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
Notable Quotables
If you cannot read all your books…fondle them—peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.
- Winston Churchill
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
Count your blessings—not your troubles!
- Dale Carnegie
We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Be there for your kids. Later, when you need them, they’ll be there for you.
- Zig Ziglar
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings, the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
- Winston Churchill
We have more than six and one-half times the level of wealth of our non-millionaire neighbors, but, in our neighborhood, these non-millionaires outnumber us better than three to one. Could it be that they have chosen to trade wealth for acquiring high-status material possessions?
- The Millionaire Next Door
If you want to build a dynasty, you need to always be focused on getting better and beating last year’s performance in everything you do. You want to eliminate peaks and valleys, what we call boom, splat, and go for a good steady incline.
- David Novak
You can literally force yourself to be courteous, happy and enthusiastic with every person you meet. After you have forced yourself to be so for a short period of time… the habit takes over.
- Zig Ziglar
Since most people have not been taught how to make mistakes and learn from them, they either avoid making mistakes altogether, which is a bigger mistake, or they make a mistake but fail to find the lesson from the mistakes.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Don’t be different just to be different. Be different to be better.
- Seth Godin
The indefiniteness of finance can be bizarre. Think about what happens when successful entrepreneurs sell their company. What do they do with the money? In a financialized world, it unfolds like this: • The founders don’t know what to do with it, so they give it to a large bank. • The bankers don’t know what to do with it.
- Peter Thiel
People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature—without any more effort than is expended by the nonachievers.
- Peter Drucker
Japanese tend to put sales and market share first. They make many products with the aim of raising sales. But then profits decline, and companies find themselves falling into debt… I changed the mindset at Canon by getting people to realize that profits come first.
- Fujio Mitarai
To boil water, the MED is 212°F (100°C) at standard air pressure. Boiled is boiled. Higher temperatures will not make it more boiled.” Higher temperatures just consume more resources that could be used for something else more productive.
- Timothy Ferriss
Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.
- John Maxwell
You may have made a lot of wrong choices, but you’ve also made a lot of choices that were right. Focus on your good qualities. Focus on your victories. Get off the treadmill of guilt.
- Joel Olsteen
The Law of Crappy People states: For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.
- Ben Horowitz
I think Bible principles are principles for life.
- Joel Olsteen
Es interesante que cuando Jesús quiso animar a sus seguidores a expandir su visión, les recordó que no se echa vino nuevo en odres viejos”.2 Jesús estaba diciendo que no puedes tener una vida abundante con actitudes restringidas. Esa.
- Joel Olsteen
The value of an idea lies in the using of it.
- Thomas Edison
Many salespeople feel that selling is warfare: the buyer is the enemy and words are ammunition…The seller’s advances are turned aside because they are so predictable, amateurish and easily deflected.
- Jerry Vass
If Jesus were here today, he wouldn’t be riding around on a donkey. He’d be taking a plane, he’d be using the media.
- Joel Olsteen
You don’t build a business –you build people– and then people build the business.
- Zig Ziglar
There will be no pissing on partners in the shower.
- Phil Knight
It’s important to be willing to make mistakes. The worst thing that can happen is you become memorable.
- Sara Blakely
If it’s not meeting a need, turn it into a seed. Remember, we will reap what we sow. When you do good for other people, that’s when God is going to make sure that His abundant blessings overtake you.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m a professional geologist, an explorationist for oil. That’s what I’ve done in my career, one that’s culminated in – at least to this point – playing a part in finding the largest field in the last 40 years anywhere in the world. That’s the Bakken field, which I believe will yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come, maybe more.
- Harold Hamm
Don’t lose youself on the way to the top.
- Jack Welch
We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.
- Bill Gates
A peace talk is always difficult, always complicated.
- Jack Ma
Indecision is the seedling of fear.
- Napoleon Hill
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
- Herbert Simon
The first is the result of a decision to act—to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth—to not do something—wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences.
- Timothy Ferriss
A small lie needs a bodyguard of bigger lies to protect it.
- Winston Churchill
Sometimes you need faith and victory spoken over your life. Words have created power. When you receive them into your spirit, they can ignite seeds of increase on the inside.
- Joel Olsteen
In the 1960s, if you were a blue collar worker or uneducated, and you had an injury on the job, the company basically dismissed you.
- Howard Schultz
If I prophesy my future I want to prophesy something good. I’m not saying what I feel. I’m not saying what it looks like in the real world. No, I’m saying what God says about me.
- Joel Olsteen
No matter what you do, your job is to tell your story.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
There are few words which are used more loosely than the word “Civilization.” What does it mean? It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is Civilization—and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort, and culture. When Civilization reigns, in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people. The traditions of the past are cherished, and the inheritance bequeathed to us by former wise or valiant men becomes a rich estate to be enjoyed and used by all.
- Winston Churchill
Complaints are your best learning opportunity
- Bill Gates
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
If one dream dies, dream another dream. If you get knocked down, get back up and go again.
- Joel Olsteen
Anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble.
- Peter Thiel
Some people are averse to change, but the advertising model is going to change with or without the Hopper. What we’re saying to the broadcasters is, ‘There’s a way for you not to put your head in the sand.’
- Charles Ergen
One of my favorite perks was picking out an issue and doing what I called a deep dive. It’s spotting a challenge where you think you can make a difference…one that looks like it would be fun, and then throwing the weight of your position behind it. Some might justifiably call it meddling….I followed up on all of them with a passion and a mania that often veered toward the lunatic fringe…To make the initiatives work, it took a passionate all-consuming commitment from the top. Beyond passion, there was alot of rigor…Making initiates successful is all about focus and passionate commitment. The drumbeat must be relentlessness. Every leadership action must demonstrate total committment to the initiative….I was an outrageous champion of everything that we did from our early need to face reality and change the culture to our major initiatives that reshaped the company. Whenever I had an idea or message that I wanted to drive into the organization, I could never say it enough. I repeated it over and over, at every meeting and review for years, until I could almost gag on the words.
- Jack Welch
Before I left China, I was educated that China was the richest, happiest country in the world. So when I arrived Australia, I thought, ‘Oh my God, everything is different from what I was told.’ Since then, I started to think differently.
- Jack Ma
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
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
The Bible says, See that none of you repays another evil for evil, but always aim to show kindness and seek to do good to one another and to everybody.
- Joel Olsteen
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
[Medco] had a different culture with respect to spending money. I believe health care demands that we be as frugal as possible and pay money for things that matter. We’re pretty frugal. Everybody has the same size offices. Everybody has the same size cube. There are no perks.
- George Paz
When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don’t read much anymore.
- Steve Martin
Managers will play every game in the book to avoid identifying their bottom 10. Sometimes they’ll sneak in people who were planning to retire that year or others who already have been told to leave the organization.
- Jack Welch
The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.
- Bill Gates
We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.
- Winston Churchill
At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.
- Seth Godin
I believe that continued strong consumer acceptance of our products at retail and the strengthening of our organization will enable us to manage through the challenges in our U. S. footwear business and lay the foundation for another round of growth.
- Phil Knight
It’s OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don’t want them to catch up because we’re slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.
- Bill Gates
Berkshire’s record would have been terrible if Warren didn’t keep learning.
- Charlie Munger
On my grandfather’s tombstone, you will find his favorite Marx quote: “Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.
- Ben Horowitz
Maintain ‘baseball cards’ and/or ‘believability matrixes’ for your people. Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.
- Ray Dalio
The idea would be in my mind – and I know it sounds strange – is that the most important advances in medicine would be made not by new knowledge in molecular biology, because that’s exceeding what we can even use. It’ll be made by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, figuring out a way to get all that information together.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
- Dale Carnegie
I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe in yourself and you believe that you’re a person of influence and a person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.
- Joel Osteen
We, too, need to be patient, especially when it comes to reaching new goals.
- George Foreman
People don’t want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology – all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.
- Peter Thiel
I feel like my message is to let people know that God is a good God, that He’s on their side, and no matter what happens, He has a great plan for them.
- Joel Olsteen
Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it’s my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Diversification and globalization are the keys to the future.
- Fujio Mitarai
Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that’s what’s happening now.
- Reed Hastings
Create a vision and personalize it. People need to say, I understand it, I’m excited about it, and I can make it happen.
- David Novak
It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
By combining broadband Internet, phone and video services over a single cable line, we are taking a major step towards implementing future integrated data, voice and video telecommunications on a mass market scale.
- John Chambers
A change is as good as a rest.
- Winston Churchill
At the end of the day … Nexium is Nexium, Lipitor is Lipitor, drugs are drugs, and it shouldn’t matter that much who’s counting to 30.
- George Paz
People have come to the erroneous conclusion that if they’re not willing to start something separate, world-changing, and risky, they have no business starting anything. Somehow, we’ve fooled ourselves into believing that the project has to have a name, a building, and a stock ticker symbol to matter.
- Seth Godin
I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I’m still fanatical, but now I’m a little less fanatical.
- Bill Gates
When I hire someone, I try to get beneath the surface and go deep. The first question I ask is, Has this person demonstrated any leadership potential? I ask for specifics and probe carefully to find out exactly what that person contributed. After all, success has many fathers.’ I also look for enthusiasm, people who lean forward in their chairs, who get up on their haunches a little but when they talk about what they’ve done. I like to see the passion and the excitement because that’s what will allow someone to inspire others. The next thing I look for is an avid learners, someone who is curious, who has an ability to make connections, to pick up on trends, and to apply what’s going on in the rest of the world to his or her business career. You obviously need smart people with a proven track record, but the real stars are passionate about what they do and are avid learners. Those two things make people continually raise the bar on performance.
- David Novak
Everything we do is about getting people to be more open, more creative, more courageous.
- Jack Dorsey
The Group adopts a two-pronged strategy in its business development in mainland China. In the prime cities, the Group targets those prime sites with heavy pedestrian flow and easy access for development into large-scale complexes of exceptional design and quality. In the second-tier cities, which are mostly provincial capitals or municipalities with a preponderance of middle class residents, the Group focuses on large-scale developments so as to achieve an efficient use of land as well as long-term appreciation in property value.
- Lee Shau Kee
If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.
- Zig Ziglar
You are here today because of a decision you made yesterday.
- Bryan Smith
The Group sold an attributable HK$3,434.6 million worth of properties in Hong Kong as compared with HK$6,810.9 million for the year before. In light of the then cautious market sentiment, the Group decided to defer the launch of a few new developments…
- Lee Shau Kee
A person’s life is over in 50, 100 years. But a company lives on through the people it is composed of, and SoftBank group has to survive even after I’m gone.
- Masayoshi Son
If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward.
- Thomas Edison
Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.
- Jerry Seinfeld
When access to information was limited, we needed to load student sup with facts. Now, when we have no scarcity of facts or the access to them, we need to load them up with understanding.
- Seth Godin
It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
- Bill Gates
I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
- Mark Zuckerberg
You can make positive deposits in your own economy every day by reading and listening to powerful, positive, life-changing content and by associating with encouraging and hope-building people.
- Zig Ziglar
Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
- Peter Thiel
People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.” There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold.
- Peter Thiel
In War: Resolution,In Defeat: Defiance,In Victory: MagnaminityIn Peace: Good Will.
- Winston Churchill
The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.
- Bill Gates
I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.
- Elon Musk
The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want.
- Dale Carnegie
True joy comes when you inspire, encourage, and guide someone else on a path that benefits him or her.
- Zig Ziglar
