Notable Quotables

Great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.

- Peter Thiel

Customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.

- Peter Thiel

A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.

- Peter Thiel

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

- Socrates

The secret to being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal.

- Seth Godin

We vote for a presidential candidate without saying, “Why not run the country for a month and then we’ll see . .

- Seth Godin

In time, we lose our freshness and spontaneity of true conversation. These are areas in which everyone interested in self-improvement will seek to improve.

- Dale Carnegie

Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it… that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.

- Dale Carnegie

I was working with stem cells as part of a NASA programme. We realised that the science of stem-cell proliferation was also fundamental to cancer cells when cancer enters the phase of metastasis.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Call it the emergence of a “world’s bank” – a system built by and for the people, delivering credit in America and across the globe in a radically decentralized, highly scalable, and crucially equitable way. The World Bank funds institutions.The world’s bank funds people.

- Reid Hoffman

Success is the maximum utilization of the ability you have.

- Zig Ziglar

Many people fail to make a favourable impression because they don’t listen attentively.

- Isaac F. Marcosson

Hope is the engine of your attitude, and your attitude determines your altitude.

- Zig Ziglar

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.

- Oprah Winfrey

I try to keep in touch with the details… I also look at the product daily. That doesn’t mean you interfere, but it’s important occasionally to show the ability to be involved. It shows you understand what’s happening.

- Rupert Murdoch

I don’t want to be liked. I want to be respected.

- Jack Ma

Market fundamentalists recognize that the role of the state in the economy is always disruptive, inefficient, and generally has negative connotations. This leads them to believe that the market mechanism can take care of all the problems.

- George Soros

I’ve always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

- Jeff Bezos

Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.

- David Packard

And it is change that always provides the opportunity for the new and different. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.

- Peter Drucker

Your workforce is your most valuable asset. The knowledge and skills they have represent the fuel that drives the engine of business – and you can leverage that knowledge.

- Harvey Mackay

A person’s life is over in 50, 100 years. But a company lives on through the people it is composed of, and SoftBank group has to survive even after I’m gone.

- Masayoshi Son

It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.

- Napoleon Hill

When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.

- John C. Maxwell

Just saying you are better than good won’t make it so. But, when you understand what it takes to live the better than good life, and you apply yourself, your life will truly be better than good.

- Zig Ziglar

We wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.

- Phil Knight

Credit is a promise to deliver money. It will produce GDP but you’ll create credit… So you reach a certain point that that you can’t do that anymore… There are choices. And how do we best support, apportion the money? How much is going to be transferred?

- Ray Dalio

I have taken six companies public, and three of those are Fortune 1000 companies, but the key to my success has been my ability to sell other people on my dreams.

- Wayne Huizenga

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

- Peter Drucker

Cultural industries will be the next engine for growth after real estate, and Wanda will make cultural industries our long-term focus.

- Wang Jianlin

Over the long run, the price of gold approximates the total amount of money in circulation divided by the size of the gold stock. If the market price of gold moves a long way from this level, it may indicate a buying or selling opportunity.

- Ray Dalio

Learn to speak God’s favor over every area of your life. Remember, the more favor-minded you are, the more of God’s favor you’re going to experience.

- Joel Olsteen

The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I put forward a pretty general theory that financial markets are intrinsically unstable. That we really have a false picture when we think about markets tending towards equilibrium.

- George Soros

It’s not how far you fall. But how high you bounce that counts.

- Zig Ziglar

Build a culture that rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.

- Ben Horowitz

Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.

- P.T. Barnum

[Luke:] I can’t believe it. [Yoda:] That is why you fail.

- Yoda

The bluegrass community… can be very strict. I didn’t know if I’d be welcomed into the bluegrass community or not, but I think they judge you very fairly… I felt really welcome.

- Steve Martin

Positive thinking is more than just a tagline. It changes the way we behave. And I firmly believe that when I am positive, it not only makes me better, but it also makes those around me better.

- Harvey Mackay

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

EVERYBODY SELLS Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.

- Peter Thiel

Look we gave this thing a good run. We both know it’s not working out. Let’s wrap this thing up.

- Jack Welch

As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.

- Henry Ford

Don’t worry that you can’t seem to come up with sure billion dollar winners at first. Just do projects for yourself for fun. You’ll get better and better.

- Steve Wozniak

[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

Leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.

- Peter Thiel

The guerrilla is obsessed with benefits. Whenever offering a product or service, she focuses on how it will benefit the consumer and builds everything—the product, the delivery, the marketing—around that benefit.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

The London property market has excellent investment opportunities.

- Wang Jianlin

I would argue heavily that the time that has been allocated to social used to come from television, and people are benefitting from it. People who are saying, ‘Aw, you’re spending all your time on Facebook, or all your time on Twitter,’ I’d like to understand what the person used to do with that time.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I’ve always felt it was not up to anyone else to make me give my best.

- Hakeem Olajuwon

We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.

- Larry Page

In this early period, Rockefeller was a chronic worrier who labored under a great deal of self-imposed stress. Though not versed in the scientific side of refining, he often excercised a direct managerial role in the plant. With fluctuating market conditions, he sometimes needed shipments to New York with great dispatch and personally rushed down to the railroad tracks to motivate the freight handlers. I shall never forget how hungry I was in those days. I stayed out of doors day and night; I ran up and down the tops of freight cars, when necessary; I hurried up the boys.

- Ron Chernow

I took a Fear of Flying class, and I always missed the class, because I was always flying.

- Sara Blakely

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

- Jeff Bezos

Humility is becoming a lost art, but it’s not difficult to practice. It means that you realize that others have been involved in your success.

- Harvey Mackay

It enjoys strong network effects from its content ecosystem: thousands of developers write software for Apple devices because that’s where hundreds of millions of users are, and those users stay on the platform because it’s where the apps are.

- Peter Thiel

Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there.

- Timothy Ferriss

Stealing Coach Wooden’s sets of three, I have come up with a formula for success no matter what kind of business you happen to be in: 1) Make sure you have the right people around you; 2) Have fun and drive results by recognizing the achievements of others; and 3) Be a passionate learner, and pass on what you know to others. Not only will this make you a success in business, but it will make you a success in life.

- David Novak

Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.

- Bill Gates

Often, out of our greatest rejection comes our greatest direction.

- Joel Olsteen

There’s a difference between telling people what to do and inciting a movement.

- Seth Godin

The first key factor, I believe, is unity. If a family is not united, how then can we unite our colleagues? If we don’t love our brothers or our family, how then can we go ahead to love our colleagues. So our tradition really is about the human factor and talents, and we are dependent on the human factor. Therefore we have this corporate slogan – The markets of the world can belong to our corporation, and so can the world’s foremost human talents; The markets of the world belongs to us, and so are the world’s vast resources of raw materials. Similarly, if we can gain access to it, then the world’s financial funding belongs to us as well. Therefore, of foremost importance is access to human talents. Of course, a slogan is only something that we speak of. Of greater importance, is to truly have access to human talents. Towards that purpose, we must first be united and possess love. Our family is very united. And for the sake of the company, we innovated – we introduced western-style (corporate) culture into our company 30 years ago.

- Dhanin Chearavanont

The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves

- Ray Kroc

When you have no one to answer to, vendetta as investment strategy is as legitimate as anything.

- Carl Icahn

There’s no single company in the whole world that has a big-scale production base and at the same time has screening and distribution channels. Wanda Group is the first one in the world.

- Wang Jianlin

In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.

- Ray Dalio

Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in.

- Seth Godin

In order to become rich, you need to learn to build systems that can work without you. .

- Robert Kiyosaki

Never fear to negotiate, but never negotiate out of fear.

- Jack Nadel

Promise what no others can: the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people. You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.

- Peter Thiel

It marks a big step in a man’s development when he comes to realize that other men can be called in to help him do a better job than he can do alone.

- Andrew Carnegie

Our customers call and e-mai us to say that’s how it feels when a Zappos box arrives. And that’s how we view this company.

- Tony Hsieh

Learn to say ‘no’ to the good so you can say ‘yes’ to the best.

- John C. Maxwell

Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario.

- Seth Godin

It’s no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”?

- Peter Thiel

Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people. The management team.

- James C. Collins

I bought a company in the mid-’90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I’ve made lots of dumb decisions. That’s part of the game.

- Warren Buffett

Mr. Carnegie’s Master Mind group consisted of a staff of approximately 50 men, with whom he surrounded himself, for the definiteness purpose of manufacturing and marketing steel. He attributed his entire fortune to the POWER he accumulated through this Master Mind…Great POWER CAN BE ACCUMULATED THROUGH NO OTHER PRINCIPLE.

- Napoleon Hill

Being able to see an activity log of where a kid has been going on the Internet is a good thing.

- Bill Gates

Even when change is elective, it will disorient you. You may go through anxiety. You will miss aspects of your former life. It doesn’t matter. The trick is to know in advance of making any big change that you’re going to be thrown off your feet by it. So you prepare for this inevitable disorientation and steady yourself to get through it. Then you take the challenge, make the change, and achieve your dream.

- Harvey Mackay

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

- Seth Godin

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

The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.

- Seth Godin

Branding is what people think about you before they even know you.

- Bryan Smith

It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor.

- Ray Kroc

If you say too much or mix in multiple pitches, you diffuse your goal. You must give the media a pitch they can hit.

- Michael Levine

Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans.

- Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles

Satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels.

- Rupert Murdoch

The Hindus are some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.

- Joel Olsteen

Our mail product, Hotmail, is the market leader globally.

- Steve Ballmer

Starbucks is committed to evolving and enhancing our customer experience with innovative and wholesome food offerings.

- Howard Schultz

It is clothes. It is parts. Therefore, you combine the parts differently to create your own unique expression.

- Tadashi Yanai

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