I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we’re not wise enough to see it.
- Oprah Winfrey
Notable Quotables
I find that a duck’s opinion of me is very much influenced over whether or not I have bread
- Mitch Hedberg
Tip #1 – Self-motivation is the key to success and will achieve powerful results.
- Jack Nadel
The power of this new era is simple: if you want to (need to, must!) lead, then you can. It’s easier than ever and we need you. But if this isn’t the right moment, if this isn’t the right cause, then hold off. Generous and authentic leadership will always defeat the selfish efforts of someone doing it just because she can.
- Seth Godin
That’s an issue dear to my heart, because I was born in the Soviet Union during the communist era.
- Sergey Brin
Consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.
- Seth Godin
What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.
- Warren Buffett
American democracy is spoiled by people buying everything in sight and then selling and buying everything in sight, including our politicians.
- Russell Simmons
Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
- Winston Churchill
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
- Bill Gates
They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.
- Thomas Edison
The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
- Timothy Ferriss
Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.
- Ben Horowitz
I always joke and say I want to invent a comfortable stiletto and then retire.
- Sara Blakely
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
We live well below our means. We wear inexpensive suits and drive American-made cars. Only a minority of us drive the current-model-year automobile. Only a minority ever lease our motor vehicles.
- Thomas J Stanley
This Sunday School has been of help to me, greater perhaps than any other force in my Christian life, and I can ask no better things for you than that you, and all that shall come after you in this great band of workers for Christ, shall receive the same measure of blessedness which I have been permitted to have.
- John D. Rockefeller
If you wish to build a powerful personal network, branch out. Build a diverse network of professional contacts that includes people that don’t look like you, sound like you, speak like you or have your background, education or history. The only thing they should have in common with you and the other people in your network is that they should be really good at what they do. Create a personal network like that, and you’ll have a network that can help you succeed at anything.
- Ivan Misner
Success is about being where we are supposed to be and doing what we need to be doing.
- David Robinson
If one dream dies, dream another dream. If you get knocked down, get back up and go again.
- Joel Olsteen
Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.
- Bill Gates
the major fears of modern man could be boiled down to two things: too much e-mail and getting fat.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.
- Bill Gates
The trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
I would call lack of candor the biggest dirty little secret in business, basically blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got. It’s a killer.
- Jack Welch
When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.
- Walt Disney
I think that maybe inside any business, there is someone slowly going crazy.
- Michael Gerber
My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars – this is very important – so you don’t have to carry the return fuel when you go there.
- Elon Musk
It’s absolutely true that unless you can instill discipline upon yourself, you will never be able to lead others.
- Zig Ziglar
Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.
- Napoleon Hill
Allow endings.
- Jack Dorsey
Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.
- Sam Walton
The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want.
- Dale Carnegie
I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving.
- Steve Martin
You have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.
- Phil Knight
When we don’t forgive, we’re not hurting the other person. We’re not hurting the company that did us wrong. We’re not hurting God. We’re only hurting ourselves.
- Joel Olsteen
If you cannot persuade people to do things, you simply will not be a success because you are not an island unto yourself. Everything in life is about persuading people to do what you want them to do.
- David Robinson
Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.
- Steve Ballmer
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
One thing I resent is the slur that I just support political candidates because of the business.
- Rupert Murdoch
Trump has been very influential in helping me expand by vision. Sometimes I talk to Donald two or three times a day, and he’s taught me many things. The best thing was a story he tells me about buying a building. When he built Trump Tower he also bought the rights to use the Tiffany name on the building. It was gonna be Tiffany Tower. He late father said, Yeah right. When you change your name to Tiffany, you call it Tiffany Tower. But for now, you call it Trump. Over a period of years whenever he was in trouble, his name and his promotion of himself as a brand are what saved him. I keep that lesson in mind. I remember how connecting Def Comedy Jam to Def Jam records helped both entities – associating HBO with an established hip-hop brand helped get the show on the air, while linking the label to a hot TV show helped the label survive a cold period.
- Russell Simmons
I’d get kicked out of buildings all day long, people would rip up my business card in my face. It’s a humbling business to be in. But I knew I could sell and I knew I wanted to sell something I had created. I cut the feet out of those pantyhose and I knew I was on to something. This was it.
- Sara Blakely
People naturally follow those stronger than themselves.
- John Maxwell
Our job as founders as entrepreneurs is to distribute the future that’s already here.
- Jack Dorsey
Do you know what that word reign means? It means, time in power.” God said we’re to reign how long? In life. That means as long as you’re alive that is your time in power.
- Joel Olsteen
The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
- Peter Thiel
Most people believe that results matter. The idea that results matter is one that you have to keep letting go of. And most of the time, I believe it.
- Russell Simmons
It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
- Bill Gates
If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
- Henry Ford
Your workforce is your most valuable asset. The knowledge and skills they have represent the fuel that drives the engine of business – and you can leverage that knowledge.
- Harvey Mackay
To be willing to do new things you don’t think you’ll like requires you to prefer the unknown. Not just to tolerate it, but to prefer it. One way to achieve that is to set out to experience things you’re sure you won’t like. To have conversations that are frightening. Becoming generous beyond measure, just to see what happens. And most of all, setting out to fail. Failing helps you see how far is too far, failing helps remind you that failing isn’t fatal, and most of all, failing opens you up to succeeding.
- Seth Godin
My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.
- Peter Thiel
Economic cycles come and go…
- Cheng Yu-tung
Common mission trap for companies: trying to be all things to all people at all times.
- Jack Welch
Transparency is terribly important in a situation like this, as a quick reaction time, because news today is not immediate. It travels globally on the Internet. In our YouTube culture, dramatic videos take on a life of their own, beyond anyone’s control. – (on crisis management)
- David Novak
When your head of sales interviews for her next job, she won’t want to say that despite the fact that she ran a global sales force with hundreds of employees, her title was “Dude.”
- Ben Horowitz
Money isn’t everything… but it ranks right up there with oxygen.
- Zig Ziglar
You have to understand your own personal DNA. Don’t do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Fear is one of the worst things in business.
- Jack Nadel
Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.
- Ray Kroc
Security has to happen at the infrastructure.
- John Chambers
Let’s test the Shakespearean model in the real world. Imagine a production called Gates and Schmidt, based on Romeo and Juliet. Montague is Microsoft. Capulet is Google. Two great families, run by alpha nerds, sure to clash on account of their sameness.
- Peter Thiel
God can cause opportunity to find you. He has unexpected blessings where you suddenly meet the right person, or suddenly your health improves, or suddenly you’re able to pay off your house. That’s God shifting things in your favor.
- Joel Olsteen
You can make an internet company with 10 people and it can have billions of users. It doesn’t take much capital and it makes a lot of money — a really, really lot of money — so it’s natural for everyone to focus on those kinds of things.
- Larry Page
Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?
- Rupert Murdoch
A lot of preachers’ kids are some of the most rebellious kids in the world. I never was like that.
- Joel Olsteen
The challenge, it turns out, isn’t in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by.
- Seth Godin
No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.
- Winston Churchill
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
- Winston Churchill
You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart.
- Thomas J Watson
The third way is less common and certainly less of a layup—a culture of integrity, meaning a culture of honesty, transparency, fairness, and strict adherence to rules and regulations. In such cultures, there can be no head fakes or winks. People who break the rules do not leave the company for “personal reasons” or to “spend more time with their families.” They are hanged—publicly—and the reasons are made painfully clear to everyone.
- Jack Welch
As one’s fortunes are reduced, one spirit must expand to fill the void.
- Winston Churchill
Wrong Selection of A Mate In Marriage.
- Napoleon Hill
When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
- Winston Churchill
The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge.
- Napoleon Hill
The word ‘Spanx’ was funny. It made people laugh. No one ever forgot it.
- Sara Blakely
What you keep before your eyes will affect you.
- Joel Olsteen
We need to and must protect privacy. But I think that people will be willing and even eager to share medical information about themselves for the greater good of mankind.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.
- John D. Rockefeller
Every dream I’ve ever had in life has come true ten times over.
- Steve Wozniak
I want people to learn what democracy means.
- Jack Ma
What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of.
- Mark Zuckerberg
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
I do not suppose that at any moment of history has the agony of the world been so great or widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world.
- Winston Churchill
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.
- Malcolm X
I have a calendar life that is complicated, so I use BusyCal and Google Calendar. I keep two different browsers open to avoid some confusion.
- Steve Wozniak
The one essential character trait of any leader is personal integrity.
- David Novak
Life is too short to be small.
- Benjamin Disraeli
For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
- Bill Gates
The craftsman and the artist say, “Here, I made this.” The workingman is asked to follow instructions.
- Seth Godin
More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.
- Peter Drucker
When I hear people debate the ROI of social media? It makes me remember why so many business fail. Most businesses are not playing the marathon. They’re playing the sprint. They’re not worried about lifetime value and retention. They’re worried about short-term goals.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.
- Guy Kawasaki
I really believed that fear is contagious.
- Joel Olsteen
It’s harder, but we’re still finding oil in Oklahoma today. The bar has been raised on startup companies, but it can still be done. Every regulation and every rule limits you, but, yes, it can still be done. That’s the beauty of living in a free country and having the freedom to have an idea and become an entrepreneur.
- Harold Hamm
I think how you start the day many times determines what kind of day you’re going to have.
- Joel Olsteen
Today, we exaggerate the differences between left-liberal egalitarianism and libertarian individualism because almost everyone shares their common indefinite attitude.
- Peter Thiel
A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.
- Peter Drucker
I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.’ Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.
- Larry Ellison
