A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.
- Timothy Ferriss
Notable Quotables
You’re going to go through tough times – that’s life. But I say, ‘Nothing happens to you, it happens for you.’ See the positive in negative events.
- Joel Olsteen
The arrival of the 21st century precedes the onslaught of turmoil and tsunami. The business environment has become unpredictable and the global economy even harsher…
- Cheng Yu-tung
The reality is that financial markets are self-destabilizing; occasionally they tend toward disequilibrium, not equilibrium.
- George Soros
If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.
- Bill Gates
To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.
- Peter Thiel
We drink the can, not the beverage
- Seth Godin
An economy is not a complicated thing, it just has a lot of moving parts.
- Ray Dalio
If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.
- James Cameron
The only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.
- Larry Ellison
Other people do not determine your potential.
- Joel Olsteen
The main thing that’s missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics.
- Bill Gates
Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult.
- Og Mandino
You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.
- Warren Buffett
Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.
- Dale Carnegie
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
China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country but we turned them into coffee drinkers.
- Howard Schultz
It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.
- Peter Drucker
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
- Zig Ziglar
Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.
- Ray Dalio
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
- John C. Maxwell
Keep it simple. Tell the truth. People can smell the truth.
- Stephen Wynn
It is always your next move.
- Napoleon Hill
The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.
- Peter Thiel
Some of the things I see around town are just disgusting.
- Jack Taylor
It is simply service that measures success.
- George Washington Carver
The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it.
- Debbi Fields
You know, I start with the assumption that -or with, with the belief that this president has to succeed. We all have an enormous amount of capital invested in his success. His success is the country’s success.
- Michael Bloomberg
This was a decision we reached after a number of years speaking to the human rights groups, and specifically people who really cared about China on human rights. I understand why other people might have other views.
- Sergey Brin
An open society is a society which allows its members the greatest possible degree of freedom in pursuing their interests compatible with the interests of others.
- George Soros
Successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.
- Peter Thiel
We often hear military experts inculcate the doctrine of giving priority to the decisive theatre. There is a lot in this. But in war this principle, like all others, is governed by facts and circumstances; otherwise strategy would be too easy. It would become a drill-book and not an art; it would depend upon rules and not on an instructed and fortunate judgment of the proportions of an ever-changing scene.
- Winston Churchill
Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We’ve termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.’
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
L.A. is only where you live, because otherwise it’s just a sprawling mass of everything, and I think if you live in L.A., you get a little network of places you go, and people you see, and when you leave town, you do miss those places and your friends.
- Steve Martin
And yet the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world.
- Seth Godin
Why settle for the ‘get by’ when in the long run the good costs less?
- Zig Ziglar
When York’s son, hitherto Earl of March, learned that his father’s cause had devolved upon him he did not shrink. He fell upon the Earl of Wiltshire and the Welsh Lancastrians, and on February 2, 1461, at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, near Hereford, he beat and broke.
- Winston Churchill
If we can get you a car in five minutes, we can get you anything in five minutes.
- Travis Kalanick
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
My favorite writers are all Jews – David, Solomon, Matthew, Mark – well, you get the picture.
- Zig Ziglar
You can’t depend on polls.
- Michael Bloomberg
The only guarantee for failure is to stop trying
- John C. Maxwell
But innovation and change make inordinate time demands on the executive. All one can think and do in a short time is to think what one already knows and to do as one has always done.
- Peter Drucker
You can’t worry about the mistakes, because you’re going to make a lot of them. You’ve got to be thinking about your next move.
- Ben Horowitz
Of course motivation is not permanent. But then, neither is bathing; but it is something you should do on a regular basis.
- Zig Ziglar
Time well spent results in more money to spend, more money to save, and more time to vacation.
- Zig Ziglar
To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.
- Winston Churchill
I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.
- Joel Olsteen
Wise men, when in doubt whether to speak or to keep quiet, give themselves the benefit of the doubt, and remain silent.
- Napoleon Hill
When we put $4 billion into the U.S. economy, they were OK with this. When we preserved jobs in Dearborn, or preserved jobs in Columbus, or preserved jobs in Pennsylvania, everyone was happy.
- Alexei Mordashov
The challenge of the retail business is the human condition.
- Howard Schultz
The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want.
- Dale Carnegie
Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
- Peter Thiel
College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.
- Peter Thiel
People suck at following advice. Even the most effective people in the world are terrible at it. There are two reasons: 1. Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. There has been no Harajuku Moment. 2. There are no reminders. No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change. Consistent tracking, even if you have no knowledge of fat-loss or exercise, will often beat advice from world-class trainers.
- Timothy Ferriss
The ballplayer who loses his head can’t keep his cool, is worse than no ballplayer at all.
- Lou Gehrig
Students of public speaking continually ask, How can I overcome self-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before an audience? Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that some horses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at the thundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing a farmer’s wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse as the train goes by? How would you cure a horse that is afraid of cars—graze him in a back-woods lot where he would never see steam-engines or automobiles, or drive or pasture him where he would frequently see the machines? Apply horse-sense to ridding yourself of self-consciousness and fear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying. You can never attain freedom from stage-fright by reading a treatise. A book may give you excellent suggestions on how best to conduct yourself in the water, but sooner or later you must get wet, perhaps even strangle and be half scared to death. There are a great many wetless bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim in them. To plunge is the only way.
- Dale Carnegie
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
- Warren Buffett
Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.
- Dale Carnegie
Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.
- Peter Thiel
Success-minded people have no trouble at all following proven instructions. We all would be happy to follow a map if the map came with a guarantee. There is no guarantee, though. There are no maps. They’ve all been taken, and their value is not what it used to be, because your competitors have maps, too. The opportunity lies in pursuing your curiosity instead. Curiosity is not allergic to failure. Curiosity drives us to the haunted house because the thrills lie in what we don’t expect, not in what’s safe. Curiosity can start us down the path to shipping, to bringing things to the world, to examining them, refining them, and repeating the process again (and again).
- Seth Godin
Who you associate with makes a difference in how far you go in life.
- Joel Olsteen
My blogging life is basically goalless. I like the zen nature of that, and paradoxically, it improves results.
- Seth Godin
This is not checkers; this is motherfuckin’ chess. Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves, the people move. As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there is always a move. You think you have no moves? How about taking your company public with $2 million in trailing revenue and 340 employees, with a plan to do $75 million in revenue the next year? I made that move. I made it in 2001, widely regarded as the worst time ever for a technology company to go public. I made it with six weeks of cash left. There is always a move.
- Ben Horowitz
Rockefeller’s supreme insight was that he could solve the oil industry’s problems by solving the railroad’s problems at the same time, creating a double cartel in oil and rails. One of Rockefeller’s strength in bargaining situations was that he figured out what he wanted and what the other party wanted and then crafted mutually advanteous terms. Instead of ruining the railroads, Rockefeller tried to help them prosper, albeit in away that fortified his own position.
- Ron Chernow
Without passion, you don’t have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
- Donald Trump
This may sound a bit naive, but I got here by believing in big dreams.
- Howard Schultz
Bloodshed, gentlemen, no doubt is lamentable. I have seen some of it–more perhaps than many of those who talk about it with such levity. But there are worse things than bloodshed, even on an extreme scale. . . . The trampling down of law and order which, under the conditions of a civilised state, assure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–all this would be worse than bloodshed.
- Winston Churchill
Look – this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do – ultimately, you’re at the end.
- Ben Horowitz
If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
- Bill Gates
He climbs highest who helps another up.
- Zig Ziglar
Our history is based on extending the brand to categories within the guardrails of Starbucks.
- Howard Schultz
Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.
- P.T. Barnum
Science is the pursuit of pure truth, and the systematizing of it.
- P.T. Barnum
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
The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn’t have that kind of personality, and it’s a terrifying thing to say.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Even leaders with the best of intentions can have dumb ideas sometimes, and if you have good people around you, then hopefully they’ll stop you before you’ve done too much damage.
- David Novak
The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.
- Bill Gates
If you want to earn more, learn more.
- Zig Ziglar
The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.
- Bruce Lee
We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.
- Ray Kroc
Aim for the highest.
- Andrew Carnegie
In a litigation-happy society, clear agreements often prevent small disagreements from becoming big ones.
- Harvey Mackay
When the economy does pick up, … so will … spending.
- John Chambers
When you catch a glimpse of your potential, that’s when passion is born.
- Zig Ziglar
I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.
- Elon Musk
Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business.
- Dale Carnegie
Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions. It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.
- Dale Carnegie
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
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.
- Michael Gerber
If there’s a problem, we at Wine Library never tell ourselves that once we handle this issue, we’ll never have to deal with the person again. We talk to every single person as though we’re going to wind up sitting next to that person at his or her mother’s house that night for dinner.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Purpose is a soft virtue — but it’s what gives you steel in your spine.
- Rich Karlgaard
If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.
- Bill Gates
Your business has to work when it’s small in order to survive to the point where it gets big.
- Seth Godin
Cooperativeness in conversation is achieved when you show that you consider the other person’s ideas and feelings as important as your own.
- Dale Carnegie
Only a company with great integrity and the resources to fight for what’s right can afford to take on the government.
- Jack Welch
The typical small business owner is only 10 percent Entrepreneur, 20 percent Manager, and 70 percent Technician.
- Michael Gerber
What you tolerate you can not change.
- Joel Olsteen
I have the best job I could possibly have.
- Michael Bloomberg
