All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
If somebody can do something 80 percent as good as you think you would have done it yourself, then you’ve got to let it go.
- Sara Blakely
When you were made a leader you weren’t given a crown, you were given the responsibility to bring out the best in others.
- Jack Welch
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
- Niels Bohr
By providing the systems that make the Internet work, Cisco is playing a major role in helping customers thrive in the explosive Internet economy. As a result, we are growing faster than all of our key competitors and have been the fastest growing and most profitable company in the history of the computer industry.
- John Chambers
If you cannot read all your books…fondle them—peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.
- Winston Churchill
Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple—many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.
- Timothy Ferriss
So much of the downstream revenue is linked to that initial excitement, to how much revenue is produced in the domestic box office. For example, what we pay for a film three years later is highly correlated to how well it did in the box office.
- Reed Hastings
You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.
- John Maxwell
Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.
- Ray Kroc
In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Ever since Justin Timberlake portrayed him in The Social Network, Sean has been perceived as one of the coolest people in America. JT is still more famous, but when he visits Silicon Valley, people ask if he’s Sean Parker.
- Peter Thiel
The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.
- Nolan Bushnell
I know I could be the host of ‘SportsCenter’ in two years if I changed my show today to sports.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.
- Yoda
I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young.
- Bill Gates
What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don’t actually improve their lives.
- Jeff Bezos
Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember, the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bite out of you.
- Zig Ziglar
I hate nobody except Hitler–and that is professional.
- Winston Churchill
He was contradicting everything he’d taught us about not running sick and making it worse. I knew it was just to make me acknowledge that his word was law, no matter how arbitrary. But that didn’t make it any easier to take. I was so mad I ran a personal record.
- Phil Knight
This country provides opportunities. If you don’t take advantage of them, it’s your own fault.
- Sam Huff
In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It’s a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems. A brain, no matter how big, cannot solve a problem it doesn’t know about.
- Ben Horowitz
We’re living in what I like to call the ‘Thank You Economy,’ because only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way – and do it authentically – are going to have a prayer of competing.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.
- Elon Musk
Management always bears in mind to ‘lend a hand’ to Hong Kong and Mainland China while we are working hard for shareholders’ benefits.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I am very lucky that I have talented and creative people around me. Also, mediation has been a very big part of my freedom, because it allows me to watch all the things going on and allows me to focus.
- Russell Simmons
What most people want in a leader is something that’s very difficult to find: we want someone who listens…The secret, Reagan’s secret, is to listen, to value what you hear, and then to make a decision even if it contradicts the very people you are listening to. Reagan impressed his advisers, his adversaries, and his voters by actively listening. People want to be sure you hear what they said – they’re less focused on whether or not you do what they said.
- Seth Godin
If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The value we create is directly related to how much valuable information we can produce, how much trust we can earn, and how often we innovate.
- Seth Godin
Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience.
- Dale Carnegie
Nothing I do is done by popular demand.
- Steve Martin
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
- Steve Jobs
Satisfied, loyal and repeat customers are at the heart of Walmart’s spectacular profit margins, and those customers are loyal to us because our associates treat them better than salespeople in other stores do. So, in the whole Wal-Mart scheme of things, the most important contact ever made is between the associated in the store and the customer. I didn’t catch on to that idea for quite a while. In fact, the biggest single regret in my whole business career is that we didn’t include our associates in the initial, managers-only profit-sharing plan when we took the company public in 1970. But there was nobody around preaching that philosophy in those days, and I guess I was just too worried about my own debt, and in too big a hurry to get somewhere fast. Today, some of our company’s critics would like everybody to believe we started our profit-sharing program and other benefits merely as away to stave off union organizing.
- Sam Walton
So sure, start with a slogan. But don’t bother wasting any time on it if you’re merely going for catchy. Aim for true instead.
- Seth Godin
Pouring espresso is an art, one that requires the barista to care about the quality of the beverage.
- Howard Schultz
What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?
- Winston Churchill
It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.
- Walt Disney
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
- Winston Churchill
At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas, but the image is that they all come from the top. I’m afraid that’s not quite right.
- Bill Gates
If my life has had a theme, I suppose it has been a typical American theme in that, for most of it, I have been looking for happiness and success.
- Zig Ziglar
I got into retailing because I wanted a real job.
- Sam Walton
I studied the lives of great men and famous women, and I found that the men and women who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work.
- Harry Truman
I have a nice office. I have a nice house… So I’m not denying myself some great things. I just don’t happen to have expensive hobbies.
- Bill Gates
Seeing is not always believing.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
There’s very little advice in men’s magazines, because men don’t think there’s a lot they don’t know. Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, ‘I know what I’m doing, just show me somebody naked.’
- Jerry Seinfeld
The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
- Jeff Bezos
There’s a sucker born every minute.
- P.T. Barnum
Visionary companies are so clear about what they stand for and what they’re trying to achieve that they simply don’t have room for those unwilling or unable to fit their exacting standards.
- James C. Collins
What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.
- Peter Thiel
Did you know that nearly one in three children live apart from their biological dads? Those kids are two to three times more likely to grow up in poverty, to suffer in school, and to have health and behavioral problems.
- Tony Dungy
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
- Peter Drucker
Exceptionally hard decisions can deplete your energy to the point at which you finally cave in. If you mentally crumble and degenerate into negative thinking, you’ll magnify the problem to the point where it can haunt you.
- John C. Maxwell
One thing that most comic artists avoid is showing decisions. They show action, sure, and they show results, but they don’t show (because it’s difficult to show) the hero or the villain making a choice.
- Seth Godin
Over Deliver and you will soon be over-paid
- Napoleon Hill
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
- Henry Ford
An organization takes its cue from the person on top. I always told our business leaders their personal intensity determined their organization’s intensity….For me intensityh covers a lot of sings. If there’s one characteristic all winners share, it’s that they care more than anyone else. No detail is too small to sweat or too large to dream. Over the years I have looked for this characteristic in the leaders we selected. It doesn’t mean loud or flamboyant. It’s something that comes from deep inside. Great organizations can ignite passion….Leaders must have courage to kick ass and break glass.
- Jack Welch
Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.
- Bill Gates
We have most of the software industry running Autonomy.
- Larry Ellison
Very important people have told me that they prefer good listeners to good talkers, but the ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good trait.
- Dale Carnegie
I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic … It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine’s works in my boyhood … it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker’s views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine’s writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, ‘What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!’ My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days.
- Thomas Edison
The U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar, the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro.
- Peter Thiel
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
If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.
- Dale Carnegie
IT’S SAID that you can only live life forward and understand it backward.
- Jack Welch
Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking tartar sauce with you.
- Zig Ziglar
Thomas Edison had only three months of schooling during his entire life. He did not lack education, neither did he die poor. Henry Ford had less than a sixth grade schooling but he has managed to do pretty well for himself financially.
- Napoleon Hill
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.
- Winston Churchill
Madness is however an affliction which in war carries with it the advantage of SURPRISE.
- Winston Churchill
I’m a catalyst for change. You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.
- Rupert Murdoch
Transparency is terribly important in a situation like this, as a quick reaction time, because news today is not immediate. It travels globally on the Internet. In our YouTube culture, dramatic videos take on a life of their own, beyond anyone’s control. – (on crisis management)
- David Novak
There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
- Dale Carnegie
About HBO’s “Silicon Valley”: It’s a Good Show.
- Peter Thiel
Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature, Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon’s unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.
- Walt Disney
If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.
- Mario Andretti
There is only one success- to be able to spend your life in your own way.
- Christopher Morley
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
Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
- Steve Jobs
Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.
- Ray Kroc
The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.
- Oprah Winfrey
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
- Winston Churchill
However, for equity to create commitment rather than conflict, you must allocate it very carefully. Giving everyone equal shares is usually a mistake: every individual has different talents and responsibilities as well as different opportunity costs, so equal amounts will seem arbitrary and unfair from the start. On the other hand, granting different amounts up front is just as sure to seem unfair. Resentment at this stage can kill a company, but there’s no ownership formula to perfectly avoid it.
- Peter Thiel
Being excellent is hard. So when you have something hard to do, remember you are being excellent. Do you want to be remembered for being good or great?
- Lee Cockerell
There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.
- Jerry Seinfeld
What’s happening is that the two groups assume that the nature of the debate is really a matter of disagreement about their own sides’ core issues. Each side is assuming that people in the other group oppose what they hold most dear to themselves – what’s most important to their side – but in fact their adversaries really don’t oppose them.
- John Chambers
There is nothing in this world that can compare with the Christian fellowship, nothing that can satisfy but Christ.
- John D. Rockefeller
People have no confidence that Washington, both sides of aisle, are coming together to try and do what’s right for the economy.
- Michael Bloomberg
Use your feelings, Obi-Wan, and find him you will.
- Yoda
I think Yahoo is a great company, with great assets.
- Jack Ma
You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.
- Gary Keller
The lower and individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his potential.
- John Maxwell
Determine your destiny or somebody else will.
- Jack Welch
Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris.
- Peter Thiel
If you try to make such projects, unseen by others, as perfect as any human could, you’ll develop skills that other professionals don’t have.
- Steve Wozniak
True leadership cannot be awarded, appointed or assigned. It comes only from influence, and that can’t be mandated. It must be earned. The only thing that a title can buy is a little time.
- Napoleon Hill
Sometimes, we’re so focused on being consistent that we also lower the bar on amazing.
- Seth Godin
To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.
- Peter Drucker
Pacifists become militants. Freedom fighters become tyrants. Blessings become curses. Help becomes hindrance. More becomes less.
- Timothy Ferriss
I aim to be pretty – I gave up dressing to be sexy in the eighties.
- Sara Blakely
Inspiration can be found in a pile of junk. Sometimes, you can put it together with a good imagination and invent something.
- Thomas Edison
