If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn’t be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers.
- Bill Gates
Notable Quotables
Jim Cathcart is one of the brightest, dearest and most comprehensive speakers I know. In this powerful book he will help you discover and express your true self, accelerate your success and improve your quality of life.
- Jack Canfield
It’s really a full-time job to manage our lives.
- Sara Blakely
Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.
- Jim Collins
The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.
- Harvey Mackay
People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
- Timothy Ferriss
I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.
- Winston Churchill
Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, what do I want to do everyday for the rest of my life…do that.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Cisco’s collaboration with AT&T and GI will result in a New World network that will fundamentally change the way communications services are delivered to the consumer market.
- John Chambers
I know how to make decisions and stand up to the criticism every day.
- Michael Bloomberg
People use so much more health care when they live longer.
- Michael Bloomberg
Facing reality sounds simple, but it isn’t. I found it hard to get people to see a situation for what it is and not for what it was, or what they hoped it would be.
- Jack Welch
He who is without a newspaper is cut off from his species.
- P.T. Barnum
Comprehensive after-sale property management service is as important as building quality.
- Lee Shau Kee
I’m not looking to exclude people, I’m looking to include them.
- Joel Olsteen
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
I don’t know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.
- Reed Hastings
Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.
- Peter Drucker
There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything and an optimist who says, Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway. Either way, nothing happens.
- Yvon Chouinard
It is a hard thing to let go of mistakes we’ve made and sins. God wants us to do that because He knows the guilt and the condemnation will keep us from becoming who He has created us to be.
- Joel Olsteen
I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.
- Jack Dorsey
Get through your fears and the world will open up. Give in to your fears and your world will get smaller every year.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I aim to be pretty – I gave up dressing to be sexy in the eighties.
- Sara Blakely
To achieve stable growth, an enterprise must live up to its conviction.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Small businesses don’t exist without the nucleus.
- Bryan Smith
Remember: There is a direct correlation between an increased sphere of comfort and getting what you want.
- Timothy Ferriss
Our culture works hard to prevent change.
- Seth Godin
That’s just $30 for two tickets. Racing is a family sport and we strive to make our tickets affordable for any families that want to come watch a race.
- Ed Clark
You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.
- Dale Carnegie
Concentrate all of your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought into focus.
- Alexander Graham Bell
Being educated in the United States gave me a good understanding of American culture. I think I got a lot of influence from the entrepreneurial mind in the United States.
- Masayoshi Son
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt has been described as founder of the Bull Moose Party, the man who led his troops up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, a big game hunter, family man, civic servant and a host of other things.
- Zig Ziglar
We’re all obsessed with ideas because ideas, not products, are the engine of our new economy.
- Seth Godin
And being as wicked as any man who ever lived, he exploited his advantage to the full.
- Winston Churchill
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
My first large-scale community development opportunity was the formation of the Mission Viejo Co. – a partnership with the O’Neill Family, who owned Rancho Mission Viejo. As the young president of the company, I had the responsibility for master planning, master building and implementing the new community’s development plans.
- Donald Bren
This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing. It’s not politically viable; it’s not morally right; it’s just not going to happen.
- Michael Bloomberg
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
- Bill Gates
Customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.
- Peter Thiel
The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses.
- Napoleon Hill
Connectors understand the necessity of creating value for others. If you want to be in the middle of the action, you must seek ways to enhance the lives of those surrounding you. The best connectors I know are extremely generous with introductions where they make sense. One of my favorite questions is, What are you most excited about right now? From that answer, I know who I can hook that person up with.
- Forbes
Potential means that you haven’t done it yet.
- David Novak
Culture manages when management is not there.
- Joe Jordan
Any colour – so long as it’s black.
- Henry Ford
It’s not Pinterest where people are putting up pins. You’re changing the way cities work, and that’s fundamentally a third rail. We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an as—hole named Taxi.
- Travis Kalanick
It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path at Dell. There’s always an opportunity to make a difference.
- Michael Dell
When you go through enough dark places, you don’t complain about little things. You don’t lose your joy because you got stuck in traffic; you don’t get offended because a coworker was rude to you. You’ve been through too much to let that sour you.
- Joel Olsteen
Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.
- Ben Horowitz
Life is too short to be small.
- Benjamin Disraeli
If you think about computing, there isn’t just one way to compute, just like there’s not just one way to move around. You can have shoes, you can have a car, you can have a bicycle, submarine, rocket, plane, train, glider, whatever. Because you have one doesn’t mean you get rid of another one… But PCs continue to be important.
- Michael Dell
However old or young, have a mindset that enables us to capture all the opportunities that changes in the world are bringing to us.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience.
- Dale Carnegie
Real estate deals a lot with the government. It isn’t like manufacturing, logistics, home appliances or the auto sector, which deal with consumers.
- Wang Jianlin
I just wanted to be in show business. I didn’t care if I was going to be an actor or a magician or what. Comedy was a point of the least resistance, really. And on the simplest level, I loved comedy.
- Steve Martin
You have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.
- Phil Knight
Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have.
- Thomas Edison
I had a feeling once about Mathematics – that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me – the Byss and Abyss. I saw – as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor’s Show – a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.
- Winston Churchill
When advice is freely given, the receiver is free to use it as he or she sees fit.
- Harvey Mackay
If you are not confused, you don´t know what is going on.
- Jack Welch
We didn’t really know what was happening.
- John Chambers
Because there have been no settlements reached for the securities action with any of the less-involved banks, it is difficult to know what reserves are prudent.
- Ed Clark
Substantial growth in GDP, rising wages, improved employment prospects and favourable bank mortgage terms have all resulted in a buoyant property market.
- Lee Shau Kee
My first job. Ah, the memories. I’m hired for minimum wage as the cleaner at an ice cream parlor and quickly realize that the big boss’s methods duplicate effort. I do it my way, finish in one hour instead of eight, and spend the rest of the time reading kung-fu magazines and practicing karate kicks outside. I am fired in a record three days, left with the parting comment, Maybe someday you’ll understand the value of hard work.” It seems I still don’t.
- Timothy Ferriss
The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.
- Walt Disney
After relating with the prospect compliment them by using what you have listened to during rapport building.
- Bryan Smith
IQ is a commodity, data is a commodity. I’m far more interested in watching people interact at a restaurant with their smartphone. We can all read ‘Tech Crunch,’ ‘Ad Age.’ I would rather be living in the trenches. I would rather be going to Whole Foods in Columbus Circle to watch people shop with their smartphones.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that everything changes except the law of change. He said: You cannot step in the same river twice. The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?
- Dale Carnegie
Why does a 67-year-old guy who got his start running an athletic shoe company think he can enter a field famous for gobbling up fortunes.
- Phil Knight
The growth of the company and the license that Starbucks has is to participate in other food and beverage opportunities. We have a global business… and in many parts of the world, tea is much, much bigger than coffee, and we’re going to bring tea and bring our capability and our understanding of what we’ve done for coffee to tea.
- Howard Schultz
We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster – closed and forgotten within the first year.
- Walt Disney
A company is stronger if it is bound by love rather than by fear.
- Herb Kelleher
Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.
- Larry Ellison
The first rule is not to lose. The second rule is not to forget the first rule.
- Warren Buffett
Life is actually far better than it is in the movies. And it takes longer.
- Seth Godin
A valuable business must start by finding a niche and dominating a small market.
- Peter Thiel
The Italians live well. They have problems, like all countries, but they are well-dressed, the women are pretty.
- Francois Pinault
We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference. Some organizations haven’t realized this yet, or haven’t articulated it, but we need artists.
- Seth Godin
Stock ownership changes behavior.
- Jack Welch
Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.
- Ben Horowitz
If you don’t cut off negative information it will depress you. Step out of the natural and say, This may be impossible with men, but I know with God all things are possible.
- Joel Olsteen
Even if you do something that others might consider wrong, you should at least be willing to talk about it and tell your parents what you’re doing because you believe it’s right.
- Steve Wozniak
Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.
- Warren Buffett
Over the years, Hong Kong has been confronted with various challenges. On every occasion, we were able to rely on our unique qualities – resourcefulness, perseverance, diligence and passion for excellence – to rise above our difficulties.
- Cheng Yu-tung
When sales people don’t know what to do, they talk. The ordinary salesperson vomits the presentation onto the Buyer’s desktop.
- Jerry Vass
The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,
- Peter Thiel
I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.
- Oprah Winfrey
I loved doing ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ Because you have to understand that I’d been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don’t think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.
- Steve Martin
Of course people are getting smarter nowadays, they are letting lawyers instead of their conscience be their guides.
- Will Rogers
In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.
- Reed Hastings
Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.
- Ben Horowitz
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
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: He is nothing but a boy — a little boy!
- Dale Carnegie
Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution. It just needs clarity.
- Ben Horowitz
Many people are unhappy and are not experiencing life to its fullest because they’ve closed their hearts to compassion, they are motivated by only what they want and what they think they need. They rarely do anything for anybody else unless they have an ulterior goal in mind. They are self-involved and self-centered.
- Joel Olsteen
No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it’s going to be different, and it must be rooted in today’s world.
- Peter Thiel
With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top.
- Seth Godin
Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.
- Jeff Bezos
The [Henderson] Group continuously strives to upgrade the quality of its development properties by applying new technologies and building materials to improve the efficiency and lower the cost of construction.
- Lee Shau Kee
