Everybody was writing about computers and electronics, but all I really knew about was running. It’s what I’ve chosen to do with my life.
- Phil Knight
Notable Quotables
It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.
- Dale Carnegie
A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.
- Harvey Mackay
True success has more components than one sentence or idea can contain.
- Zig Ziglar
Victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats.
- Og Mandino
He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.
- Andrew Carnegie
I think one of the great dangers here is going and categorizing anybody from one religion as a terrorist. That’s not true… That would let the terrorists win. That’s what they want us to do.
- Michael Bloomberg
Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
- Harry Truman
People will always blame the poets for society’s ills. But these are the true artists.
- Russell Simmons
Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when, and if, it is organized into definite plans of action, and directed to a definite end.
- Napoleon Hill
We do benefit from the fact that once we say we’re going to do it, people believe we can do it, because we have the resources. Google helps in that way: There aren’t many funding mechanisms like that.
- Larry Page
Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.
- Winston Churchill
If you use your money to create exceptional products and services, you won’t need to spend it on advertising.
- Seth Godin
You walk into a retail store, whatever it is, and if there’s a sense of entertainment and excitement and electricity, you wanna be there.
- Howard Schultz
Success always demands a greater effort.
- Winston Churchill
The overall dynamic was net positive, unlike Napster’s negative-sum struggle with the U.S. recording industry. As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.
- Peter Thiel
You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that’s wrong with it and fix it. Seek negative feedback, particularly from friends.
- Elon Musk
If you believe in quality, you can’t just tell everybody We believe in quality! You’ve got to pay bonuses based on quality. You’ve got to let everyone in the organization know that they are being judged on quality.
- Jack Welch
I have lots of sources of information about what’s going on at the company. I think I have a pretty good pulse on where we are and what people are thinking.
- Steve Ballmer
We sold ‘Seinfeld’ all over the world but it was a very specific kind of show. In some countries it went down really well, in others they hated it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I believe in being an innovator.
- Walt Disney
Lack of Persistence.
- Napoleon Hill
I couldn’t figure out what to wear under my clothes. The body shapers were too thick at the time.
- Sara Blakely
Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.
- Winston Churchill
I’m born into the cycle of giving that we’re all born into, and I recognize it. So just because something is a good business, I’m not a business guy. I’m a creative guy.
- Russell Simmons
The secret to being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal.
- Seth Godin
Why is this mediocre? We love to point out how broken our systems are. We enjoy getting angry at hotels or government agencies or airlines that are so obviously doing a poor job. Idiots! But we almost never look at merely mediocre products and wonder why they aren’t great. Mediocre services or products do what they’re supposed to, but have set the bar so low that it’s hardly worth the energy to cross the street to buy them. A resolute generic sameness pervades this mediocrity. Why isn’t every restaurant meal a fabulous buy for the money? Why isn’t every tax dollar spent with the intensity and focus it could be spent with? It seems as though we are willing to accept mediocre as long as the product, the service, or the organization isn’t totally broken.
- Seth Godin
Humor can often be effective and with this style, it’s emphasized. Appeal to the journalist’s heightened sense of the unusual. Stunts, sideshows, ancillary themes are put to work here.
- Michael Levine
Business leaders cannot be bystanders.
- Howard Schultz
He listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.
- Ron Chernow
RULE 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.
- Jack Welch
My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.
- Winston Churchill
We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
- Peter Thiel
We appreciate size, but only if it is robust growth. Just to be big is not a target.
- Alexei Mordashov
MARCH 1 Envision Your Dreams I counsel you to buy from me . . . salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. REVELATION 3:18 DO YOU LOOK UPON your life with eyes of faith? Think of it this way: when we close our eyes, we should see more than we do when we have our eyes open. See your whole family serving God. See yourself rising to new levels of effectiveness. See yourself stronger, healthier, and living a more abundant life. See God using you in.
- Joel Olsteen
The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
- Winston Churchill
I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don’t laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that’s not real laughter.
- Steve Martin
Spare the conquered and confront the proud.
- Winston Churchill
It doesn’t matter whether you are pursuing success in business, sports, the arts, or life in general: The bridge between wishing and accomplishing is discipline.
- Harvey Mackay
Never, never, never give up.
- Winston Churchill
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.
- Timothy Ferriss
Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.
- Peter Drucker
We were guerilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit.
- Phil Knight
People suck at following advice. Even the most effective people in the world are terrible at it. There are two reasons: 1. Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. There has been no Harajuku Moment. 2. There are no reminders. No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change. Consistent tracking, even if you have no knowledge of fat-loss or exercise, will often beat advice from world-class trainers.
- Timothy Ferriss
John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there’s something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjugated to the good of the whole.
- Ben Horowitz
Humility is becoming a lost art, but it’s not difficult to practice. It means that you realize that others have been involved in your success.
- Harvey Mackay
It is not enough that we do our best, sometimes we must do what is required.
- Winston Churchill
You know, if it’s a three-way race, the public has more choice than if it’s a two-way race, and has more choice in a two-way race than a one-way race.
- Michael Bloomberg
I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.
- Joel Olsteen
As soon as we associate reading with a test, we’ve missed the point.
- Seth Godin
The goal is to get the buyer to like and trust you.
- Clay Clark
Writing is thought crystalized on a piece of paper, which can then be reviewed.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
Politicians make decisions in favor of their interest groups or their supporters back in their hometowns.
- Tadashi Yanai
Don’t settle in the land of barely enough. That is where you are, it is not who you are. That’s your location, it’s not your identity. No matter what it looks like, have an abundant mentality.
- Joel Olsteen
The person who knows one thing and does it better than anyone else, even if it only be the art of raising lentils, receives the crown he merits. If he raises all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor of mankind and its rewarded as such.
- Og Mandino
If I hadn’t given my money away, I’d have had more than anyone else on the planet.
- Bill Gates
Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.
- Dale Carnegie
People who build family businesses are not classically trained. They have to deal with an enormous amount of politics. You think corporate politics are tough? Go work for your dad or your mom.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.
- John Maxwell
The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.
- Bill Gates
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
- Winston Churchill
Make your desires clear and reduce them to writing.
- Napoleon Hill
ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
- Peter Thiel
I don’t know what can be so dangerous about giving people hope. Causing people to have better relationships. I’m not leading them to some false God or something like that.
- Joel Olsteen
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
- Jeff Bezos
History is more or less bunk.
- Henry Ford
I’m a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome. I don’t believe in equal outcome because unfortunately life’s not like that. It would be a pretty boring place if it was. But I really believe in equal opportunity. Equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great education.
- Steve Jobs
In the years to come, that lure of partnership helped us attract a lot of good managers, but I don’t believe that we ever had one who bought more stock than Willard. And of course he feels pretty good about it today. – Sam Walton (on human resources, hiring, early history of Wal-Mart)
- Sam Walton
The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which secures for the gifted artists a world-wide fame princes well might envy.
- P.T. Barnum
We should be able to significantly improve health-care outcomes. The government is needing that. When you look at ACOs [accountable care organizations] and look at what the Obama administration is talking about, in trying to improve quality, that’s exactly what Express Scripts does.
- George Paz
In 2008, Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But people didn’t know they needed such a thing—cloud computing hadn’t caught on yet. That summer, Blake was hired as Box’s third salesperson to help change that. Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company. In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.
- Peter Thiel
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
The great majority of people are “wandering generalities” rather than “meaningful specifics”. The fact is that you can’t bit a target that you can’t see. If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else. You have to have goals.
- Zig Ziglar
Sometimes adversity is what you need to face in order to become successful.
- Zig Ziglar
Customers today are strongly value oriented. But just what does that mean? Customers tell us that value means the results they receive in relation to the total costs (both the price and other costs to customers incurred in acquiring the service).
- Gary W. Lo
Once you start doing only what you’ve already proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.
- Jerry Seinfeld
The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.)
- James C. Collins
The wealthy class often looks down on the poor as those people. And deprived people view the rich as cold and heartless. The way to break down the barrier between the rich and poor is to asociate with each other and to help one another. Make a connection. If you can break down the barrier, it may pave the way to recovery for some person, a family, maybe an entire community.
- George Foreman
How Many Marriages Would Be Better If the Husband and the Wife Clearly Understood That They’re On the Same Side?
- Zig Ziglar
Being great at everything is not an actionable message.
- Floris Maljers
Meeting sports athletes that are the best in the world is a thrill to this day.
- Phil Knight
When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for people telling you that you are nuts.
- Larry Ellison
Luck Follows Persistence.
- Jim Collins
I have made the tough decisions, always with an eye toward the bottom line. Perhaps it’s time America was run like a business.
- Donald Trump
Many people are unhappy and are not experiencing life to its fullest because they’ve closed their hearts to compassion, they are motivated by only what they want and what they think they need. They rarely do anything for anybody else unless they have an ulterior goal in mind. They are self-involved and self-centered.
- Joel Olsteen
I own my business. My business doesn’t own me.
- Cherie Ve Ard
It’s so easy to tweet from wherever you are.
- Jack Dorsey
One thing I resent is the slur that I just support political candidates because of the business.
- Rupert Murdoch
The bluegrass community… can be very strict. I didn’t know if I’d be welcomed into the bluegrass community or not, but I think they judge you very fairly… I felt really welcome.
- Steve Martin
Intentional Dishonesty.
- Napoleon Hill
The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.
- Bill Gates
What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?
- Sam Walton
I understood the importance of hiring for strength rather than for lack of weakness, and I understood the meaning of “fit.”
- Ben Horowitz
Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.
- Peter Drucker
If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.
- Larry Page
You’re only as good as the people you hire.
- Ray Kroc
I’ve always been very happy. I’ve always been easy going and I’ve always been very encouraging, it’s just my personality.
- Joel Olsteen
The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
