I know nothing about technology.
- Jack Ma
Notable Quotables
It’s surreal to think that I own this beautiful island. It doesn’t feel like anyone can own Lanai. What it feels like to me is this really cool 21st-century engineering project, where I get to work with the people of Lanai to create a prosperous and sustainable Eden in the Pacific.
- Larry Ellison
Dad never had the kind of ambition or confidence to build much of a business on his own, and he didn’t believe in taking on debt. Sam Walton on the traits that make a great leader. It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Sam Walton
Don’t let what you don’t know scare you, because it can become your greatest asset. And if you do things without knowing how they have always been done, you’re guaranteed to do them differently.
- Sara Blakely
It’s okay. Let your ego push you to be the initiator. But tell your ego that the best way to get something shipped is to let other people take the credit. The real win for you (and your ego) is seeing something get shipped, not in getting the credit when it does.
- Seth Godin
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
Christopher Colombus’ big mistake was that he was looking for a trade route to China, and accidentally bumped into America, the richest, most powerful country in the world.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The path of least resistence is the path of the loser.
- H.G. Wells
The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
- Peter Drucker
There are men in the world who derive as stern an exaltation from the proximity of disaster and ruin, as others from success.
- Winston Churchill
Lots of people will give you advice… and depending upon how well they know you, the advice might be valid or not so valid.
- Abigail Johnson
I’m not as interested in what you make as I am in what you’re passionate about. What business are you really in?
- Howard Schultz
Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress—stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.
- Timothy Ferriss
Don’t be intimidated as you design your pitch. The fact is that nobody will come to you at first. You must be the aggressor, or you will not be heard.
- Michael Levine
Some conflicts are simply territorial. For instance, I’ve rarely met a marketing person who wanted to raise prices and I’ve rarely met a finance person who wanted to lower prices.
- David Novak
I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, ‘It’s all your fault.’ Your reaction is, ‘It’s not my fault.’ But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.
- Ben Horowitz
When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.
- Ben Horowitz
In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.
- Wang Jianlin
When you own your choices, you own their consequences.
- Jack Welch
It is easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That’s not true. The opposite is true. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you.
- Ben Horowitz
Remember, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware. Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side are they. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Luke… Luke… do not… do not underestimate the powers of the Emperor or suffer your father’s fate you will. Luke, when gone am I… the last of the Jedi will you be. Luke, the Force runs strong in your family. Pass on what you have learned, Luke. There is… another… Sky… walker.
- Yoda
I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a might oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today.
- Og Mandino
I will not allow yesterday’s success to lull me into today’s complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure.
- Og Mandino
A full and fair discussion is essential to democracy.
- George Soros
We’re trying to identify the key influencers and make them distribution points.
- Jack Dorsey
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
What has sustained us through these years? Trust. Dedication. Discipline.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Let’s think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it’s okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea… well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you’re not gonna get people coming up with ideas.”
- Elon Musk
I don’t spend any time thinking about my place in history, ever. If people say I changed things, it’s nice, and I take it – but if I could give it to a charity it would be useful. I really believe now that my only job in life is to achieve a state of comfort and happiness.
- Russell Simmons
There’s room for another planet between Mars and Jupiter. Given that planets formed everywhere else, why couldn’t another planet have formed there?
- John Chambers
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
Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.
- Peter Thiel
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.
- Thomas Edison
What did I do that was right—and in what way could I have improved my performance? What lessons can I learn from that experience?
- Dale Carnegie
Small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. 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).
- Peter Thiel
What chance does a five-foot-seven billionaire Jew who’s divorced really have of becoming president?
- Michael Bloomberg
I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it’s something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn’t compute with our existing educational system.
- Peter Thiel
Google’s search algorithms, for example, return results better than anyone else’s. Proprietary technologies for extremely short page load times and highly accurate query autocompletion add to the core search product’s robustness and defensibility.
- Peter Thiel
Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.
- Dave Barry
Right now I’m just delighted to be alive and to have had a nice long bath.
- Richard Branson
The Minden prospect originated this past summer through a large acreage acquisition from a major oil company and Cabot now controls 3,500 acres over the area. We are pleased with our initial results and will remain active in this area throughout 2006. On forty-acre spacing, the prospect has the potential for 80 plus locations.
- Dan Dinges
With communication technology in general, there’s a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world’s entire population using one communication technology, that’s a big deal. It’s beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it’s a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.
- Ben Horowitz
We’ve seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we’re seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.
- Sergey Brin
Things get much easier if one jumps on the bandwagon of existing trends.
- Lei Jun
In the 1950s, people welcomed big plans and asked whether they would work. Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris. You can still visit the Bay Model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today it’s just a tourist attraction: big plans for the future have become archaic curiosities.
- Peter Thiel
De-escalating the rivalry post-merger wasn’t easy, but as far as problems go, it was a good one to have.
- Peter Thiel
…[if you] use discrimination in the selection of your Master Mind group, your objective will have been half-way reached, even before you begin to recognize it.
- Napoleon Hill
You’re not being responsible with what God gave you if you’re hanging out with time wasters who have no goals and no dreams.
- Joel Olsteen
If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
A much better idea would have been to give the problem to the people who could not only fix it, but who would also be personally excited and motivated to do so.
- Ben Horowitz
What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?
- Sam Walton
In my lifetime, Mitt Romney is the most qualified leader I’ve ever seen run for the presidency of the United States.
- Jack Welch
Patience is a key element of success.
- Bill Gates
When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.
- Bill Gates
If you know you have to wait anyway, why not make a decision to enjoy your life while you’re waiting? Why not be happy while God is in the process of changing things? After all, there’s nothing we can really do to make it happen any faster. We might as well relax and enjoy our lives, knowing that at the appointed time God is going to bring his plan to pass.
- Joel Olsteen
People naturally follow those stronger than themselves.
- John Maxwell
Well, you know, News Corp is the only real media global – that has a global presence that’s involved in TV production, in movies, in publishing, in newspapers, digital media, et cetera. So for a company like that to function, clearly it does not depend only on Rupert Murdoch or James Murdoch.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Occasionally a man stumbles over the truth. Most dust themselves off and continue walking as though nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill
The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative.
- Peter Thiel
It may look impossible, but God can do the impossible. Just because you don’t see anything happening doesn’t mean God is not working.
- Joel Olsteen
Capitalism works.
- Michael Bloomberg
Don’t ally your personal interests with the development of the company.
- Wang Jianlin
I think I meant that, given the circumstances of my childhood, I had the illusion that it’s easier to be alone. To have your relationships be casual and also to pose as a solitary person, because it was more romantic. You know, I was raised on the idea of the ramblin’ man and the loner.
- Steve Martin
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
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
Get mad, then get over it.
- Colin Powell
Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do.
- Timothy Ferriss
I guess the worst moment I ever had in business was the fear that Southwest Airlines wouldn’t get off the ground.
- Herb Kelleher
I believe we are in at least a two-quarter slowdown.
- John Chambers
The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.
- Bill Gates
People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete – the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.
- Peter Drucker
Our thoughts make us what we are.
- Dale Carnegie
Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
- Ben Horowitz
One of my biggest personal holdings is Rotana. That company has a very dominant force in the Middle East. It has around 45% of all the movie industry and around 75% of all the music.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
The 1980s will seem like a walk in the park when compared to new global challenges, where annual productivity increases of 6% may not be enough. A combination of software, brains, and running harder will be needed to bring that percentage up to 8% or 9%.
- Jack Welch
The conditions of suffering that exist today in our impoverished communities are not acceptable. The reflection of those conditions are less concerning to me. And I work everyday about changing the conditions.
- Russell Simmons
Microsoft’s an important partner for Dell, an important company in the industry.
- Michael Dell
The people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don’t know.
- Seth Godin
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
- Oprah Winfrey
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
If you had to boil down the Wal-Mart system to one single idea, it would porbably be communication, because it is one of the real keys to our success…Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
- Sam Walton
I enjoy the competition and the process of learning as we compete. The whole thing is just fascinating. I don’t know what I’ll do when I retire. When I go sailing, I look around … anyone want to race? I just love competing as opposed to just going out and watching the sunset.
- Larry Ellison
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.
We need to, you know, restore people. We need to show mercy. I mean, because as much mercy as you show people, that’s the mercy you’re going to be receiving.
- Joel Olsteen
Macau has been steady. The shocking, unexpected government is the one in Washington.
- Stephen Wynn
I have a lot of things to prove to myself. One is that I can live my life fearlessly.
- Oprah Winfrey
We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn’t be in this business.
- Jeff Bezos
Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts … genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation … the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality …though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries [WWII]
- Winston Churchill
I’m often asked how I define success. It’s an overused term, but I fundamentally view this elusive beast as a combination of two things – achievement and appreciation. One isn’t enough: Achievement without appreciation makes you ambitious but miserable. Appreciation without achievement makes you unambitious but happy.
- Timothy Ferriss
In the States, there’s ESPN3, and each country has different options, and other than premiere league football, there tends to be very little global content. And movie and TV rights are pretty broad content.
- Reed Hastings
What you sow you reap. What you give.
- Zig Ziglar
It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don’t think it’s possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.
- Elon Musk
We think when God speaks to us, there’s going to be a boom out of Heaven or we’re going to get some chill bumps, but I really believe God’s talking to us all the time. He’s talking to us right in here. I call it our heart, our conscience, but it’s the Holy Spirit talking to us.
- Joel Olsteen
With the casino and the beds, our passengers will have at least two ways to get lucky on one of our flights.
- Richard Branson
I am also one of those persons who were transformed, who grew out of the Soviet system and transformed myself into the new Russia.
- Vagit Alekperov
Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.
- Peter Thiel
Vision without execution is just hallucination.
- Henry Ford
Humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.
- Peter Thiel
Just because you don’t announce your plan doesn’t mean you don’t have one.
- Herb Kelleher
Since belief determines behavior, doesn’t it make sense that we should be teaching ethical, moral values in every home and in every school in America?
- Zig Ziglar
