Our minds were freewheeling. We rushed to get things done.
- Sam Walton
Notable Quotables
A movement is thrilling. It’s the work of many people, all connected, all seeking something better.
- Seth Godin
WHATEVER YOU DO, DO IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT Work at it, if necessary, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now. The old proverb is full of truth and meaning, “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.” Many a man acquires a fortune by doing his business thoroughly, while his neighbor remains poor for life, because he only half does it. Ambition, energy, industry, perseverance, are indispensable requisites for success in business. Fortune always favors the brave, and never helps a man who does not help himself.
- P.T. Barnum
Thinking (of how to improve your life and business) is the hardest thing there is. That is why so few people engage in it.
- Henry Ford
The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
- Winston Churchill
The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.
- Elon Musk
To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.
- Bill Gates
The most expensive piece of real estate is the six inches between your right and left ear. It’s what you create in that area that determines your wealth. We are only really limited by our mind.
- Dr. Dolf de Roos
A girl child who is even a little bit educated is more conscious of family planning, health care and, in turn, her children’s own education.
- Azim Premji
A number of people in the United States, almost everyone, is using plastic cards to pay for things, but it’s extremely difficult to accept these cards. So let’s make it’s easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.
- Jack Dorsey
Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey’s angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.
- John C. Maxwell
The most important thing in life is not to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The really important thing is to profit from your losses.
- Dale Carnegie
The first rule is not to lose. The second rule is not to forget the first rule.
- Warren Buffett
When God puts love and compassion in your heart toward someone, He’s offering you an opportunity to make a difference in that person’s life. You must learn to follow that love. Don’t ignore it. Act on it. Somebody needs what you have.
- Joel Olsteen
People can get information – on entertainment, politics, finance – much easier than before. That will change the way people do business, the way people live.
- Robin Li
Projects undreamed of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants, comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.
- 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
Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
- Peter Thiel
There are ways of fighting for your interests. I never do something in business that I wouldn’t do in life.
- Vladimir Potanin
China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country but we turned them into coffee drinkers.
- Howard Schultz
The dove is my emblem…. I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it…. I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill…
- Thomas Edison
Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.
- Bill Gates
Indeed, the real question is not, Why greatness?” but What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?” If you have to ask the question, Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?” then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.
- James C. Collins
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
- Dale Carnegie
I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.
- Jerry Seinfeld
My job is making money, helping other people make money. I am spending money, trying to make sure more people get rich, because you cannot spend a lot of money, right? So my job is spending money, helping others. This is a headache.
- Jack Ma
The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.
- Elon Musk
Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.
- Zig Ziglar
In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
If you have your health, if you have people in your life to love, you are blessed. Slow down and enjoy the simple things in life.
- Joel Olsteen
Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?
- Ray Kroc
If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.
- Rupert Murdoch
Leadership qualities of Effective Leaders:
- Jack Welch
When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation.
- Peter Thiel
Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.
- P.T. Barnum
Live an active life among people who are doing worthwhile things, keep eyes and ears and mind and heart open to absorb truth, and then tell of the things you know, as if you know them. The world will listen, for the world loves nothing so much as real life.
- Dale Carnegie
God wouldn’t have given you the dream unless He already had a way to bring it to pass.
- Joel Olsteen
Indeed, if there is any one secret” to an enduring great company, it is the ability to manage continuity and change—a discipline that must be consciously practiced, even by the most visionary of companies.
- James C. Collins
Meeting Coach Wooden, the most humble leader I’ve ever met, made me think about my ego, about as the wise John Weinberg once put it, the difference between growing and swelling.
- David Novak
You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war. – To Neville Chamberlain
- Winston Churchill
For more than a decade, I led an organization that put on an elaborate Christmas program each December. It was a big production, with over 250 people participating in more than 20 performances. By the end of the season, everyone who participated was exhausted.”
- John C. Maxwell
Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
- Dale Carnegie
Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it
- Aristotle
Everything popular is wrong.
- Oscar Wilde
Boadicea then turned upon Verulamium (St Albans). Here was another trading centre, to which high civic rank had been accorded. A like total slaughter and obliteration was inflicted. “No less”, according to Tacitus, “than seventy thousand citizens and allies were slain” in these three cities. “For the barbarians would have no capturing, no selling, nor any kind of traffic usual in war; they would have nothing but killing, by sword, cross, gibbet, or fire.” These grim words show us an inexpiable war like that waged between Carthage and her revolted mercenaries two centuries before. Some high modern authorities think these numbers are exaggerated; but there is no reason why London should not have contained thirty or forty thousand inhabitants, and Colchester and St Albans between them about an equal number. If the butcheries in the countryside are added the estimate of Tacitus may well stand. This is probably the most horrible episode which our Island has known. We see the crude and corrupt beginnings of a higher civilisation blotted out by the ferocious uprising of the native tribes. Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.
- Winston Churchill
What I know for sure is that if you want success, you can’t make success your goal. The key is not to worry about being successful, but to instead work toward being significant, and the success will naturally follow.”
- Oprah Winfrey
Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures
- Sam Walton
A business that looks orderly says to your customer that your people know what they’re doing.
- Michael Gerber
Does that mean that we should never hire or promote an inexperienced manager who had not already learned to do what needs to be done in this assignment? The answer: it depends. In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people–resources. In this circumstance, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience to do the job–because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead. But in established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by processes, and is less dependent upon managers with detailed, hands-on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience.
- Clayton M. Christensen
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
Hmm. In the end, cowards are those who follow the dark side.
- Yoda
I’ve got to keep breathing. It’ll be my worst business mistake if I don’t.
- Steve Martin
Love doesn’t sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread: remade all the time, made new.
- Og Mandino
Use technology to remind people that we are really human and civilization is meant to connect together. Civilization is meant to be easy, and the technology to completely disappear. And should be easy to pick up.
- Jack Dorsey
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
- Mark Twain
Japanese businesspeople and companies are lacking in individuality.
- Tadashi Yanai
If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
- Peter Thiel
That’s the true spirit of Christmas, people being helped by people other than me.
- Jerry Seinfeld
China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them.
- Bill Gates
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
Most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.
- Peter Thiel
The Indian community in Canada has integrated much better than the Indian community in United States. They’ve become really Canadian at the same time as keeping all their Indian characters and customs and social groups.
- Azim Premji
If you want success, if you want wisdom, if you want to be prosperous and healthy, you’re going to have to do more than meditate and believe; you must boldly declare words of faith and victory over yourself and your family.
- Joel Olsteen
A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.
- Henry Ford
These are all commodity-focused issues. The old conceit of a retailer was that if you offered the right products at a fair price in a convenient location, you’d do fine if you watched your expenses. Today, the issues are totally different.
- Seth Godin
You can succeed at almost anything for which you have unbridled enthusiasm.
- Zig Ziglar
To reach your full potential, you have to set goals that will stretch you.
- Zig Ziglar
Cultural industries will be the next engine for growth after real estate, and Wanda will make cultural industries our long-term focus.
- Wang Jianlin
We receive what we believe.
- Joel Olsteen
I DECLARE that God has a great plan for my life. He is directing my steps. And even though I may not always understand how, I know my situation is not a surprise to God. He will work out every detail to my advantage. In His perfect timing, everything will turn out right. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
Most people have never thought through how they’re going to allocate their time. You need to make a decision in advance.
- Clayton M. Christensen
He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.
- Andrew Carnegie
Don’t confuse selling with art.
- Jack Taylor
My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure
- Abraham Lincoln
There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.
- Walt Disney
One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
- Ben Horowitz
It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
- Warren Buffett
Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market. That starts with asking yourself: what will the world look like 10 and 20 years from now, and how will my business fit in?
- Peter Thiel
Because there have been no settlements reached for the securities action with any of the less-involved banks, it is difficult to know what reserves are prudent.
- Ed Clark
Get ready, get ready, get ready, to get ready.
- T.D Jakes
Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.
- Warren Buffett
Disneyland is a show.
- Walt Disney
The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.
- Jerry Seinfeld
The thing that’s confusing for investors is that founders don’t know how to be CEO. I didn’t know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don’t know how to be CEOs, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn. The question is… can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
- Ben Horowitz
In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.
- Winston Churchill
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
Un cambio de actitud Lo que diferencia a los individuos exitosos de aquellos que languidecen es exactamente lo mismo que separa a las organizaciones innovadoras y en crecimiento de aquellas que se estancan y mueren. Los ganadores han convertido la iniciativa en una pasión y en una práctica. Adelante, prepara una lista de las personas y organizaciones a las que admiras. Apuesto a que el séptimo imperativo es lo que las hace destacar. Como ves, el reto no consiste en perfeccionar tu capacidad de saber cuándo empezar o cuándo mantenerte al margen, sino en adoptar la costumbre de empezar.
- Seth Godin
We’re talking about changing every aspect of our lives.
- John Chambers
Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective – doing less – is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.
- Timothy Ferriss
I spend a lot of time reading.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft
- Bill Gates
Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.
- Sam Walton
One thing I resent is the slur that I just support political candidates because of the business.
- Rupert Murdoch
No alibi will save you from accepting the responsibility.
- Napoleon Hill
Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.
- Ben Horowitz
When I was at Kingsoft, I was under pressure and worked hard, but the results were not satisfactory.
- Lei Jun
Maturity is often more absurd than youth and very frequently is most unjust to youth.
- Thomas Edison
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
- Thomas Edison
I think Les Moonves is the most highly overrated person in television.
- Donald Trump
The abundance mindset makes it easier to be graceful.
- Seth Godin
[On working at Nike for 48 years] In those 48 years, I have never had a promotion. but it had its other benefits.
- Phil Knight
