason, you missed the opportunity to move your business to the next level of success due to failure of one of your systems…At each new level of growth, the CEO must start planning the systems needed to support the next level of growth, from phone lines to lines of credit for production needs. Systems drive both cash flow management and communication. As your systems get better, you or your employees will have to exert less and less effort. Without well-designed and successful operating systems, your business will be labor intensive. Once you have well-designed and successful operating systems, you will have a saleable business asset.

- Robert Kiyosaki

hombre que conozco es superior a mí en algún sentido. En ese sentido, aprendo de él.

- Dale Carnegie

My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

- Elon Musk

To be candid, some people have given positive thinking a bad name. I can’t stand to hear some gung-ho individual say that with positive thinking you can just do ‘anything.’ If you think about that one for a moment, you recognize the absurdity of it.

- Zig Ziglar

We were looking to guide and help people who want to start small businesses.

- David Nilssen

Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization’s history. For some reason that simple truth has evaded everybody.

- Stephen Wynn

When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization.

- Peter Thiel

I was lucky enough to co-found a business in college that ended up with 400 employees, and I launched 20 different projects while I was there – a project a week.

- Seth Godin

Success is not measured by what you do compared to what others do, it is measured by what you do with the ability God gave you.

- Zig Ziglar

Our mail product, Hotmail, is the market leader globally.

- Steve Ballmer

Our leaders in business, politics, research, and the arts are all great salespeople or they have great sales people on their payroll.

- Jerry Vass

A story is at its best when it’s not intrusive, when it brings value to a platform’s consumers, and when it fits in as a natural step along the customer’s path to making a purchase.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”

- Ben Horowitz

If what others say doesn’t match what God has put in your heart, let it go in one ear and out the other.

- Joel Olsteen

One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.

- Richard Branson

Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.

- P.T. Barnum

You may think you’ve got a long way to go, but you need to look back at how far you’ve already come. You may not be everything you want to be but atleast you can thank God that you’re not what you used to be.

- Joel Olsteen

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.

- Peter Drucker

I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful – it depends on how they’re managed.

- Ray Dalio

I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible.

- Timothy Ferriss

Do not swallow anything Satan is trying to ram down your throat. Jesus comes first.

- Joel Olsteen

Poke the box How do computer programmers learn their art? Is there a step-by-step process that guarantees you’ll get good? All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works. The box might be a computer or it might be a market or it might be a customer or it might be your boss. It’s a puzzle, one that can be solved in only one way—by poking.

- Seth Godin

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

Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.

- Bill Gates

When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.

- Walt Disney

Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.

- James C. Collins

There’s only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that’s already been written.

- Bill Gates

Interestingly, self-employed people make up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires. Also, three out of four of us who are self-employed consider ourselves to be entrepreneurs.

- The Millionaire Next Door

We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren’t that many things people use twice a day.

- Larry Page

Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.

- Michael Gerber

Life is bigger than processes and overflows and dwarfs them.

- Dale Carnegie

Japan has only 100m people. Asia has 4bn. At least one-third, maybe nearly half, will become middle class, and this is a big opportunity for Japanese businessmen.

- Tadashi Yanai

Rockefeller succeeded because he believed in the long –term prospects of the business and never treated it as a mirage that would soon fade.

- Ron Chernow

Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.

- Seth Godin

It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.

- Henry Ford

You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That’s how you know you’re still alive.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

- Dale Carnegie

People ask me what’s the most important function when you’re starting an organization or setting up the kind of culture and values that are going to endure. The discipline I believe so strongly in is H.R., and its the last discipline that gets funded.

- Howard Schultz

I’m healthy as can be – not an ache or a pain. A lot of my prayer is thanking the Lord that I am healthy. I pray for long life and good health.

- Joel Olsteen

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

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.

- Peter Drucker

We’d love to be involved with the creation of something very special, something quite large and something quite exciting.

- Richard Branson

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

- Paul Graham

You should give 80% of your time and attention to your best 20% of employees. If you have one hundred customers, the top twenty will provide you with 80% of your business.

- John Maxwell

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

There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.

- Winston Churchill

People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonald’s? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly.

- Ben Horowitz

We have two turbines in our company: One is engineering, and the other is operations. And so our business people are on equal footing with our engineering and technology culture. Cars are moving because of what we do, so there’s an imperative to go beyond just the technology.

- Travis Kalanick

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.

- Winston Churchill

The people of Southwest have always been my pride, my joy and my love. Their indomitable dedication and esprit de corps have taken Southwest from a three-airplane dream to a 500-airplane reality.

- Herb Kelleher

No matter how senior you get in an organization, no matter how well you’re perceived to be doing, your job is never done. Every day, you get up and the world is changing; your customers are expecting more from you. Your competitors are putting pressure on you by doing more and trying to beat you here and beat you there.

- Abigail Johnson

Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another.

- Seth Godin

When I started working on Southwest Airlines, I kid you not, only people flying on business and very wealthy people ever flew.

- Herb Kelleher

of preparing for defeat, prepare for victory. Prepare for increase. Prepare for God’s favor. You have to set the tone at the start of each day.

- Joel Olsteen

China’s movie industry is growing a lot faster than that of the U.S.

- Wang Jianlin

Q1 was a solid quarter for Cisco, with balanced execution across most of our geographies, market segments and product categories, … We are especially pleased with the improving business momentum in the U.S. and Asia Pacific, the strength of our product families and the accelerated growth of the commercial marketplace, which has become our fastest growing customer segment.

- John Chambers

You do not get what you want. You get what you negotiate.

- Harvey Mackay

You get to keep making art as long as you are willing to make the choices that let you make your art.

- Seth Godin

I hope you will take good care of your health, this is religious duty, and you can accomplish so much for the world if you keep well and strong.

- John D. Rockefeller

Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.

- Bill Gates

If change is happening on the outside faster than on the inside the end is in sight.

- Jack Welch

I think they are fine. I don’t think you have a choice between iPad models so that’s just saying that the iPad is good … that’s a very different statement (and contrary to the implication) that, if I chose not to upgrade now, less than a year after my last upgrade, then I, Woz, am saying that the new Apple iPad is bad.

- Steve Wozniak

They need to avoid coming at us head-on, and do their own thing better than we do ours. It doesn’t make any sense to try to underprice Walmart on something like toothpaste. That’s not what they customer is looking to a small store for anyway. Most independents are best off, I think, doing what I prided myself on doing for many years as a storekeeper, getting out front on the door and meeting everyone of the customers. Let them know how much you appreciate them, and that register yourself. That little personal touch is so important for an independent merchant because no matter how hard Walmart tries to duplicate, ad we try awfully hard, we can’t really do it.

- Sam Walton

A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

- Timothy Ferriss

Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.

- Napoleon Hill

Optimism is the most important human trait, because it allows us to evolve our ideas, to improve our situation, and to hope for a better tomorrow.

- Seth Godin

Nike is not about going to a ball game. It’s a business.

- Phil Knight

We just want to have great people working for us.

- Sergey Brin

Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.

- Henry Ford

If we can put a man on the moon, we can make pantyhose comfortable.

- Sara Blakely

They don’t call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I’m no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.

- Larry Ellison

Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.

- Napoleon Hill

My personal opinion is that I’m in the media too much. I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman. I would like to be without any extra visibility.

- Viktor Vekselberg

Education isn’t a problem until it serves as a buffer rom the world and a refuge from the risk of failure.

- Seth Godin

Names are the sweetest, most important sound in any language.

- Dale Carnegie

Before you take on the media, you have to know something about The Pitch.

- Michael Levine

Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. The reason is simple: it’s easier to dominate a small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.

- Peter Thiel

You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.

- Dale Carnegie

If you run a corporation, your job is to maximize the return on investment for your investors. Good for you. But by the same token, we have to remember that corporations have no compassion. That’s why legislation and regulations are necessary.

- Russell Simmons

You can’t be in neutral and hope to reach your full potential.

- Joel Olsteen

Don’t use your words to describe the situation. Use your words to change the situation.

- Joel Olsteen

The internet had yet to take off, partly because its commercial use was restricted until late 1992 and partly due to the lack of user-friendly web browsers.

- Peter Thiel

Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others…He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds – or on persons devoted to them – have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a ‘dirty little atheist’ he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with ‘The Rights of Man’ he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But ‘The Age of Reason’ cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen – a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the attacks of his countrymen. That those attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how strong prejudice, when once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up Paine as an example of everything bad.The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty – who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause – can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.

- Thomas Edison

Don’t go into the new year holding a grudge from last year. Leave the hurts and disappointments behind.

- Joel Olsteen

It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.

- Ben Horowitz

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