The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether he would tolerate a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. Madden answered, “If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you’ll be so late you’ll miss the game, so you can’t do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you’ll have a player that’s so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
How can we walk away from requirements that we know to be true to pursue something that we think will help?” It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.
- Ben Horowitz
The Hindus are some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.
- Joel Olsteen
It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.
- Steve Jobs
The sooner you accept the fact that you will have both successes and failures, the easier it will be to get your business and personal life headed in the right direction.
- Harvey Mackay
Attitude, not Aptitude, determines Altitude.
- Zig Ziglar
The bigger your list, the greater your options. That doesn’t mean you contact everyone on your list each time you send out a press release. You pick and choose who gets what, and block out long-term strategy as you go.
- Michael Levine
What we maybe should’ve realized sooner was that we are running a political campaign and the candidate is Uber. And this political race is happening in every major city in the world. And because this isn’t about a democracy, this is about a product, you can’t win 51 to 49. You have to win 98 to 2.
- Travis Kalanick
To grasp and hold a vision, that is the very essence of successful leadership—not only on the movie set where I learned it, but everywhere.
- Ronald Reagan
The question is not, ‘Do you have a problem?’ The question is, ‘Does the problem have you? ‘
- Joel Olsteen
For those already successful, money can become a controlling factor in life and make you a slave to it. One way to avoid that – Philanthropy.
- Lee Shau Kee
God will always bring the right people into your life, but you have to let the wrong people walk away.
- Joel Olsteen
I can become someone’s miracle.
- Joel Olsteen
Among the world’s 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.
- Wang Jianlin
Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart. I think Bud put in 3 percent, and Don Whitaker – whom I had hired to manage the store from TG&Y store out in Abilene, Texas, and I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen and I had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could alone. We pledges houses and property, everything we had.. But in those days we were always borrowed to the hilt. We were about to go into the discount business for real now. And from the time those doggone Wal-Marts opened until almost today, it has been a little challenging.
- Sam Walton
Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets
- Steve Jobs
Over three hundred years ago Galileo said: You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.
- Dale Carnegie
I don’t like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.
- Bill Gates
We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.
- Michael Bloomberg
Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.
- Peter Thiel
God didn’t make a mistake when He made you. You need to see yourself as God sees you.
- Joel Olsteen
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see and who sees before others see.
- Leroy Eimes
From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional.
- Peter Thiel
I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.
- Joel Olsteen
For those that have fixed exchange-rate regimes, you will need a greater amount of foreign reserves. That’s the case in Belize, it’s the case in the Eastern Caribbean zone and it’s also the case in Barbados. In those cases, the level of reserve coverage is one of credit weakness. Where you have a bit more flexibility in the exchange rate ? for instance, Jamaica ? you would require a smaller amount of international reserves.
- John Chambers
I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.
- Jeff Bezos
The person who knows one thing and does it better than anyone else, even if it only be the art of raising lentils, receives the crown he merits. If he raises all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor of mankind and its rewarded as such.
- Og Mandino
God’s got you in the palm of His hand. You won’t leave one second before your time. If God wants you to be here, then you’re going to be here.
- Joel Olsteen
You have in the U.S. around two million new diagnoses of cancer a year, and 13 million survivors, so you have about 10,000 patients that require analysis every day. That’s about five petabytes that need to be transmitted and computed on a daily basis.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.
- Thomas Edison
The earnings from Hong Kong and China Gas and rental property portfolio serve as a solid base for the Group’s sustainable growth.
- Lee Shau Kee
I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.
- Steve Martin
We have set the course for the future and are very happy about a successful generational change at the top of the company.
- Stefan Quandt
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
- Winston Churchill
Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.
- Winston Churchill
When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world
- George Washington Carver
We remain confident about the market opportunity ahead of us over the next three to five years.
- John Chambers
I think a newspaper should be provocative, stir ’em up, but you can’t do that on television. It’s just not on.
- Rupert Murdoch
Earn the right to be heard by listening to others. Seek to understand a situation before making judgments about it.
- John C. Maxwell
For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.
- Peter Thiel
I was lucky enough to co-found a business in college that ended up with 400 employees, and I launched 20 different projects while I was there – a project a week.
- Seth Godin
If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I’ll tell you what you are.
- Dale Carnegie
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.
The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.
- Bill Gates
Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.
- Jack London
God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days. Why should you and I?
- Dale Carnegie
You can’t buy a good reputation, you must earn it.
- Harvey Mackay
I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.
- Charles M. Schwab
What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 million years. It’s about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it’s something that people have wanted forever.
- Seth Godin
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
If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.
- Simon Sinek
Don’t fight change; embrace it, and you will step into the fullness of what God has in store.
- Joel Olsteen
If someone’s criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”
- Timothy Ferriss
Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Cisco believes that the Internet, and related technologies, will be a key enabler for India to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation.
- John Chambers
Sooner or later, many idealists transform themselves into disheartened realists who mistakenly believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.
- Seth Godin
She said, ‘My family is OK, John, but we lost everything.
- John Chambers
I watch mostly independent films.
- Reed Hastings
An idea that can change the course of the company can come from anywhere.
- Jack Dorsey
When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
- Steve Jobs
Take time to be kind and to say ‘thank you.’
- Zig Ziglar
Every great man, every successful man, no matter what the field of endeavor, has known the magic that lies in these words: every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.
- W. Clement Stone
It helps to have founded and run a company if you’re going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.
- Ben Horowitz
Without promotion, something terrible happens… nothing!
- P.T. Barnum
My personal opinion is that I’m in the media too much. I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman. I would like to be without any extra visibility.
- Viktor Vekselberg
Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.
- Winston Churchill
No matter what you do, your job is to tell your story.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
…People have lived before you. You’re not the first person to dream big, so you’d be wise to study what others have learned first and then build you actions on the backs of their lessons.
- Gary Keller
You will never change what you tolerate.
- Joel Olsteen
Keep in mind, hurting people often hurt other people as a result of their own pain. If somebody is rude and inconsiderate, you can almost be certain that they have some unresolved issues inside. They have some major problems, anger, resentment, or some heartache they are trying to cope with or overcome. The last thing they need is for you to make matters worse by responding angrily.
- Joel Olsteen
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Cupcakes The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor. The third time, you might improvise and screw up. Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can. At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen. Others merely plod along. They’re cooks, not chefs. A cook follows a recipe. A chef invents one. We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs.
- Seth Godin
Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.
- Peter Thiel
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
- Thomas Edison
Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.
- Winston Churchill
Remember to celebrate milestones as you prepare for the road ahead.
- Nelson Mandela
Entrepreneurs must think in specifics with laser-like precision.
- Jack Nadel
I’m not a fan of the cursing method of management.
- David Robinson
Twitter has been my life’s work in many senses. It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what’s going on in them right now.
- Jack Dorsey
Macau has been steady. The shocking, unexpected government is the one in Washington.
- Stephen Wynn
What we need to do is always lean into the future, when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.
- Jeff Bezos
You can learn from everybody.
- Sam Walton
When you become a leader success is all about growing others.
- Jack Welch
Intemperance.
- Napoleon Hill
The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner’s job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one’s own property.
- Peter Drucker
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
- Bishop Desmond TuTu
Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.
- Dale Carnegie
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
People who couldn’t fit into this informal and entreprenual environment left or were asked to leave. I cut my losses quickly on bad hires that didn’t perform.
- Jack Welch
You’ve got to embrace what you don’t know.
- Sara Blakely
Washington is unpredictable these days.
- Stephen Wynn
The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.
- Timothy Ferriss
Like biological evolution, ‘survival of the fittest’ during the course of reformation is to adapt to changes in the surrounding environment and make changes accordingly.
- Cheng Yu-tung
To me, job titles don’t matter. Everyone is in sales. It’s the only way we stay in business.
- Harvey Mackay
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
- Maya Angelou
The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it’s a job.Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.I call the process of doing your art ‘the work.’ It’s possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that’s how you become a linchpin.The job is not the work.
- Seth Godin
If you will focus on meeting other people’s needs, God will always make sure your needs are supplied. God will take care of your problems for you.
- Joel Olsteen
I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you are going to run a successful business you are going to have to be committed to your customers 100% of the time. If customers consistently tell you that they don’t like a certain product or service you offer or an employee that you have working for you, you must be willing to act based upon their feedback if you find it to be factual.
- Clay Clark
