Notable Quotables

Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution. It just needs clarity.

- Ben Horowitz

I’m a big believer than a great bit is a great bit – if I go and see someone I love, like Robert Klein. I want to hear some classics and some new stuff. But a great stand-up bit takes a long time to really polish and perfect, and they’re beautiful things when they’re done.

- Jerry Seinfeld

If you concentrate on what you have, you will always end up having more. If you focus on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.

- Oprah Winfrey

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

I think we are not serious about attacking the long-term debt problem, and that’s one of the things that he’s going to have to find a way to get on the agenda.

- Michael Bloomberg

One thing that most comic artists avoid is showing decisions. They show action, sure, and they show results, but they don’t show (because it’s difficult to show) the hero or the villain making a choice.

- Seth Godin

Founding Fathers of U.S. set up processes, checks and balances designed to insure that their values lived on long after their passing.

- Jim Collins

In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.

- Bill Gates

Follow the GOLDEN RULE. Do unto others as you would have them do onto you.

- David Robinson

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

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

- John C. Maxwell

One of the statistics that always amazes me is the approval of the Chinese government, not elected, is over 80 percent. The approval of the U.S. government, fully elected, is 19 percent. Well, we elected these people and they didn’t elect those people. Isn’t it supposed to be different? Aren’t we supposed to like the people that we elected?

- Bill Gates

You know what, Steve Jobs is real nice to me. He lets me be an employee and that’s one of the biggest honors of my life.

- Steve Wozniak

FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON THE NUMBERS In the second example, I managed the team to a set of numbers that did not fully capture what I wanted. I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time—in that order. Unfortunately, the metrics that I set did not capture those priorities. At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them at every staff meeting, my people focused intensely on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result. Interestingly, I see this same problem play out in many consumer Internet startups. I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product. It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.

- Ben Horowitz

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.

- Peter Thiel

Only 17 percent of us or our spouses ever attended a private elementary or private highschool. But 55 percent of our children are currently attending or have attended private schools.

- Thomas J Stanley

If you are against yourself, you will never reach your highest potential. And when you criticize yourself, you’re criticizing God.

- Joel Olsteen

Historians will record 1998 as a time when the impossible happened in Asia

- Cheng Yu-tung

Tip #1 – Self-motivation is the key to success and will achieve powerful results.

- Jack Nadel

When the leader has done the work to connect with his people, you can see it in the way the organization functions. The vision of the leader becomes the aspiration of the people. The impact is incredible

- John Maxwell

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

- Winston Churchill

[Luke:] I can’t believe it. [Yoda:] That is why you fail.

- Yoda

I’d say it’s been my biggest problem of my life…it’s money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.

- Walt Disney

Part of being a winner is knowing when enough is enough. Sometimes you have to give up the fight and walk away, and move on to something that’s more productive.

- Donald Trump

My mission is not to forbid French art. If the quality is there, I buy; if the quality isn’t there, I don’t.

- Francois Pinault

There is no shame in taking pride in achievements or position. But nobody gets to the top alone.

- Harvey Mackay

With the casino and the beds, our passengers will have at least two ways to get lucky on one of our flights.

- Richard Branson

I’m going to start these art museums that are basically converted homes, and I have one for modern art, and I have one for 19th century European art, and one for French impressionism. I’ve got Japanese.

- Larry Ellison

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

- Yoda

You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.

- Winston Churchill

Sometimes God gives instructions that go against conventional wisdom, such as treating people kindly when they’re hateful. Who really wants to do that? Instructions like that my not always make sense, so that’s why I need to trust and obey the One who inspired them.

- George Foreman

Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove we’ll settle for intense.

- Jeff Bezos

If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.

- Seth Godin

Remember to celebrate milestones as you prepare for the road ahead.

- Nelson Mandela

The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability… When the leader demonstrates vulnerability and sensibility and brings people together, the team wins.

- Howard Schultz

The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner’s job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one’s own property.

- Peter Drucker

Apply the blacksmith’s homely principle when you are speaking. If you feel deeply about your subject you will be able to think of little else. Concentration is a process of distraction from less important matters. It is too late to think about the cut of your coat when once you are upon the platform, so centre your interest on what you are about to say—fill your mind with your speech-material and, like the infilling water in the glass, it will drive out your unsubstantial fears.

- Dale Carnegie

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

- Richard P. Feynman

It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.

- Dale Carnegie

You watch television and see what’s going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing’s going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress.

- Stephen Wynn

Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an ever smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.

- Winston Churchill

I know if I stopped hosting ‘Wine Library TV,’ we’d probably lose 75 percent of our audience, but the remaining 25 percent is still a big number.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.

- Ben Horowitz

The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more things you’ll have to express gratitude for.

- Zig Ziglar

They don’t understand that Excellence isn’t about working extra hard to do what you’re told. It’s about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing.

- Seth Godin

And because no matter who you are, if you believe in yourself and your dream, New York will always be the place for you.

- Michael Bloomberg

I like winning. There’s also a certain joy in it. I feel fulfilled by it.

- Carl Icahn

Chance made us sisters. Hearts made us friends.

- Zig Ziglar

One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that good ones slip through.

- Seth Godin

One of [Bill] Bowerman’s more legendary innovations is the Waffle outsole, which he discovered by pouring rubber into a waffle iron.

- Phil Knight

They were making a deal for a property that clearly was a property that we wanted to own, so we had to act, and act as quickly as we could, and make the offer more attractive,

- Jack Welch

We certainly employ a lot of immigrants at Fox… and we do not take any consistent anti-immigrant line.

- Rupert Murdoch

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

- Jerry Vass

Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.

- Warren Buffett

Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.

- Henry Ford

Some people keep God in a Sunday morning box and say, ‘Hey, I did my religious duty.’ That’s fine, but the scripture says to pray without ceasing. And I think that means all through the day you’re talking to God. Even if it’s in your thoughts.

- Joel Olsteen

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

- Thomas Edison

As Google CEO Larry Page put it in his 2014 TED talk: “The main thing that has caused companies to fail, in my view, is that they missed the future.

- Jack Welch

Every well built house started in the form of a definite purpose plus a definite plan in the nature of a set of blueprints.

- Napoleon Hill

Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.

- Napoleon Hill

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

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I’m still fanatical, but now I’m a little less fanatical.

- Bill Gates

You need to have extraordinary wisdom to be the forerunner.

- Ma Huateng

I had this very rich sense of how the metropolis was living and breathing.

- Jack Dorsey

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

- Winston Churchill

This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

- Clayton M. Christensen

In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.

- Peter Thiel

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

- Peter Thiel

Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money, non-monopolists can’t.

- Peter Thiel

I believe that God’s dream is that we be successful in our careers, and that we be able to send our kids to college. I don’t mean that everyone is going to be rich, and I preach a lot on blooming where you’re planted. But I don’t have the mindset that money is a bad thing.

- Joel Olsteen

We’re working toward the ability for all Cisco devices to work together and communicate with each other to stop attacks. The idea is that one device can warn another device of a threat.

- John Chambers

The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo, the job is to invent the status quo.

- Seth Godin

Frankly speaking, I decided to become a businessman at the moment when I understood that it is possible, because I grew up in a country where it was not possible. There existed even a special article in the penal code of the Soviet Union which punished entrepreneurial activity.

- Vladimir Potanin

Time has its role to play in one’s behaviour and how one conducts himself in society. With the passage of time, we master our lives better and become more refined and polished, step by step.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn’t always where you want to use it, and it isn’t always when you want to use it.

- Bill Gates

You don’t even really need a place. But you feel like you’re doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Unemployment in America today is too high. And part of the reason, unfortunately, is that many companies cannot fill the high-skilled jobs increasingly at risk of going overseas.

- Michael Bloomberg

When I grew up, the Devil was a reason why I had a headache or the Devil was the reason I got mad today. We always blamed the Devil. I think today when I say the Enemy, I like to make it broader. Sometimes the Enemy can be our own thoughts.

- Joel Olsteen

Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

- Bill Gates

It’s in the difficult times that we’re growing and you can’t just rebuke everything hard. We’ve got to endure it and fight the good fight of faith and pass the test.

- Joel Olsteen

You know, in Saudi Arabia, there is a body of 40 people – 34 people exactly, that once the succession comes, they will meet and they will elect a king in there.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.

- Winston Churchill

When you deal with change, you have a couple choices: you can lead it and make the rules, or you can be a fast follower, or you can be a slow follower.

- Charles Ergen

When you focus on being a blessing, God makes sure that you are always blessed in abundance.

- Joel Olsteen

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