Notable Quotables

Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.

- Benjamin Franklin

[On signing up Michael Jordan in 1984 when he was just 21 years old] We could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture.

- Phil Knight

If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.

- Peter Thiel

I try to use my voice. I know that celebrity is valuable, and people do listen.

- Russell Simmons

Our job as founders as entrepreneurs is to distribute the future that’s already here.

- Jack Dorsey

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

- Michael Levine

A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn’t exactly been one of moderation.

- Donald Trump

If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.

- Peter Thiel

Concentrate all of your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought into focus.

- Alexander Graham Bell

There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Present my story and the difficulties that I have faced. As an entrepreneur, a CEO.

- Ben Horowitz

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

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

- Bill Gates

Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.

- Seth Godin

I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.

- Winston Churchill

We’re on our way to Greece, in the hands of a confused, foolish government. It’s got to stop. It’s got to stop.

- Stephen Wynn

We’re not going to outgrow our need for information.

- Seth Godin

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

- John C. Maxwell

Nobody walks this earth thinking he’s better than I think I am – I think I’m great. At the same time, it’s so obvious to me that I’m nobody.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

There is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.

- Winston Churchill

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

- Elon Musk

The interview process takes twelve to fifteen hoursof your team’s time. This process is expensive for your team, so you should vet people in advance. A technique I use is to email the references and say, Rate this person one to ten. No one’s going to reply a five or a three by email; that means they hate the candidate. Call me is usually the response for a sub-seven rating. At the same time, nobody is going to reply with a ten. What you’re really looking for is a bunch of eights and nines. This is an exceptionally quick referencing system when you’re trying to triage a list.

- Reid Hoffman

I will say that walking down the street, getting on the subway, taking the elevator, if there’s one or two people and they say, ‘Great job, Mayor,’ that is a real turn-on. I mean, anybody that wouldn’t find that satisfying, rewarding, exciting, thrilling – I think they should see the doctor.

- Michael Bloomberg

We understand the most important thing we do is market the product…

- Phil Knight

You have to keep your goal in mind and never lose sight of it. I envisioned myself winning the heavyweight title for ten years before I actually captured it. If you’re not driven to do your best, you’ll never reach the level of excellence in your life.

- George Foreman

Foreplay, cuddling – a Jedi craves not these things.

- Yoda

I don’t know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.

- Reed Hastings

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others.

- Dale Carnegie

If you don’t have a voice that forces you back to basics, you’re a dangerous person. Or to put it another way: You’re at risk, and the people with you are at risk. I’m not a daredevil. I don’t fly without a safety net.

- Stephen Wynn

You’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.

- Peter Thiel

Business in Russia was not being done like in the West, with contracts. In Russia, hundreds of millions of dollars were going forward and backward by word of mouth.

- David Reuben

Small businesses don’t exist without the nucleus.

- Bryan Smith

Life is a classroom — only those who are willing to be lifelong learners will move to the head of the class.

- Zig Ziglar

If you want to reach a goal, you must ‘see the reaching’ in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.

- Zig Ziglar

We do lots of Stuff. The only way you are going to have success is to have lots of failures first.

- Sergey Brin

It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life. This is a nonstarter—nothing can justify that sacrifice.

- Timothy Ferriss

Creating a sense of urgency around change initiatives is especially hard to do. Human nature seems to be hardwired to adhor change, and people will do everything in their power to resist it. I once heard this explained to another Pepsi consultant. His philosophy was that in order to drive change, you need to create what he called, the burning platform. This burning-platform image was an oil rig in the North Sea that has caught fire and the only way to save yourself is to jump into the frigid water and swim to the lifeboat. You know the jump might kill you, but you jump anyway, not because you think it might be a good idea, but because you had no choice. That’s creating a sense of urgency.

- David Novak

This is not checkers; this is motherfuckin’ chess. Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves, the people move. As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there is always a move. You think you have no moves? How about taking your company public with $2 million in trailing revenue and 340 employees, with a plan to do $75 million in revenue the next year? I made that move. I made it in 2001, widely regarded as the worst time ever for a technology company to go public. I made it with six weeks of cash left. There is always a move.

- Ben Horowitz

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

- Mark Twain

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

- Winston Churchill

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

Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.

- P.T. Barnum

I don’t think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You’re always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it’ll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it’s always meant to be something. So, to me, there’s no practicing; there’s only editing and publishing or not publishing.

- Steve Martin

The world of the 1990s and beyond will not belong to ‘managers’ or those who can make the numbers dance. The world will belong to passionate, driven leaders – people who not only have enormous amounts of energy but who can energize those whom they lead.

- Jack Welch

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

- Joel Olsteen

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

I spent a disproportionate amount of my time in a car in L.A. I’m 35 years old. If you add up the hours spent in cars, it would be years.

- Travis Kalanick

Culture is one of the most precious things a company has…So you must work harder on it than anything else.

- Herb Kelleher

His friends, drunk to the point of speaking in tongues, were asleep.

- Timothy Ferriss

The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.

- Henry Ford

God created you to leave your mark on this generation. You have gifts and talents that you have not tapped into. There are new levels of your destiny still in front of you. But break out starts in your thinking. As you put these keys into action, making room for increase, expecting shifts of God’s favor, praying bold prayers, and keeping the right perspective, then God will release floods of His goodness that will thrust you beyond barriers of the past into the extraordinary life you were designed to live.

- Joel Olsteen

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.

- John D. Rockefeller

I broke into an industry that was completely money-focused. Nobody was paying attention to the women and thinking about how these undergarments felt, or how they fit…All of a sudden I showed up and charged more for one pair than anybody can comprehendand women lined up in droves to buy them. I think I left the industry in show, but I really believed that we needed to make it better not cheaper.

- Sara Blakely

If you say too much or mix in multiple pitches, you diffuse your goal. You must give the media a pitch they can hit.

- Michael Levine

Think about how Google talks about its business. It certainly doesn’t claim to be a monopoly.

- Peter Thiel

If you’re going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don’t work.

- Seth Godin

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

- Winston Churchill

When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough.

- Donald Trump

The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I’ve run into people in my life who were so dramatic; people who are so extreme and so frustrating to be around that you end up thinking about them and talking about them for literally years after your experience with them is over. I’ve had that happen to me, and I’ve seen it happen to other people. I find it fascinating.

- Steve Martin

The question is not, ‘Do you have a problem?’ The question is, ‘Does the problem have you? ‘

- Joel Olsteen

If the merit of the idea is strong, it spreads really quickly no matter who you are or where you are from.

- Jack Dorsey

This is not a book for the wild-haired crazies your company keeps in a corner. It is a book for you, your boss, and your employees, because the best future available to us is a future where you contriubute your true self and your best work. Are you up for that?

- Seth Godin

The onset of global financial turmoil in the second half of 2008 and the resultant wait-and-see attitude adopted by some homebuyers put the property market into the doldrums, with a general decline in both transaction volume and transacted prices.

- Lee Shau Kee

But this “spray and pray” approach usually produces an entire portfolio of flops, with no hits at all. This is because venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.

- Peter Thiel

Luck plays a role in business but whether you succeed or fail depends on many other factors. I haven’t really had a failure.

- Lui Che Woo

The ‘Billionaire’ song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It’s funny.

- Bill Gates

The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say.

- Sam Walton

Even god doesn’t propose to judge a man till his last days, why should you and I?

- Dale Carnegie

When you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, the day will come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.

- Zig Ziglar

Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.

- Steve Wozniak

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.

- Walt Disney

That’s why I can tell you with confidence that you are coming into greater victories. Enlarge your vision. Take the limits off God. You have not seen your best days. God has victories in your future that will amaze you. He will show up and show out in unusual ways. You may be in a tough time right now, but remember this: The enemy always fights you the hardest when he knows God has something great in store for you.

- Joel Olsteen

Obama has no solutions. Obama has failed the country and its great citizens, and they don’t like it when somebody such as myself speaks the truth about this – it hurts too much.

- Donald Trump

Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary. TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels.

- Bill Gates

God would not have put a dream in your heart if He had not already given you everything you need to fulfill it.

- Joel Olsteen

First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst.

- Dale Carnegie

[That was the case Wednesday night, when Cisco executives talked about results for the fiscal second quarter (which closed on Jan. 26). Chambers and chief financial officer Larry Carter spoke only about the next quarter, when revenue growth from the second fiscal quarter is expected to be nil or in the low single digits.] Our visibility is still very limited, … If there’s one lesson we’ve learned over the past year, it’s how quickly things can change.

- John Chambers

MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs. At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future. Note that there were many numbers as well as more qualitative goals that would have helped: Was our competitive win rate increasing or declining? Was customer satisfaction rising or falling? What did our own engineers think of the products? By managing the organization as though it were a black box, some divisions at HP optimized the present at the expense of their downstream competitiveness. The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company. It would have been better to take into account the white box. The white box goes beyond the numbers and gets into how the organization produced the numbers. It penalizes managers who sacrifice the future for the short term and rewards those who invest in the future even if that investment cannot be easily measured. CLOSING THOUGHT It is easy to see that there are many ways for leaders to be misinterpreted. To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors. Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create. Otherwise, the side-effect behaviors may be worse than the situation you were trying to fix.

- Ben Horowitz

Common mission trap for companies: trying to be all things to all people at all times.

- Jack Welch

Ally yourself with a group of as many people as you may need for the creation and carrying out of your plan or plans for the accumulation of money…Compliance with this instruction is absolutely essential. Do not neglect it.

- Napoleon Hill

You know the funny thing, I don’t get along with rich people. I get along with the middle class and the poor people better than I get along with the rich people.

- Donald Trump

The path of least resistence is the path of the loser.

- H.G. Wells

Baseball is like cricket, and I grew up in a country where they had cricket. So I understand cricket, soccer and basketball. I played basketball at the club level and a little bit in college, so that’s why I’m a basketball fanatic.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Dinner would have been splendid…if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess.

- Winston Churchill

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream: —There spread a cloud of dust along a plainAnd underneath the cloud, or in it, ragedA furious battle, and men yelled, and swordsShocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s bannerWavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.A craven hung along the battle’s edge,And thought, Had I a sword of keener steel —That blue blade that the king’s son bears, — but thisBlunt thing! — he snapt and flung it from his hand,And lowering crept away and left the field.Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead,And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shoutLifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down,And saved a great cause that heroic day.

- Edward Rowland Sill

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