If you want to reap financial blessings, you have to sow financially.
- Joel Olsteen
Notable Quotables
Each morning before breakfast, Rockefeller led the family in prayer, charging out a penny fine to latecomers.
- Ron Chernow
The bulk of the universities are about teaching kids.
- Bill Gates
Once Microsoft lost its grip on developers, it became only a matter of time before it lost its monopoly on operating systems.
- Ben Horowitz
You will give birth to more in the future than you’ve lost in the past.
- Joel Olsteen
We are beginning to see the benefits of global consolidation.
- Lakshmi Mittal
We’re absolutely going to have a better facility.
- Ed Clark
Dios ve el valor que usted tiene, y sabe en lo que le está convirtiendo. A veces nos miramos a nosotros mismos y pensamos: Tengo muchas imperfecciones. Tengo mal genio. Tengo un problema con mi boca. No soy tan disciplinado”. Vemos el barro, pero Dios ve la hermosa taza. La buena noticia es que usted no es un producto terminado. Dios sigue obrando, y si trabaja usted con Dios y le permite eliminar esas impurezas, Él hará más con su vida de lo que usted nunca soñó.
- Joel Olsteen
Bill Campbell developed an excellent methodology for measuring executives in a balanced way that will help you achieve this. He breaks performance down into four distinct areas.
- Ben Horowitz
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win — you’re still a rat.
- Lily Tomlin
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
- Confucius
I think we are living in a time where the consumer has lots of choices, whether it’s coffee, newspapers or whatever it is. And there is parity in the market place, and as a result of that, the consumer is beginning to make decisions, not just on what things cost and the convenience of it.
- Howard Schultz
But what do average people do? The exact opposite. If they don’t like a thing, they bawl out their subordinates; if they do like it, they say nothing.
- Dale Carnegie
The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.
- Oprah Winfrey
This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I can do what it says I can do.
- Joel Olsteen
A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.
- Peter Thiel
Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the better.
- Jack Welch
Speeches will not distribute the future.
- Jack Dorsey
One of my biggest flaws is I don’t take advice.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”
- Ben Horowitz
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
The successful leader must be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes and the shortcomings of his followers. If he tries to shift this responsibility he will not remain the leader. If one of his followers makes a mistake or proves to be incompetent, the leader must consider that it is he who failed.
- Napoleon Hill
My relationship with money is that it’s a tool to be self-sufficient, but it’s not something that is a part of who I am.
- Laurene Powell Jobs
A pay increase of 5 percent is more than justified. It would compensate for losses we’ve had in the past and I’d like to be able to buy the everyday things I’ve put off for years, like a new TV.
- Michael Gerber
Leadership is influence.
- John C. Maxwell
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.
- Richard Branson
At the end, the acquisition of wealth is ignoble in the extreme. I assume that you save and long for wealth only as a means of enabling you the better to do some good in your day and generation.
- Andrew Carnegie
FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON THE NUMBERS In the second example, I managed the team to a set of numbers that did not fully capture what I wanted. I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time—in that order. Unfortunately, the metrics that I set did not capture those priorities. At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them at every staff meeting, my people focused intensely on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result. Interestingly, I see this same problem play out in many consumer Internet startups. I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product. It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.
- Ben Horowitz
Speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves.
- Proverbs 31:8
by breakthrough, broken into three broad stages: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined.
- James C. Collins
Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose…
- Thomas Edison
Let the good work go on. We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good.
- Ron Chernow
Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.
- Jack Welch
I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.
- Seth Godin
Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
- Dale Carnegie
You can expect what you accept.
- Anonymous
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
- Winston Churchill
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
- Winston Churchill
You will never change what you tolerate.
- Joel Olsteen
The Habit of Saving does not mean that you shall limit your earning capacity, it means just the opposite – that you shall apply this law so that it not only conserves that which you earn, in a systematic manner, but it also places you in the way of greater opportunity and gives you the vision, the self-confidence, the imagination, the enthusiasm, the initiative and leadership actually to increase your earning capacity.
- Napoleon Hill
Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, happier families.
- Howard Schultz
it was necessary to bait the hook to suit the fish.
- Dale Carnegie
Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.
- Oprah Winfrey
The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.
- Bill Gates
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Strange as it sounds, great leaders gain authority by giving it away.
- Napoleon Hill
You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down.
- Reid Hoffman
People really criticize professional athletes going into the Olympics. People don’t like change. A bunch of people don’t like the Olympics now because we’ve added skateboarding… We’re modernizing the sport.
- Larry Ellison
In Riyadh, there’s going to be a huge project that will house at least 12,000 units with inhabitants of approximately 150,000 people. It’s like a city within a city.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Two men looked out from prison bars, One saw the mud, the other saw the stars.
- Dale Carnegie
Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It’s something you have to learn. It’s a very lonely job.
- Ben Horowitz
They don’t call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I’m no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.
- Larry Ellison
I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Many a false step was made by standing still.
- Timothy Ferriss
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That’s the fundamental thing.
- Ben Horowitz
I knew there was a way out. I knew there was another kind of life because I had read about it. I knew there were other places, and there was another way of being.
- Oprah Winfrey
Always deliver more than expected.
- Larry Page
When Pat Holt strings together a list of words not to overuse—“Actually, totally, absolutely, completely, continually, constantly, continuously, literally, really, unfortunately, ironically, incredibly, hopefully, finally”—she’s not being a stickler for formality and grammar. Instead she’s reminding us that words matter, that poor word use is just a red flag for someone who wants to ignore you.
- Seth Godin
No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.
- Ben Horowitz
Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model.
- Michael Gerber
Stock ownership changes behavior.
- Jack Welch
I took up an offer for me to lose 30 pounds in 30 days. It worked. I lost 30 days!
- Zig Ziglar
Life is a classroom — only those who are willing to be lifelong learners will move to the head of the class.
- Zig Ziglar
Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
- Winston Churchill
Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right.
- Dale Carnegie
There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.
- Henry Ford
Just because you don’t announce your plan doesn’t mean you don’t have one.
- Herb Kelleher
The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.
- Peter Thiel
Organizations that achieve both market and operating focus are nearly unbeatable Customers don’t buy products or services. They buy results. They were designed to break what Schlesinger and his colleagues called the cycle of failure practiced by many of Au Bon Pain’s competitors who paid their employees and managers low wages, offered them little training and other support, and suffered high turnover of employees and limited customer loyalty as a result.
- James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser and Leonard
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
Whatever the trend in exchange rates or whatever the external factors, a manufacturing company is always faced with the mission of transforming itself into a company that can produce higher value-added to absorb the increase in the cost of living in the country it’s operating in.
- Fujio Mitarai
History is more or less bunk.
- Henry Ford
We must not let our standards be determined by the gentlemen of the oposition.
- Winston Churchill
A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
- General George S. Patton
Success is not what you have, but who you are.
- Bo Bennett
We’ve shown the world that New York can never be defeated, because of its dynamic and diverse population and because it embodies the spirit of enterprise and the love of liberty. And because no matter who you are, if you believe in yourself and your dream, New York will always be the place for you.
- Michael Bloomberg
I think there will be 20 years of evolution from linear broadcast to internet television.
- Reed Hastings
Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.
- James C. Collins
If you do not see yourself as a winner, you cannot perform as a winner.
- Zig Ziglar
An enterprise shall take care of the people’s livelihood, through thick and thin…
- Cheng Yu-tung
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
Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It’s just cultural. People just don’t want to do it.
- Jack Welch
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
- Dale Carnegie
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater their power to harm us.
- Voltaire
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
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
- Henry Ford
There’s different kinds of laughs. It’s like a baseball lineup: this guy’s your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we’re gonna win.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.
- Seth Godin
I see tremendous imbalance in the world. A very uneven playing field, which has gotten tilted very badly. I consider it unstable. At the same time, I don’t exactly see what is going to reverse it.
- George Soros
First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.
- Napoleon Hill
Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software.
- Larry Ellison
Pouring espresso is an art, one that requires the barista to care about the quality of the beverage.
- Howard Schultz
In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.
- Peter Thiel
The successful business executive can handle challenges and solve problems at a remarkable clip.
- Zig Ziglar
It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than to apply them.
- Winston Churchill
Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you’re average, and average is for losers.
- Seth Godin
India is more of an aid recipient than a provider of aid.
- Bill Gates
The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers’ needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager’s business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.
- Peter Drucker
A broad trend I’m completely obsessed with is mobile commerce. Like completely. I’m completely convinced that everybody’s going to be buying from their mobile devices. Whoever can claim that space or be in that space, I’m very interested in.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
