If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
- Steve Jobs
We believe our growth rate indicates that Cisco continues to gain market share against our traditional competitors in most product sectors.
- John Chambers
We’ve been able to go deep rather than broad.
- Jack Dorsey
About one in five of us is retired. About two-thirds of us who are working are self-employed. Interestingly, self-employed peoplemake up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires.
- Thomas J Stanley
From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.
- Ben Horowitz
The question isn’t ‘What do we want to know about people?’ It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?
- Mark Zuckerberg
I think that diversity is key for the next American entrepreneurs. They want to be a part of this society where there is so much diversity they have to have people from all the experiences.
- Russell Simmons
The habit of doing more than is necessary can only be earned through practice.
- Seth Godin
There’s a fascinating statistic: One out of every four people in America has visited New York since 9/11. It is astounding. Now, I don’t know how you count it; it’s some people coming multiple times.
- Michael Bloomberg
Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation…. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward!
- Thomas Edison
Someday, man will harness the rise and fall of the tides, imprison the power of the sun, and release atomic power.
- Thomas Edison
In whatever you do, strive to be the best at it.
- Aliko Dangote
If I was down to my last dollar, I would spend it on public relations.
- Bill Gates
No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.
- Bill Gates
You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.
- Winston Churchill
The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.
- Sergey Brin
How do you tap in to what God has already done? Very simple: just act like you’re blessed, talk like you’re blessed, walk like you’re blessed, think like you’re blessed, smile like you’re blessed, dress like you’re blessed. Put actions behind your faith, and one day you will see it become a reality.
- Joel Olsteen
Buoyant consumer confidence will continue to underpin retial spending and hence rental growth for shopping centres. The office market is expected to perform well on the back of tight supply being met by keen demand from companies looking for expansion opportunities.
- Lee Shau Kee
When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.
- Howard Schultz
THE HABIT OF DOING MORE THAN PAID FOR – One of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness, upon the part of the leader, to do more than he requires of his followers.
- Napoleon Hill
You can take from every experience what it has to offer you. And you cannot be defeated if you just keep taking one breath followed by another.
- Oprah Winfrey
We’re trying to identify the key influencers and make them distribution points.
- Jack Dorsey
Frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
- Jeff Bezos
The single reason for a salesperson’s existence is to get the Buyer’s commitment. Just how poor are salespeople at their jobs? In a study of professional sales people (those who sell full time), 50% failed to ask for the buyer’s commitment to buy.
- Jerry Vass
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
- Benjamin Disraeli
I don’t think so, in that Virgin is already a global brand. Brands like Amazon have had to spend hundreds of millions of pounds you know, building their brands, whereas Virgin is already well-known around the world.
- Richard Branson
It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.
- Seth Godin
With comedy, you have no place to go but more comedy, so you’re never off the hook.
- Steve Martin
Many of America’s and New York’s sons and daughters are around the world fighting for the freedoms that the Statue of Liberty stands for.
- Michael Bloomberg
This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, this is just perhaps the end of the beginning.
- Winston Churchill
Leaders who are kind of insecure or egocentric, they basically sabotage themselves.
- John C. Maxwell
if you want to keep happiness , you have to share it !
- Dale Carnegie
If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or statement on any subject online, you’re going to polarize people. And without that polarity, there’s no discussion. Discussion is what I want, which means that I’m fine with the consequences.
- Timothy Ferriss
It took 23 years from Abraxane being conceived to us showing now with conclusiveness that it works in pancreatic cancer. We cannot afford as a society to wait another 23 years to make sure that the patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.
- Bill Gates
Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.
- Oprah Winfrey
The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure, but to build one that is worthy of enduring.
- Jim Collins
To do anything truly worth doing, I must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in with gusto and scramble through as well as I can.
- Og Mandino
To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.
- Henry Ford
India has been and continues to be a strategic market for Cisco both in terms of business opportunities and as a base for outstanding engineering talent, … With the launch of our new campus in Bangalore today, Cisco will be well placed to continue building our presence in India as a critical part of our R&D efforts and as the domestic market for networking products and solutions continues to expand.
- John Chambers
There is only one excuse for a speaker’s asking the attention of his audience: he must have either truth or entertainment for them.
- Dale Carnegie
you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.
- Dale Carnegie
You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.
- Sam Walton
In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.
- Peter Thiel
Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.
- Bill Gates
There is only one way… to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
- Dale Carnegie
Chinese people today have strong demand for culture, but we need effective supply, and China needs innovative cultural products.
- Wang Jianlin
The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability… When the leader demonstrates vulnerability and sensibility and brings people together, the team wins.
- Howard Schultz
I hope you will take good care of your health, this is religious duty, and you can accomplish so much for the world if you keep well and strong.
- John D. Rockefeller
Even if you are predisposed to being overweight, you’re not predestined to be fat.
- Timothy Ferriss
El séptimo imperativo • El primer imperativo es estar al tanto; al tanto del mercado, de las oportunidades y de quién eres. • El segundo imperativo es estar preparados, para entender lo que sucede a tu alrededor. • El tercer imperativo es estar conectado, para que confíen en ti. • El cuarto imperativo es ser coherente, para que el sistema sepa qué esperar de ti. • El quinto imperativo es crear un valor, para tener algo que vender. • El sexto imperativo es ser productivo, para ofrecer un buen precio. No obstante, es posible que hagas todas estas cosas y aun así fracases. Un empleo no es suficiente, ni una fábrica, ni una industria. Solían serlo, pero ya no lo son. El mundo está cambiando muy rápido, y sin la chispa de la iniciativa te limitas a reaccionar ante lo que te rodea. Asimismo, sin la capacidad de incitar y experimentar estás estancado, a la deriva, esperando el empujón…
- Seth Godin
The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.
- Seth Godin
Nothing happens until something is sold.
- Joe Ricketts
At the start of any business, keeping the cash flowing in is the entrepreneur’s most IMPORTANT JOB.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.
- Bill Gates
There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.
- Phil Knight
I’m not a public official. I’m a businessman, I’m a builder, I’m a planner.
- Donald Bren
Anybody can wish for riches, and most people do, but only a few know that a definite plan plus a burning desire for wealth, are the only dependable means of accumulating wealth.
- Napoleon Hill
When you wake up every day, you have two choices. You can either be positive or negative; an optimist or a pessimist. I choose to be an optimist. It’s all a matter of perspective.
- Harvey Mackay
The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.
- Elon Musk
It doesn’t hurt to ask Actually, it does hurt. It does hurt to ask the wrong way, to ask without preparation, to ask without permission. It hurts because you never get another chance to ask right.
- Seth Godin
Steve really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn’t there. He took over the project, and it was really my own opinion — only my opinion — that he wanted to compete with the Lisa group that had kicked him out.
- Steve Wozniak
Allow yourself to get on the same side of the desk and solve the problems together.
- Jack Nadel
Quit questioning God and start trusting Him!
- Joel Olsteen
The Pitch is your mechanism for persuasion. Persuasion is the goal. You’re trying to convince them of someone or something, and they might initially be resistant. This isn’t a nice casual conversation; it’s the Guerrilla P.R. version of a first strike.
- Michael Levine
I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.
- Elon Musk
The sad truth is, if you push hard enough, and if you’re so stubborn that you must have things your way, God will sometimes allow you to undertake a project without His blessing or at the wrong time. The problem with that, of course, is when you start something in your own strength and in your own timing, you’re going to have to finish it and maintain it in your own strength.
- Joel Olsteen
I’ve already figured out when I’m going to be No. 2 and No. 1.
- Sheldon Adelson
It’s easy to dream about it … Much harder to execute it ….Work!
- Gary Vaynerchuk
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
Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.
- Bill Gates
What we want to watch is whether this is a short-term bump or not.
- John Chambers
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
I look at Facebook as being more conscientious about operator concerns, we are not 100 percent there, but we are finding consensus.
- Jon Fredrik Baksaas
I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
- Larry Page
Nike was the great goddess of victory.
- Phil Knight
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
- Steve Jobs
Don’t Hire People Like Yourself.
- Forrest Ray
If you don’t let people flourish in their jobs, why are they going to stay?
- Joel Olsteen
Once a decision is made…problems have to be solved.
- Theodore Roosevelt
Konosuke Matsushita was a visionary entrepreneur. He started working very young as a teenager, and he eventually created Panasonic to become a truly global company.
- Tadashi Yanai
War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war:
- Peter Thiel
I would rather hire a man with enthusiasm than a man who knows everything.
- John D. Rockefeller
In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it’s disruptive and it’s a problem.
- Ray Dalio
If you had to boil down the Wal-Mart system to one single idea, it would porbably be communication, because it is one of the real keys to our success…Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
- Sam Walton
If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.
- Elon Musk
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
- Elon Musk
Tip #17 – Perceived value is what sells. Real value is what repeats.
- Jack Nadel
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
God never said that we wouldn’t have unfair situations, that we wouldn’t experience loss. But He promised if we would stay in faith, He would restore everything that was stolen.
- Joel Olsteen
I kept saying, Sam, we’re making a good living. Why go out why expand so much more? The stores are getting farther and farther away. After the seventeenth store, though, I realized there wasn’t going to any stopping it.
- Helen Walton
The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor.
- Jack Welch
I’m in two modes when I’m on Lanai: In engineering mode, I’m trying to find the right place for the reservoir and the desalination plant, and looking at designs for new hotel rooms. The rest of the time, I’m in decompression mode. I’m on Hulopoe Beach, going for a swim, or on my paddleboard surrounded by 100 spinner dolphins.
- Larry Ellison
It turned out there was alot to learn about running a store. And, of course, what really drove Sam was that competition across the street – John Dunham over at the Sterling Store. Sam was always over there checking on John. Always. Looking at his prices, looking at his displays, looking at what was going on. He was always looking for a way to do a better job. I don’t remember the details, but I remember some kind of panty-price-war they got into. Later on, long after we left Newport, and John had retired, we would seem him and he would laugh about Sam always being in his store. But I’m sure it aggravate him quite a bit early on. John had never had good competition before Sam. Helen Walton (Sam’s Wife): That Newport store was really the beginning of where Walmart is today. We did everything. We would wash windows, sweep floors, trim windows. We did all the stockroom work checked the freight in. Everything it took to run a store. We had to keep expenses to a minimum. That is where it started, year ago. Our money was made by controlling expenses. That, and Sam always being ingeniious. He never stopped trying to do something different. One thing, though I never forgave him for making me clean out that damned ice cream machine…
- Bud Walton
Well… I graduated from the business school of Northumberland University in Newcastle.
- Alexei Mordashov
You have to get all agreements in writing.
- Jack Nadel
Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.
- Richard Branson
Starbucks represents something beyond a cup of coffee.
- Howard Schultz





