EVERYBODY SELLS Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
I’m addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.
- Larry Ellison
Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.
- Colin Powell
Spare the conquered and confront the proud.
- Winston Churchill
When your art fails, make better art.
- Seth Godin
Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!
- Michael Gerber
I like definitive things.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.
- Winston Churchill
Money doesn’t change you, it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.
- Timothy Ferriss
What do you want? is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer.
- Timothy Ferriss
We can’t wait for Washington. Business leaders are going to have to galvanize their own constituencies and do everything they can to demonstrate confidence in the economy, and I think that can be contagious.
- Howard Schultz
Education and the Internet must go hand in hand, … It will serve as one of the great equalizers.
- John Chambers
Change is powerful, but change always comes with the possibility of failure as its partner. “This might not work” isn’t merely something to be tolerated; it’s something you must seek out.
- Seth Godin
Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources.
- Bill Gates
People will always blame the poets for society’s ills. But these are the true artists.
- Russell Simmons
Let go of yesterday. Let today be a new beginning and be the best that you can, and you’ll get to where God wants you to be.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.
- Phil Knight
Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.
- Jeff Bezos
There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
We are in turbulent times.
- Lee Shau Kee
Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship.
- Ben Horowitz
I’m short on New York, long on Silicon Valley.
- Peter Thiel
Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.
- Napoleon Hill
As a company it is always better for us to work with more customers than fewer customers. The more people that we serve, the more money that we will make.
- Napoleon Hill
Love to learn—hate to be taught.
- Winston Churchill
At 25, I was in the audience of my first professional speaker, Bob Bales. His presentation got my attention. I had never seen anyone having so much fun ‘at work’ and getting paid for it!
- Zig Ziglar
We’re talking about changing every aspect of our lives.
- John Chambers
There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there’s just millions of voices and people want to be heard.
- Rupert Murdoch
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
God wouldn’t have given you the dream unless He already had a way to bring it to pass.
- Joel Olsteen
At first, we couldn’t be establishment, because we didn’t have any money. We were guerrilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit. But, as we became No. 1 in our industry, we’ve had to modify our culture and become a bit more planned.
- Phil Knight
But the three rules I always stuck with were 1) Be on time 2) No profanity and 3) Never criticize a teammate.
- David Novak
If you can’t fail, it doesn’t count.
- Seth Godin
You need editors, not brand managers,who will push the envelope to make [a brand media property] go forward.
- Seth Godin
Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
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.
- Seth Godin
Act enthusiastic and you will be enthusiastic.
- Dale Carnegie
Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.
- Walt Disney
I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.
- Jeff Bezos
You must focus on WIN. What’s important now.
- Lee Cockerell
The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
- Peter Drucker
Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum. The second person to install a urinal wasn’t an artist, he was a plumber.
- Seth Godin
The ultimate goal for a business owner is to build a company that he or she can one day sell, continue to scale, or even own passively. Most business owners reach for growth by working harder and personally trying to produce more. This is a flawed model that at best will lead to only moderate growth. At worst this strategy can literally put your entire company at risk.
- Jeff Hoffman
Wouldn’t it be great to be gifted? In fact… It turns out that choices lead to habits. Habits become talents. Talents are labeled gifts. You’re not born this way, you get this way.”
- Seth Godin
Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.
- George Washington Carver
When we put $4 billion into the U.S. economy, they were OK with this. When we preserved jobs in Dearborn, or preserved jobs in Columbus, or preserved jobs in Pennsylvania, everyone was happy.
- Alexei Mordashov
In between personal sales (salespeople obviously required) and traditional advertising (no salespeople required) there is a dead zone.
- Peter Thiel
I once asked General Eisenhower’s son, John, if his father ever nourished resentments. No,” he replied, Dad never wastes a minute thinking about people he doesn’t like.
- Dale Carnegie
It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
- Warren Buffett
The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don’t have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.
- Ben Horowitz
The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
- Randy Pausch
Be honest, always.
- Jack Dorsey
Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.
- Seth Godin
Get through your fears and the world will open up. Give in to your fears and your world will get smaller every year.
- Robert Kiyosaki
When a man has accumulated a sum of money, accumulated it within the law, the Government has no right to share in its earnings.
- John D. Rockefeller
Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal.
- Winston Churchill
The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I’m making 22 minutes; I know there’s a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Do extremely difficult work.That seems obvious, right? If you do something that’s valued but scarce because it’s difficult, you’re more likely to be in demand and to be compensated fairly for what you do.The implication is stunning, though: When designing a project or developing a skill, seek out the most difficult parts to master and contribute. If it’s easy, it’s not for you.
- Seth Godin
No matter what any of us has—and how grateful we are for what we have—no one has it all.
- Sheryl Sandberg
You cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure.
- Zig Ziglar
It is exactly because we are a city that embraces freedom, that welcomes everyone and encourages their dreams, that New York remains on the front lines in the war on terror.
- Michael Bloomberg
That was so much fun. It’s been such a neat experience racing with these guys.
- Ed Clark
I would get records by Earl Scruggs… I would tune my banjo down and I’d pick out the songs note by note. Learned how to play that way. I persevered. There was a book written by Pete Seeger, who showed you some basic strumming and some basic picking… And I kind of worked out my own style of playing.
- Steve Martin
When you do more than you’re paid for, eventually you’ll be paid for more than you do.
- Zig Ziglar
Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.
- Peter Drucker
You have enough people against you… be for yourself.
- Joel Olsteen
Great organizations demand a high level of commitment by the people involved.
- Bill Gates
Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.
- Andrew Carnegie
Make your team feel respected, empowered and genuinely excited about the company’s mission.
- Tim Westergren
I really chess-play culture shifts. I’m really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That’s what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I’ve found that many of the greatest ideas surface in bars because that’s where many people cultivate inspiration.
- Herb Kelleher
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
- Henry Ford
I don’t shop online, but my wife buys everything at home. We buy sea crabs, fresh crabs, all kinds of things.
- Jack Ma
There’s only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that’s already been written.
- Bill Gates
All a bliss state like California does is spoil you.
- Phil Knight
Colleges are the equivalent of the subprime mortgage lenders who…
- Brian Tracy
My role has been to pick good people and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.
- Sam Walton
The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.
- Bill Gates
In the short term, the market is a popularity contest. In the long term, the market is a weighing machine.
- Warren Buffett
You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
- Og Mandino
To me, the idea and expectation that the day is slowly and surely coming when we will be able to honestly say we are our brother’s keeper and not his oppressor is very beautiful .
- Thomas Edison
When you start a company, you’re basically jumping off a cliff. You don’t have any sense of where you’re going to land, what to do when you land, or what you should be doing inmidair. It’s very very scary. But it’s much easier when you have somebody to commiserate with you who knows what you’re going through, and who you know will always be on your side.
- Seth Goldman
I really like reading books
- Dale Carnegie
The habit of doing more than is necessary can only be earned through practice.
- Seth Godin
The guerrilla is a cheapskate. She knows that every dollar allocated to marketing is essential, and she doesn’t plan to waste a penny. But she’s not foolish. When necessary, she hires the best designers, media planners, and experts in the business—she realizes that the best is often the cheapest in the end.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
Set your target and keep trying until you reach it.
- Napoleon Hill
The challenge, it turns out, isn’t in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by.
- Seth Godin
The majority of people begin to drift as soon as they meet with opposition, and not one out of ten thousand (people) will keep on trying after failing two or three times.
- Napoleon Hill
If you run a company, you will experience overwhelming psychological pressure to be overly positive. Stand up to the pressure, face your fear, and tell it like it is.
- Ben Horowitz
None of Us is as Good as All of Us.
- Ray Kroc
This country provides opportunities. If you don’t take advantage of them, it’s your own fault.
- Sam Huff
Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.” Everyone around the table nodded assent. “Then,” continued Mr. Sloan, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.
- Peter Drucker
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
- Warren Buffett
Failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. This way, it is about answering to yourself.
- Sara Blakely
Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.
- Rupert Murdoch
Time – the one asset none of us are ever gonna get more of.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The reason I was able to grow my business was that every day, after producing 30 minutes of wine television, I spent 15 hours a day replying to every single person’s e-mail and every single person’s Twitter @ reply.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
