Notable Quotables

Strong is Vader. Mind what you have learned. Save you it can.

- Yoda

Just because something didn’t work out your way, or somebody disappointed you, that does not change who you are.

- Joel Olsteen

As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise – security, quality and worms.

- Ben Horowitz

The Group recorded totals sales of around 3,300 property units from which approximately HK$6,810 million was generated from sales revenues attributable to the Group.

- Lee Shau Kee

By getting your customers to agree with you in small steps along the way, you have a better chance of reaching agreement when it’s time to do business.

- Harvey Mackay

If you have enough push, you don’t have to worry about the pull.

- Zig Ziglar

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

My politics are: I’m a trustbuster. Very focused. And yeah, I’m pro-efficiency. I want the most economic activity at the lowest price possible. It’s good for everybody; it’s not red or blue.

- Travis Kalanick

A man who succeeds in life must sometimes go against the current.

- Ron Chernow

You’ve got to take a big jump to make it. You’ve got to have great big balls.

- Forrest Ray

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

God can do in a split second what might otherwise take you many years.

- Joel Olsteen

I’m a constant learner. You need to be a constant student because things change and you have to change and grow. And I emphasize the word ‘grow.’

- Zig Ziglar

Most of us don’t invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.

- Sam Walton

Procrastination is one of the most common and deadliest of diseases and its toll on success and happiness is heavy.

- Wayne Gretzky

There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.

- Seth Godin

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.

- Winston Churchill

I’m never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.

- Bill Gates

1. Why is it foolish to launch a new business with millions of dollars in TV ads?2. Are the market leaders in every industry more vulnerable to sudden successes by the competition than ever before?3. Should book publishers issue the paperback edition of a book before the hardcover?4. What’s the single most important asset a company can create—and what is the simple thing that can kill it?5. Every ad needs to do one of two things to succeed…yet most ads do neither. What’s the right strategy?6. Does the Net create a dynamic that fundamentally changes the way everything is marketed?7. How can every business…big and small…use ideavirus marketing to succeed?

- Seth Godin

Who you associate with makes a difference in how far you go in life.

- Joel Olsteen

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this – you haven’t.

- Thomas Edison

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn’t funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

- Steve Martin

Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.

- Bill Gates

Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you.

- Michael Gerber

The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn’t have that kind of personality, and it’s a terrifying thing to say.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”

- Ben Horowitz

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

I’ve worked very hard, but my life’s always been fun.

- Reed Hastings

Bill Gates wants people to think he’s Edison, when he’s really Rockefeller. Referring to Gates as the smartest man in America isn’t right… wealth isn’t the same thing as intelligence.

- Larry Ellison

Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.

- Mark Zuckerberg

If you complain you will remain, if you praise you will be raised.

- Joel Olsteen

Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.

- Clayton M. Christensen

I want the entire smartphone, the entire Internet, on my wrist.

- Steve Wozniak

Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!

- Og Mandino

The real opportunity for success lies within the person and not in the job.

- Zig Ziglar

Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.

- Mary Kay Ash

I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.

- Ben Horowitz

Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.

- Oprah Winfrey

There’s room for another planet between Mars and Jupiter. Given that planets formed everywhere else, why couldn’t another planet have formed there?

- John Chambers

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

- Bill Gates

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

- Winston Churchill

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.

- Aristotle

This office is smaller than the last one I had. I’m not trying to impress people. I want to be close to them.

- Stephen Wynn

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

The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

- Peter Drucker

When I was 12 years old, I got interested in learning English.

- Jack Ma

The local property market witnessed a slowdown following the 9-11 incident in the United States, under an environment of high unemployment and sustained deflation in Hong Kong. On the whole, property prices showed a slight decline as compared with the price levels recorded in the previous financial year.

- Lee Shau Kee

You are looking at an economy that most CEOs are going to believe will be a good economy for 2006. Most CEOs are saying they are going to spend both on hiring of people and on technology.

- John Chambers

Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money

- Warren Buffett

If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.

- Seth Godin

When companies fail, or fail to grow, it’s almost always because they don’t invest in the people, the systems, and the processes they need.

- Howard Schultz

Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.

- Seth Godin

The construction arm of the Group always firmly adheres to the principle of ‘People is our priority’ and deploys a vast amount of resources to quality facilities and training of staff to ensure a safe and good working environment.

- Lee Shau Kee

L.A. is only where you live, because otherwise it’s just a sprawling mass of everything, and I think if you live in L.A., you get a little network of places you go, and people you see, and when you leave town, you do miss those places and your friends.

- Steve Martin

God didn’t create you to be average. You were created to excel You have everything.

- Joel Olsteen

Being an Entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death

- Elon Musk

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

- Mark Twain

The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.

- Peter Thiel

I have always respected education, which is why I actually went back secretly and taught school for eight years.

- Steve Wozniak

Berkshire’s record would have been terrible if Warren didn’t keep learning.

- Charlie Munger

We’re better than the rest of the country but we shouldn’t believe it too much.

- Peter Thiel

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose . . . only then will you learn the game.

- Zig Ziglar

When people come to Twitter and they want to express something in the world, the technology fades away. It’s them writing a simple message and them knowing that people are going to see it.

- Jack Dorsey

Napoleon was criticized for giving toys” to war-hardened veterans, and Napoleon replied, Men are ruled by toys.

- Dale Carnegie

Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.

- Zig Ziglar

Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

- Jeff Bezos

To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.

- Ben Horowitz

Rich is my word for someone who can afford to make choices, who has enough resources to do more than merely survive.

- Seth Godin

We have a big opportunity in China. We think the number of stores here can rival the number in North America.

- Howard Schultz

e liked to call them idiots for making it too expensive. Well, one megabyte of RAM back then cost 10,000 of today’s dollars. He made a cheap one — but what he did was he made a really weak, lousy computer, to tell you truth, in the Macintosh, and still at a fairly high price. He made it by cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there. It was a lousy product. Every time we improved the Macintosh, year by year by year, it got closer to what the Lisa had been.

- Steve Wozniak

hombre que conozco es superior a mí en algún sentido. En ese sentido, aprendo de él.

- Dale Carnegie

We don’t want disruption where we just move things around from point a to point b. We want a direction, we want a purpose.

- Jack Dorsey

It’s unconscionable that cancer patients get the wrong diagnosis 30 percent of the time and that it takes so long to treat them with appropriate drugs for their cancer.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Everything we do is about getting people to be more open, more creative, more courageous.

- Jack Dorsey

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

- Andrew Carnegie

When we began Starbucks, what I wanted to try to do was to create a set of values, guiding principles, and culture.

- Howard Schultz

We live in an age where everything is based on the short term.

- Howard Schultz

In line with the objective to diversify the business of your Group, Henderson Cyber was established to focus on businesses in the telecommunications and information technology fields.

- Lee Shau Kee

All my friends ask me, ‘Am I number one in the world in [receiving] dividend payments?’ I say, ‘I don’t know, ask Forbes.’

- Lee Shau Kee

The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts.

- James C. Collins

If you don’t have public hangings for bad culture in a company, if you don’t take people out and let them say, they went home to spend more time with the family. It’s crazy.

- Jack Welch

We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.

- Walt Disney

I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don’t know.

- Bill Gates

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