My new favorite word is ‘awkward.’…The reason we need to be in search of awkward is that awkward is the barrier between us and excellence, between where we are and the remarkable. If it were easy, everyone would have done it already, and it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
- Seth Godin
Notable Quotables
If the employees come first, then they’re happy….A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy, so they keep coming back, which pleases the shareholders. It’s not one of the enduring green mysteries of all time, it is just the way it works.
- Herb Kelleher
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
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they’ve never failed to imitate them.
- Zig Ziglar
We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft
- Bill Gates
I’m a job creator.
- Stephen Wynn
Little phrases such as ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ ‘Would you be so kind as to –?’ ‘Won’t you please?’ ‘Would you mind?’ ‘Thank you’ – little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life – and incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.
- Dale Carnegie
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
- Peter Drucker
Whether you’re talking about the core consumer or the person on the street, the principle is the same: you have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.
- Phil Knight
It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others.
- Dale Carnegie
You shouldn’t do things differently just because they’re different. They need to be… better.
- Elon Musk
Converting a decision into action requires answering several distinct questions: Who has to know of this decision? What action has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it? The first and the last of these are too often overlooked—with dire results.
- Peter Drucker
Obstacles can’t stop you. Problems can’t stop you. Most of all, other people can’t stop you. Only you can stop you.
- J. Gitomer
Logic, like science, must be the servant and not the master of man.
- Winston Churchill
As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
- Bill Gates
Never consider the possibility of failure. As long as you persist, you will be successful.
- Brian Tracy
Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are commmon and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields – from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us. That means we need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies. And there is such a strategy – though it will seem almost ridiculous in its simplicity, maybe even crazy to those of us who have spent years carefully developing ever more advanced skills and technologies. It is a checklist.
- Atul Gawande
Properly run startups place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting and the interview process in order to build their talent base. Too often the investment in people stops there.
- Ben Horowitz
Fortune always favors the brave, and never helps a man who does not help himself.
- P.T. Barnum
The market is fast-moving, fast-growing. Things that are true today may not be true tomorrow.
- Robin Li
I have always believed in God.
- Joel Olsteen
Quit questioning God and start trusting Him!
- Joel Olsteen
I believe that success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have.
- Timothy Ferriss
When you learn to listen to your fear, you’ve found a compass that can show you what matters.
- Seth Godin
The Net is not television. It is the finest direct-marketing mechanism in the history of mankind. It is direct mail with free stamps, and it allows you to create richer and deeper relationships than you’ve ever been able to create before.
- Seth Godin
I am easily satisfied with the very best.
- Winston Churchill
Don’t romance Wall Street. You don’t want investors who are only concerned about the quarter, or who are working on their exit strategy from day one. You want shareholders to own you forever. If we have no trading at all, I consider that a tremendous accomplishment.
- Warren Buffett
In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
- Ben Horowitz
There was absolutely no consistency to the experience.
- Michael Gerber
I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we’re not wise enough to see it.
- Oprah Winfrey
I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don’t know.
- Bill Gates
It took Flickr two years to reach the milestone of 100 million uploaded pictures. It took Instagram eight months
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I cut the feet out of my control top pantyhose to wear under these white pants and that was the ah-ha moment that started Spanx. My own butt was my own inspiration!
- Sara Blakely
I DECLARE I will live victoriously. I was created in the image of God. I have the DNA of a winner. I am wearing a crown of favor. Royal blood flows through my veins. I am the head, never the tail, above never beneath. I will live with purpose, passion, and praise, knowing that I was destined to live in victory. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
Success must never be measured by how much money you have.
- Zig Ziglar
Great opportunities can be and have been created during tough economic times.
- Howard Schultz
We are currently not planning on conquering the world.
- Sergey Brin
Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.
- Reed Hastings
We believed we could build a better search. We had a simple idea that not all pages are created equal. Some are more important.
- Sergey Brin
Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
- Dale Carnegie
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
- Zig Ziglar
There is a certain amount of dissatisfaction that goes with knowing your time, talent and abilities are not being properly used.
- Zig Ziglar
There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.
- Jack Welch
I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
- Bill Gates
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.
- Dale Carnegie
Don’t panic.
- David Novak
If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.
- Dave Ramsey
Ultimately you want to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind
- Sergey Brin
A narrow mind and a fat head invariably come on the same person.
- Zig Ziglar
The more you know, the more you care.
- Sam Walton
Present my story and the difficulties that I have faced. As an entrepreneur, a CEO.
- Ben Horowitz
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
I don’t like mixing up moralities with mathematics.
- Winston Churchill
The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.
- Peter Thiel
When you’re green, your growing. When you’re ripe, you rot.
- Ray Kroc
The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.
- Bill Gates
I’ve always taught that a poor economy is the best opportunity for salespeople because the naysayers and grumblers have already given up, leaving more territory, more opportunities to be successful than in a good economy when virtually all salespeople are out there, giving it their best.
- Zig Ziglar
If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.
- Elon Musk
To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.
- Ben Horowitz
About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools, and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology, which I look at as a global platform.
- Reed Hastings
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
Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash. How’s that for incentive to be effective and efficient?
- Timothy Ferriss
I think Bible principles are principles for life.
- Joel Olsteen
Whenever a company proudly announces the establishment of its beautiful, new, modern corporate headquarters, you can be sure it’s heading downhill. Why? Because instead of focusing on their business, the company’s managers are focusing on themselves. Messy desks, cramped quarters and unlovely surroundings are the physical manifestations of people too busy getting the work done to care much about their own creature comforts. The greatest danger to a business is not risk. It’s a lack of risk: complacency.
- Harvey Mackay
I’m a little unusual: I’m a six-person-or-less extrovert.
- Reid Hoffman
Don’t waste your energy trying to convince people to understand you. Your time is too valuable to try to prove yourself to people.
- Joel Olsteen
I think when you’re very dedicated to something and you’re engaged fully, you become a giver.
- Russell Simmons
A man should never neglect his family business.
- Walt Disney
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
- Timothy Ferriss
People don’t want to embrace culture shifts because it’s not going to happen in the next 20 minutes.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus.
- Larry Page
It’s the next opportunity that keeps us motivated.
- Zig Ziglar
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.
Of course people are getting smarter nowadays, they are letting lawyers instead of their conscience be their guides.
- Will Rogers
I’m not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I’m doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.
- George Soros
The thought of my mortality – I think about it a lot. I find it motivating. It can be any time that your number’s up.
- Sara Blakely
We ride roughshod over the feelings of others, getting our own way, finding fault, issuing threats, criticising a child or an employee in front of others, without even considering the hurt to the other person’s pride. Whereas a few minutes’ thought, a considerate word or two, a genuine understanding of the other person’s attitude, would go so far toward alleviating the sting!
- Dale Carnegie
Restructuring a job usually means restructuring a score of jobs, moving people around, and upsetting everybody. There is one exception: the exceedingly rare, truly exceptional man for whose sake the rule should be broken.
- Peter Drucker
Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
- Peter Thiel
Play long enough and you might get lucky. In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.
- Ben Horowitz
If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.
- Elon Musk
Diversification does not mean that we have lost confidence in the long term prospects of the property market. Just the contrary is true.One year after the hand-over of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, the people in Hong Kong and around the world have witnessed the successful implementation of the ‘One Country, Two System.’
- Cheng Yu-tung
I can be stressed, or tired, and I can go into a meditation and it all just flows off of me. I’ll come out of it refreshed and centered and that’s how I’ll feel and it’ll carry through the day.
- Ray Dalio
We do lots of Stuff. The only way you are going to have success is to have lots of failures first.
- Sergey Brin
The quality of our integration will be judged, not by the ultimate costs in hitting our targets, but instead by the level of service we give to our clients throughout the process. That’s kind of my 8-to-5 job. My 5-to-8 job is what’s the next move? Where else in health care do we see inefficiencies, that we see a splintered system with tremendous cost overruns?
- George Paz
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
So to hype up PolyGram we placed fake orders for the record into their system by telling retailers and wholesalers to order the 12 inch through PolyGram. PolyGram didn’t own it yet, but we created an appetite for Christmas Rappin that led them to buy it…So in the fall of 1979 Kurtis Blow signed with Mercury Records a division of Polygram Records, making him the first rapper on a major label…Christmas eve 1979 was the first time that I heard Christmas Rappin’ on the radio; I was upstairs at my family’s house. Frankie Crocker the biggest radio DJ in New York played it on WBLS.
- Russell Simmons
You’ve been destined to live in victory, destined to overcome, destined to leave your mark on this generation.
- Joel Olsteen
The 1990’s sure aren’t like the 1980’s.
- Donald Trump
When the tech geeks talk, I pay close attention.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Chinese people, young people, they don’t go shopping a lot in department stores. All department store guys hate me. They say business is bad because of Jack.
- Jack Ma
If you always do what you’ve always done, you’re always going to get what you’ve always gotten.
- Zig Ziglar
If You Want to Gather Honey, Don’t Kick Over the Beehive.
- Dale Carnegie
What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The ‘Billionaire’ song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It’s funny.
- Bill Gates
The War was decided in the first twenty days of fighting, and all that happened afterwards consisted in battles which, however formidable and devastating, were but desperate and vain appeals against the decision of Fate.
- Winston Churchill
Trust but Verify.
- Ronald Reagan
After all, a man’s Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action. Without work there is no play.
- Winston Churchill
I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
- Winston Churchill
They need to avoid coming at us head-on, and do their own thing better than we do ours. It doesn’t make any sense to try to underprice Walmart on something like toothpaste. That’s not what they customer is looking to a small store for anyway. Most independents are best off, I think, doing what I prided myself on doing for many years as a storekeeper, getting out front on the door and meeting everyone of the customers. Let them know how much you appreciate them, and that register yourself. That little personal touch is so important for an independent merchant because no matter how hard Walmart tries to duplicate, ad we try awfully hard, we can’t really do it.
- Sam Walton
