My dad is like a cactus – introverted and tough. I’m a people person, like my mom, but I got my competitiveness from my dad. He came to this country from Belarus with nothing and built a real business. He’s my hero for giving me that need to run a business and for having enormous confidence in me.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Notable Quotables
I believe social responsibility begins with a strong, competitive company. Only a healthy enterprise can improve and enrich the lives of people and their communities.
- Jack Welch
When I cut the feet out of my pantyhose that one time, I saw it as my sign. I had been visualizing being self employed prior to this happening. It was my mental preparation meeting the opportunity in that moment.
- Sara Blakely
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
I DECLARE I will experience God’s faithfulness. I will not worry. I will not doubt. I will keep my trust in Him, knowing that He will not fail me. I will give birth to every promise God put in my heart and I will become everything God created me to be. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1.
- Peter Thiel
the best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.
- Dale Carnegie
It’s the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change – as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.
- Bill Gates
The internet population is going up and up. I am confident that this will be a huge market.
- Robin Li
Our job as founders as entrepreneurs is to distribute the future that’s already here.
- Jack Dorsey
There are no rules here — we’re trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison
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
Eating words has never given me indigestion.
- Winston Churchill
Getting things straight in your head is a major achievement because there’s so much clutter out there. You’ve got to push aside the static to really hear the music.
- Stephen Wynn
With every experience, you alone are painting your own canvas, thought by thought, choice by choice.
- Oprah Winfrey
An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.
- Ben Horowitz
There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
And I keep saying, whether you like the president or not, everybody has to pull together and help the president because, as the president goes, so goes the country, as the country goes, so goes your job, your ability to feed your family, your government.
- Michael Bloomberg
We modeled our employee stock ownership plan after Sam’s, and it worked well for us.
- Bernie Marcus
The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.
- Henry Ford
Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we’re going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.
- Elon Musk
As Americans we do not recognize the jurisdiction of the Hague Tribunal. We only follow court orders from the Chinese judiciary
- Sergey Brin
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
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
- Steve Jobs
Only the Dark Lord of the Sith knows of our weakness. If informed the senate is, multiply our adversaries will.
- Yoda
In America, when you bring an idea to market, you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share. In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China – execution is.
- Ma Huateng
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
If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.
- Richard Branson
Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.
- Steve Jobs
We are gods in the chrysalis.
- Dale Carnegie
You cannot consistently perform in a manner which is inconsistent with the way you see yourself.
- Zig Ziglar
I guess the worst moment I ever had in business was the fear that Southwest Airlines wouldn’t get off the ground.
- Herb Kelleher
I believe God wants you to have money to pay your bills, send your kids to college and do charity work and build orphanages. There’s the teaching that we’re supposed to be poor to show that we’re humble. I don’t buy that. I think we’re supposed to be leaders. We’re supposed to excel.
- Joel Olsteen
Keeping score is for games, not friendships.
- John C. Maxwell
People development should be a daily event, integrated into every aspect of your regular goings-on.
- Jack Welch
Focus on being productive instead of busy.
- Timothy Ferriss
War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow men.
- Napoleon Hill
I used to believe that a good product sold itself.
- Phil Knight
God didn’t create you to be average. You were created to excel You have everything.
- Joel Olsteen
All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can’t worry about it, you can’t panic when you look at the stock market’s decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.
- Larry Ellison
Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.
- Peter Thiel
Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.
- Jerry Seinfeld
A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.
- Peter Thiel
Success doesn’t make you and failure doesn’t break you.
- Zig Ziglar
Not an hour is lost that is spent in the saddle.
- Winston Churchill
Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world.
- Joel Olsteen
We are fastidious investors. On average, we investnearly 20 percent of our household realized income each year. Most of us invest at least 15 percent. Seventy-nine percent of us have at least one account with a brokerage company. But we make our own investment decisions.
- Thomas J Stanley
Surround yourself with people who want the best for you and the people you love!
- Zig Ziglar
The Waffle Trainer later became the best-selling training shoe in the United States.
- Phil Knight
The truth is, somebody is always talking about you, so you have to let it go… if it’s not a part of your God-given destiny.
- Joel Olsteen
My parents got one bedroom, my three sisters got the other bedroom, and my brother and I made do with a rollaway in the kitchen.
- David Green
If a job doesn’t excite you on some level—just because of the stuff of it—don’t settle.
- Jack Welch
Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.
- Henry Ford
Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.
- Dale Carnegie
When you encourage others, you in the process are encouraged because you’re making a commitment and difference in that person’s life. Encouragement really does make a difference.
- Zig Ziglar
Creativity dies in an indisciplined environment.
- James C. Collins
The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance – and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.
- Oprah Winfrey
I’m very careful about saying who would and wouldn’t go to heaven. I don’t know.
- Joel Olsteen
Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want – and a little more.
- Sam Walton
We’re absolutely going to have a better facility.
- Ed Clark
Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.
- John C. Maxwell
SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company’s lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.
- Elon Musk
I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.
- Joel Olsteen
The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.
- Elon Musk
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into smaller manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
- Mark Twain
Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.
- Steven Spielberg
If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.
- Bernard Shaw
Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.
- Dale Carnegie
Being aware of your fear is smart. Overcoming it is the mark of a successful person.
- Seth Godin
Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.
- Zig Ziglar
Later on, Rockefeller learned to camouflage his business anxiety behind a studied calm, but during these years it ws often graphically displayed. Clark remembered one daring venture when the firm wagered its entire capital on a large grain shipment to Buffalo. With foolish, atypical imprudence, Rockefeller suggested that they skip the insurance and pocket the $150.00 premium; Gardner and Clark reluctantly acquiesced. That night, a terrible storm blew across Lake Erie, and when Gardner came to the office the next morning, a frightfully pale Rockefeller paced the floor in agitation. Let’s take out insurance right away, he said, We still have time – if the boat hasn’t been wrecked by now. Gardner ran off to pay the premium. By the time he got back, Rockefeller was waving a telegram announcing the ship’s safe arrival in Buffalo. Whether unnerved by the episode or upset at having paid the unnecessary premium, Rockefeller went home ill that afternoon.
- Ron Chernow
Common mission trap for companies: trying to be all things to all people at all times.
- Jack Welch
We’re profitable and have the potential to be very profitable, … We generate cash from operations of over $1 billion per quarter. We have $19 billion in cash and equivalents in an industry that is in debt. We’ve gained more market share than we’ve ever gained in this last quarter. We’ve got the customer loyalty and strategy for where the industry’s going, which is combining networks for service providers and enterprises. So I’m very optimistic about our future if we execute right.
- John Chambers
Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.
- Henry Ford
If the Starbucks secret is a smile when you get your latte… ours is that the Web site adapts to the individual’s taste.
- Reed Hastings
The secret of his success? I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody.
- Dale Carnegie
It’s not about size, it’s about your ability to make a difference. At that small size, collaboration is all the more important.
- John Chambers
In the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we’ve done, and they will say ‘do not despair, do not yield…march straightforward.
- Winston Churchill
A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do.
- Seth Godin
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
- Steve Jobs
As youngsters, my mother taught her children that while we might not be the smartest people around, we could be courteous, polite and considerate of others.
- Zig Ziglar
There is no man living that can not do more than he thinks he can.
- Henry Ford
This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.
- Bill Gates
Don’t wait for the right answer and the golden path to present themselves.This is precisely why you’re stuck. Starting without seeing the end is difficult, so we often wait until we see the end, scanning relentlessly for the right way, the best way and the perfect way.The way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path, right now.Step by step, page by page, interaction by interaction. As you start moving, you can’t help but improve, can’t help but incrementally find yourself getting back toward your north star.You might not end up with perfect, but it’s significantly more valuable than being stuck.Don’t just start. Continue. Ship. Repeat.
- Seth Godin
Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.
- Albert Einstein
The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.
- Bill Gates
Nature is truly wonderful. Only man is truly foul.
- Thomas Edison
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
- Jeff Bezos
Love doesn’t sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread: remade all the time, made new.
- Og Mandino
The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny.The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe.The lizard brain will fight (to the death) if it has to, but would rather run away. It likes a vendetta and has no trouble getting angry.The lizard brain cares what everyone else thinks, because status in the tribe is essential to its survival.A squirrel runs around looking for nuts, hiding from foxes, listening for predators, and watching for other squirrels. The squirrel does this because that’s all it can do. All the squirrel has is a lizard brain.The only correct answer to ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ is ‘Because it’s lizard brain told it to.’ Wild animals are wild because the only brain they posses is a lizard brain.The lizard brain is not merely a concept. It’s real, and it’s living on the top of your spine, fighting for your survival. But, of course, survival and success are not the same thing.The lizard brain is the reason you’re afraid, the reason you don’t do all the art you can, the reason you don’t ship when you can. The lizard brain is the source of the resistance.
- Seth Godin
Personal initiative is the power that inspires the completion of that which one begins. It is the power that starts all action. No person is free until he learns to do his own thinking and gains the courage to act on his own.
- Napoleon Hill
I think it is a sad day for the company and we are going to miss him. But, typically of him, he has planned his own succession immaculately. We will have a dinner and a nice party for him.
- Simon Wolfson
Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.
- John C. Maxwell
Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society, they’re powerful engines for making it better.
- Peter Thiel
Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
- Warren Buffett
We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.
- Winston Churchill
No one’s going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful, although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude.
- Rupert Murdoch
The prizes of life are at the end of each journey, not near the beginning, and it is not given to me to know how many steps are necessary in order to reach my goal. Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner.
- Og Mandino
What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.
- Peter Thiel
You were created to give. You were created to make the lives of others better. Someone needs what you have. Someone needs your love. Someone needs your smile. Someone needs your encouragement and your gifts.
- Joel Olsteen
