Do not wait: the time will never be ‘just right’. Start where you stand, and work whatever tools you may have at your command and better tools will be found as you go along.
- Napoleon Hill
Notable Quotables
One challenge is the Peter Principle. Coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book of that name, the Peter Principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain being unable to earn further promotions.
- Ben Horowitz
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
When advice is freely given, the receiver is free to use it as he or she sees fit.
- Harvey Mackay
You have everything to gain and nothing to lose by trying. Success is achieved and maintained by those who keep trying with a positive mental attitude.
- Napoleon Hill
The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one.
- John C. Maxwell
What you are will show in what you do.
- Thomas Edison
The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.
- Elon Musk
China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them.
- Bill Gates
It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, an Inner Temple lawyer, now become a seditious fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.
- Winston Churchill
Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.
- Ben Horowitz
The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it’s very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.
- Bill Gates
It’s important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now. It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it’s been possible, and that window could be open for a long time – hopefully it is – or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now.
- Elon Musk
A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.
- Harvey Mackay
The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I’ll never be hands-on on anything except software.
- Bill Gates
There is nothing in this world that can compare with the Christian fellowship, nothing that can satisfy but Christ.
- John D. Rockefeller
The entrepreneur community, there’s a certain kind of founder, they call them a ‘lone wolf.’ I probably fit in that category.
- Travis Kalanick
You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it.
- Oprah Winfrey
Even though I’m a hype man myself, I like the practicality of it all. People who understand how to turn a profit. At the end of the day, this is still business so I’m looking for real practical knowledge of how to actually make money, not necessarily raise it.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I think that both parties should declare the debt limit as a political weapon of mass destruction which can’t be used. I mean, it is silly to have a country that has 237 years building up its reputation and then have people threaten to tear it down because they’re not getting some other matter.
- Warren Buffett
Every crowd has a silver lining.
- P.T. Barnum
I don’t like paying taxes, but I like sleeping at night.
- Leonardo Del Vecchio
When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.
- John C. Maxwell
On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.
- Bill Gates
There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.
- Elon Musk
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
- Thomas Edison
A person convinced against their will Is of the same opinion still.
- Dale Carnegie
God didn’t create you to be average. You were created to excel You have everything.
- Joel Olsteen
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
For me, my father was, and still is, a symbol of qualified persons in the Ministry of Foreign Trade under Soviet conditions.
- Vladimir Potanin
I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.
- Elon Musk
Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.
- Bill Gates
I’m truly passionate about basketball. I’m not as passionate about baseball as I am about basketball, but I watch baseball and I watch football. I love sports in general.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.
- Timothy Ferriss
One of the jobs of a manager is to instill confidence, pump confidence into your people. And when you’ve got somebody who’s raring to go and you can smell it and feel it, give ’em that shot.
- Jack Welch
When you start a company, it’s a singular focus. You have the wind at your back.
- Howard Schultz
Your best days are not behind you. They’re in front of you.
- Joel Olsteen
When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.
- Napoleon Hill
The more you are grateful for what you have the more you will have to be grateful for.
- Zig Ziglar
One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon – instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
- Dale Carnegie
When state funding for Irvine public schools began to diminish some time ago, my Irvine Company colleagues helped me to provide private funding support for continuation of basic science, art and music programs that had been eliminated by lack of state funding.
- Donald Bren
Throughout this quarter of a century, the entrepreneurial outlook, versatility and vision of our employees have remained the crucial elements of our success…
- Cheng Yu-tung
Pain, suffering, death I feel. Something terrible has happened. Young Skywalker is in pain. Terrible pain.
- Yoda
Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.
- Zig Ziglar
Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.
- John F. Kennedy
There is a good chance India may become our largest total sales market in the whole of Asia.
- John Chambers
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
- Winston Churchill
I would prefer not to be involved in party politics.
- George Soros
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.
- Winston Churchill
The basic principle is I command, and my employees carry it out immediately.
- Wang Jianlin
We woke up one day, and all the sudden Starbucks was in the middle of this political crossfire between the people who want to bring a gun into Starbucks and the people who want to prevent it. It is a very difficult, fragile situation.
- Howard Schultz
For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’, just do it and correct course along the way.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you don’t let people flourish in their jobs, why are they going to stay?
- Joel Olsteen
I know for sure that what we dwell on is who we become.
- Oprah Winfrey
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
- Socrates
Expect to make some mistakes when you try new and different approaches. Sometimes colossal failures lead to spectacular successes.
- Harvey Mackay
By establishing a reputation as being a person who always renders more service and better service than that for which you are paid, you will benefit by comparison with those around you who do not render such service, and the contrast will be so noticeable that there will be keen competition for your services, no matter what your life-work may be.
- Napoleon Hill
The Secret Make up your mind that no matter what comes your way, no matter how difficult, no matter how unfair, you will do more than simply survive. You will thrive in spite of it.
- Joel Olsteen
The skill sets it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, a successful marketer, or a relevant celebrity is a different skill set than you needed ten years ago, even though that was the skill set that mattered for decades.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
It’s not time,” “Take it easy,” “Wait and see,” “It’s someone else’s turn” – none of these stalls are appropriate for a leader in search of change. There’s a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late. The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.
- Seth Godin
I’m a genetic optimist.
- Jeff Bezos
My father died during open-heart surgery on March 29 of my senior year in college. I was getting set to go to law school. I remember sitting in the waiting room when the doctor walked in. I said to myself, The worst possible thing just happened. What will you do?
- Stephen Wynn
I remember one time I didn’t want to spend any money on motels so we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor of one of our guys’ houses. His furniture hadn’t gotten there yet.
- Sam Walton
Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.
- Zig Ziglar
The ability to get the job done.
- Jack Welch
My wealth is reflected in the price of Severstal, and the number of shares I have in my possession doesn’t have any impact on the company.
- Alexei Mordashov
Smart people instinctively understand the dangers of entrusting our future to self-serving leaders who use our institutions, whether in the corporate or social sectors, to advance their own interests.
- James C. Collins
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
- Peter Drucker
With a population of more than 600 million people, an emerging middle class that is driving strong consumption, and a robust and resilient economy, Southeast Asia presents a compelling growth opportunity for Starbucks.
- Howard Schultz
The growth of the company and the license that Starbucks has is to participate in other food and beverage opportunities. We have a global business… and in many parts of the world, tea is much, much bigger than coffee, and we’re going to bring tea and bring our capability and our understanding of what we’ve done for coffee to tea.
- Howard Schultz
You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
- Peter Thiel
Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.
- Elon Musk
The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
- Oprah Winfrey
Despite incessant dissappointment, he doggedly pursued a position. Each morning, he left his boardinghouse at eight o’ clock, clothed in a dark suit with a high collar and black tie, to make his rounds of appointed firms. This grimly determined trek went on each day, six days per week for six consecutive weeks, until late in the afternoon. The streets were so hot and hard that he grew footsore from pacing them. His perseverance surely owed something to his desire to end his reliance upon his fickle father. At one point, Bill (his father) suggested that if John didn’t find work he might have to return to the country; the thought of such dependence upon his father made a cold chill run down his spine, Rockefeller later said. Because he approached his job hunt devoid of any doubt or self-pity, he could stare down discouragement. I was working every day at my business –the business of looking for work. I put in my full time at this everyday. He was a confirmed exponent of positive thinking. With almost thirty thousand inhabitants, Cleveland was a boom town that would have thrilled any young man avid for business experience. It had drawn many transplants from New England who had brought along the Puritan mores and Yankee trading culture of their old hometowns. While the streets were largely unpaved and the town lacked a sewage system, Cleveland was expanding rapidly, with immigrants pouring in from Germany and England as well as the Eastern seaboard. The plenty if the Midwest passed through the commercial crossroads of the Western Reserve: coal from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, iron ore from around Lake Superior, salt from Michigan, grain and corn from the plains states. As a port on Lake Erie and the Ohio Canal, Clevelend was a natural hub for transportation networks. When the Cleveland Colombus and Cincinatti Railroad arrived in 1951, it created excellent opportunities for transport by both water and rail, and nobody would more brilliantly exploit these options than John D. Rockefeller. For all the thriving waterfront commerce, the job prospects were momentarily bleak. No one wanted a boy, and very few showed any overwhelming anxiety to talk with me on the subject, said Rockefeller. When he exhausted his list he simply started over from the top and visited several firms two or three times. Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.Then, on the morning of September 26th 1855, he walked into the offices of Hewitt & Tuttle, commission merchants and produce shippers on Mervin Street. He was interviewed by Henry B. Tuttle, the junior partner, who needed help with his books and asked him to return after lunch. Ecstatic, Rockefeller walked with restraint from the office, but when he got downstairs and rounded the corner he skipped down the street in pure joy. Even as an elderly man, he a saw the moment as endowed with high drama: All my future seemed to hinge on that day: and I often tremble when I ask myself the question: What if I had not got the job?In a fever of anxiety, Rockefeller awaited until the noonday meal was over, then returned to the office, where he was interviewed by senior partner Iasacc L. Newton. Owner of a good deal of Cleveland real estate and a mighty capitalist indeed. After scutinizing the boy’s penmanship, he clared we’ll give you a chance. They were evidently in urgent need of an assistant bookkeeper, since they told Rockefeller to hang up his coat and go straight to work without any mention of wages. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for an adolescent to serve an unpaid apprenticeship, and it was three months before John received his first humble retroactive pay. For the rest of his life he would honor September 26th as JOB DAY and celebrate it with more genuine brio than his birthday. One is tempted to say that his real life began on that day, that he was born again in business as he would be in the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. All the latent dynamism that had been dormant during his country youth would now quicken into robust, startling life in the business world. He was finally liberated from Big Bill (his father), the endless flight from town to town, the whole crazy upside-down world of his boyhood.
- Ron Chernow
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
Americans move more than 10 times over the course of a lifetime.
- Bill Gates
Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that… you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.
- Elon Musk
When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.
- Steve Martin
The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.
- Peter Thiel
Don’t let any opportunity lead you away from serving God. That’s a price that’s too high to pay.
- George Foreman
We’ve been trained to prefer being right to learning something, to prefer passing the test to making a difference, and most of all, to prefer fitting in with the right people, the people with economic power. Now it’s your turn to stand up and stand out.
- Seth Godin
Lost a planet Master Obi-Wan has. How embarrassing …
- Yoda
Change is not threatening.
- Stephen Wynn
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
Simply put, your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.
- Michael Gerber
It is always important that we have transparency, that we have shareholder protection. Then again, I think it is important that there are not so many regulations that management can’t make a decision without asking a lawyer whether he can do it.
- Michael Otto
Successful leadership calls for mastery of details of the leader’s position.
- Napoleon Hill
Happiness does not depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.
- Dale Carnegie
Choose your customers, choose your future.
- Seth Godin
There is far more opportunity than there is ability.
- Thomas Edison
The game of life does not proceed like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes they make five, or minus four, and sometimes the blackboard topples over in the middle of the sum and the pedagogue is left with a black eye.
- Winston Churchill
The truth is that finding happiness in what you do every day is so imperative.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Increasingly, the Chinese will own a lot more of the world because they will be converting their dollar reserves and U.S. government bonds into real assets.
- George Soros
NO PURCHASE SHOULD EVER BE MADE IN A BUSINESS UNLESS IT IS JUSTIFIED BY AN INCREASE IN SALES.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The fastest and best way to build value for your business is to build your people
- Clay Clark
When I started the diamond business, no black person, period, was in it to do what we’re trying to do to change the industry. So I like to do things that I see clearly that are in my, you know, scope. And then, I had to figure how I get talented or smart business people around me to execute. That’s what I have to do.
- Russell Simmons
Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose…
- Thomas Edison
Confidence is a habit that can be developed by acting as if you already had the confidence you desire to have.
- Brian Tracy
It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.
- Warren Buffett
I’m not looking for a legacy, and you’ll never shut up the critics. I’ve been around 50 years. When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.
- Rupert Murdoch
