Artists don’t think outside the box, because outside the box there’s a vacumm. Outside the box there are no rules, there is no reality. You have nothing to interact with, nothing to work against. If you set out to do something way outside the box (designing a time machine, or using liquid nitrogen to freeze Niagara Falls), then you’ll never be able to do the real work of art. You can’t ship if you’re far outside the box. Artists think along the edges of the box, because that’s where things get done. That’s where the audience is, that’s where the means of production are available, and that’s where you can make impact.
- Seth Godin
Notable Quotables
Deadlines aren’t bad. They help you organize your time. They help you set priorities. They make you get going when you might not feel like it.
- Harvey Mackay
When you make a promise, keep it.
- Zig Ziglar
Globally, business and government leaders are beginning to dramatically transform their traditional business models into Internet economy business models, … Customers are increasingly seeking Cisco’s expertise to help them through this transformation.
- John Chambers
I’m a huge believer in clarity.
- Ben Horowitz
Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. Pick people who are interested in what you’re interested in.
- Russell Simmons
In the 1950s, people welcomed big plans and asked whether they would work. 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. You can still visit the Bay Model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today it’s just a tourist attraction: big plans for the future have become archaic curiosities.
- Peter Thiel
Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ we will fall, but ‘when.’ There are no exceptions.
- John C. Maxwell
The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit… a reputation, character.
- John D. Rockefeller
If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you—like a fever.
- Sam Walton
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
- Winston Churchill
Of this I am quite sure. If we open up a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
- Winston Churchill
It’s not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There’s nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.
- Bill Gates
In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?
- Jack Welch
I think it’d be crazy not to have the plan encompass the entire reservoir. If we have (the smaller map), we’ve got a bunch of other folks telling us what they want to see happen in our community.
- Jack Taylor
I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
- Bill Gates
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
Successful leadership calls for mastery of details of the leader’s position.
- Napoleon Hill
The surest foundation of a manufacturing concern is quality. After that, and a long way after, comes cost.
- Andrew Carnegie
A story is at its best when it’s not intrusive, when it brings value to a platform’s consumers, and when it fits in as a natural step along the customer’s path to making a purchase.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Those who are blessed with the most talent don’t necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.
- Mary Kay Ash
To win without risk is to triumph without glory.
- Confucius
The Lack of Candor is the biggest and deepest darkest secrets of business…People might not have agree with me on every issue, and I may not have been right all the time, but they always knew they were getting it straight and honest.
- Jack Welch
Some think that it is cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10 percent of our people. It isn’t. It’s just the opposite. What I think is brutal and false kindness is keeping people around who aren’t going to grow and prosper. There’s no cruelty like waiting and telling people late into their careers that they don’t belong – just when the options are limited and they’re putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages.
- Jack Welch
Yesterday ended last night. Today is a brand new day and it’s yours.
- Zig Ziglar
The earnings from Hong Kong and China Gas and rental property portfolio serve as a solid base for the Group’s sustainable growth.
- Lee Shau Kee
[On stopping working and focussing 100% on his company Nike] I was still teaching accounting, but the next year, I told Penny [married in 1968] if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I’m going to go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000. I said, that ‘s close enough.
- Phil Knight
It’s the next opportunity that keeps us motivated.
- Zig Ziglar
I want people to know their palate is a snowflake. We all like different things. Why should we all have the same taste in wines?
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.
- Bill Gates
When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.
- Bill Gates
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
- David Novak
If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman.
- Phil Knight
It was definitely kind of surprising to see us come out and run the ball because we usually like to pass to start the game and put up some quick points. But tonight, we had real good balance offensively. We ran and passed the ball well, which kept them off balance all night.
- Jack Taylor
We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.
- Henry Ford
Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.
- Timothy Ferriss
It takes the same effort to think small than to think big. But to think big frees you from the insignificant details.
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
Each time they Tweet, it sparks interaction.
- Jack Dorsey
Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Storytelling is the game. It’s what we all do. It’s why Nike is Nike, it’s why Apple is Apple, it’s why Walt Disney built Disney World and it’s why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.
- Bill Gates
Men like a ref decision because they just want to get back to the game.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Thank you is probably the most important thing that a leader can say.
- David Novak
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
- Winston Churchill
Cold steel and discipline and the slight capital surplus necessary to move and organise armies constituted the sole defences.
- Winston Churchill
Instead of choosing to focus in the liability column, I chose to focus in the asset column.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl – no superior alternative has yet been found.
- Winston Churchill
Fortunately we’re not a public company – we’re a private group of companies, and I can do what I want.
- Richard Branson
I don’t make deals for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it.
- Donald Trump
The thing for you is a burial permit. You have only to speak and I will see that you get it.
- Dale Carnegie
One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War’.
- Winston Churchill
Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.
- Winston Churchill
If you want enemies, excel your friends; but if you want friends, let your friends excel you.
- Dale Carnegie
You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.
- Jack Ma
How do leaders serve their people? They may pay good wages and treat employees with respect.
- John C. Maxwell
I don’t spend any time thinking about my place in history, ever. If people say I changed things, it’s nice, and I take it – but if I could give it to a charity it would be useful. I really believe now that my only job in life is to achieve a state of comfort and happiness.
- Russell Simmons
Even if we are right and the other person is definitely wrong, we only destroy ego by causing someone to lose face. The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.
- Larry Page
In business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.
- Peter Thiel
We’ve seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we’re seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.
- Sergey Brin
Make it just like a Mac.
- Bill Gates
If I go public, I’ll stick to it.
- David Novak
God wouldn’t have given you the dream unless He already had a way to bring it to pass.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Never forget that people are your greatest asset.
- John Maxwell
You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.
- Bill Cosby
A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.
- James C. Collins
The main cause of depression is traceable directly to the world-wide habit of trying to REAP without sowing.
- Napoleon Hill
We can never own property (because of property taxes) we can just control it (by renting it from the government by paying taxes).
- Robert Kiyosaki
We are in turbulent times.
- Lee Shau Kee
Every noteworthy achievement met with some sort of temporary setback before success came.
- Napoleon Hill
The Cul-de-Sac ( French for “dead end” ) … is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing much changes.
- Seth Godin
Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.
- Napoleon Hill
No one knows more about the way you think than you do.
- Seth Godin
When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation.
- Peter Thiel
Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.
- Bill Gates
Following a period of drastic market fluctuations in Asia during the summer months of the previous year, economies in the region gradually improved and stabilised during the financial year.
- Lee Shau Kee
Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.
- Warren Buffett
Being nice to people is just 20% of providing good customer service. The important part is designing systems that allow you to do the job right the first time. All the smiles in the world aren’t going to help you if your product or service is not what the customer wants,
- James L. Heskett
I’d learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.
- Ben Horowitz
Fail openly.
- Jack Dorsey
I’m for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children?
- Steve Martin
Learning is not done to you, it is something you choose to do.
- Seth Godin
I’ve operated and launched newspapers all over the world.
- Rupert Murdoch
I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it’s made by Warren Buffett.
- Bill Gates
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
The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.
- Seth Godin
From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional.
- Peter Thiel
More people will yell and wave at you to tell you that you forgot to close the gas cap than the amount of people who will stop to tell you that you are going the wrong direction with your life.
- Clay Clark
Send out a cheerful, positive greeting, and most of the time you will get back a cheerful, positive greeting. It’s also true that if you send out a negative greeting, you will, in most cases, get back a negative greeting.
- Zig Ziglar
I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.
- John D. Rockefeller
I don’t think culture is something you can describe.
- Bill Gates
There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That’s a beautiful deleveraging.
- Ray Dalio
You guarantee a good meal by picking the recipes well, not by following recipes well.
- Timothy Ferriss
I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.
- Elon Musk
The most impressive person I’ve ever met? Elaine Wynn is no slouch. She’s a much better person than me. But I’ve got her. Finders keepers, losers weepers. And it’s been forty-seven years.
- Stephen Wynn
God, You said You would restore health unto me and heal me of my wounds. You said I would live and not die. You said what is impossible with men is possible with God. When you pray.
- Joel Olsteen
The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong questionl
- Peter Drucker
You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated.
- James C. Collins
And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round.
- Winston Churchill
