RULE 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.
- Jack Welch
Notable Quotables
People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.
- Ben Horowitz
When I first discovered in the early 1980s the Italian espresso bars in my trip to Italy, the vision was to re-create that for America – a third place that had not existed before. Starbucks re-created that in America in our own image; a place to go other than home or work. We also created an industry that did not exist: specialty coffee.
- Howard Schultz
The good-will of a business which is losing money is not worth much.
- Ron Chernow
You cannot expect victory and plan for defeat.
- Joel Olsteen
Apple has a complex suite of proprietary technologies, both in hardware (like superior touchscreen materials) and software (like touchscreen interfaces purpose-designed for specific materials).
- Peter Thiel
Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.
- Warren Buffett
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
To my mind, there is a solution which has to do with democracy, because democratic governments are subject to the will of the people. So, if the people will it, you can actually create international institutions through the democratic states.
- George Soros
Measuring and establishing facts at every step of the process. Without facts, assumptions and misperceptions will defeat whatever reason and good judgment can be brought to effort
- Service Profit Chain
Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.
- Seth Godin
It’s flattering to people who stop you and say that you’ve helped them and all. But, again, you know, you’ve got to stay humble because as quick as you came up, you can come down.
- Joel Olsteen
The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.
- Warren Buffett
There is no elevator to success…you have to take the stairs.
- Zig Ziglar
You have to BE before you can DO, and DO before you can HAVE.
- Zig Ziglar
Often, organizations need bold, grand gestures to galvanize people towards a new mission or refocus their attention.
- Howard Schultz
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
A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Today, we’re very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted – all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.
- Bill Gates
There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.
- Winston Churchill
There is no right or wrong way of giving. People in Los Angeles have made major contributions in different ways to the city: Eli Broad to art. David Geffen to hospitals. I’m not judgmental.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Learn to speak God’s favor over every area of your life. Remember, the more favor-minded you are, the more of God’s favor you’re going to experience.
- Joel Olsteen
I said a long time ago that Foursquare can make cities better. You have these augmented realities like Foursquare and Twitter and Facebook that provide these virtual nodes and instant feedback from anywhere, adding annotation around a physical places.
- Jack Dorsey
Don’t do the natural thing, the impulsive thing. That is usually wrong.
- Dale Carnegie
The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.
- Sam Walton
Money isn’t everything… but it ranks right up there with oxygen.
- Zig Ziglar
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Money has always been in politics. And I’m not sure you’d want money to be completely out of politics.
- Bill Gates
Just because you don’t announce your plan doesn’t mean you don’t have one.
- Herb Kelleher
If you wait until all the lights are green before you leave home, you’ll never get started on your trip to the top.
- Zig Ziglar
People of excellence go the extra mile to do what’s right.
- Joel Olsteen
Our schools are not teaching students to think. It is astonishing how many young people have difficulty in putting their brains definitely and systematically to work….
- Thomas Edison
I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody.
- Dale Carnegie
The most common cause of fear of old age is associated with the possibility of poverty.
- Napoleon Hill
Let us accept the natural order in which we move. Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time. Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows. The glory of light cannot exist without its shadows. Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together. The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making – once.
- Winston Churchill
Steve really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn’t there. He took over the project, and it was really my own opinion — only my opinion — that he wanted to compete with the Lisa group that had kicked him out.
- Steve Wozniak
My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.
- Bill Gates
Faith in the endgame helps you live through the months or years of buildup.
- James C. Collins
Most of our wives are planners and meticulous budgeters. In fact, only 18 percent of us disagreed with the statement Charity begins at home. Most of us will tell you that our wives are a lot more conservative with money than we are.
- Thomas J Stanley
Its never too late…to start heading in the right direction.
- Seth Godin
I think they are fine. I don’t think you have a choice between iPad models so that’s just saying that the iPad is good … that’s a very different statement (and contrary to the implication) that, if I chose not to upgrade now, less than a year after my last upgrade, then I, Woz, am saying that the new Apple iPad is bad.
- Steve Wozniak
Everybody is going to have their critics. It’s easy to get discouraged in life.
- Joel Olsteen
If you count E-mail, I’m on the Internet all day, every day.
- Bill Gates
Stones of judgment, discouragement or doubt may be thrown at you. You can’t stop them, but you can make the choice to keep your walls up and not let them affect you.
- Joel Olsteen
E – Executions, how to get things done
- Jack Welch
By providing the systems that make the Internet work, Cisco is playing a major role in helping customers thrive in the explosive Internet economy. As a result, we are growing faster than all of our key competitors and have been the fastest growing and most profitable company in the history of the computer industry.
- John Chambers
Opportunity is walking through your life every day in the form of people you meet.
- Zig Ziglar
This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
- Peter Thiel
A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
- Winston Churchill
Although we can’t predict the future, our orders for the first weeks of this quarter are in line with the expectations we discussed in our fourth quarter earnings call.
- John Chambers
Nobody in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will ever object to your saying: ‘I may be wrong. Let’s examine the facts.
- Dale Carnegie
Well, the odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first attempt. All of us who are attempting to go around the world in balloons are effectively flying in experimental craft because these craft cannot be tested.
- Richard Branson
Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
- Ben Horowitz
Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.
- Guy Kawasaki
Before spending time on a stress-inducing question or problem, consider this: If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
- Timothy Ferriss
Through some strange and powerful principle of mental chemistry which she has never divulged, nature wraps up in the impulse of strong desire, that something which recognizes no such word as impossible, and accepts no such reality as failure.
- Napoleon Hill
Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
- Warren Buffett
Lack of ambition to aim above mediocrity.
- Napoleon Hill
Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
If you are starting a business I believe it has to be your passion.
- David Robinson
In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
- Winston Churchill
The best way to sell yourself to others is first to sell the others to yourself.
- Napoleon Hill
Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.
- Elon Musk
Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.
- Mark Zuckerberg
All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can’t worry about it, you can’t panic when you look at the stock market’s decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.
- Larry Ellison
If you’re going to be thinking, you may as well think big.
- Donald Trump
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
- Winston Churchill
The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny.The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe.The lizard brain will fight (to the death) if it has to, but would rather run away. It likes a vendetta and has no trouble getting angry.The lizard brain cares what everyone else thinks, because status in the tribe is essential to its survival.A squirrel runs around looking for nuts, hiding from foxes, listening for predators, and watching for other squirrels. The squirrel does this because that’s all it can do. All the squirrel has is a lizard brain.The only correct answer to ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ is ‘Because it’s lizard brain told it to.’ Wild animals are wild because the only brain they posses is a lizard brain.The lizard brain is not merely a concept. It’s real, and it’s living on the top of your spine, fighting for your survival. But, of course, survival and success are not the same thing.The lizard brain is the reason you’re afraid, the reason you don’t do all the art you can, the reason you don’t ship when you can. The lizard brain is the source of the resistance.
- Seth Godin
As knowledge is acquired it must be organized and put into use, for a definate purpose, through practical plans. Knowledge has no value except that which be gained from its application toward some worthy end.
- Napoleon Hill
I’d be derelict in my duty if I didn’t go and continue to use every advantage that I can to promote New York’s cause.
- Michael Bloomberg
the expression one wears on one’s face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one’s back
- Dale Carnegie
Everything is fraught with danger. I love technology and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.
- Steve Martin
An economy is not a complicated thing, it just has a lot of moving parts.
- Ray Dalio
Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that’s right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that’s better than television in terms of social connectivity.
- Reid Hoffman
You may make some mistakes – but that doesn’t make you a sinner. You’ve got the very nature of God on the inside of you.
- Joel Olsteen
Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.
- Timothy Ferriss
I like football, but I think this is a very personal matter. I don’t see any negatives for some Russian rich man to buy a football club.
- Viktor Vekselberg
[In January 2011] We take a cut of every transaction. So we charge 2.75 percent and 15 cents on the transaction. Which we then pay the credit card companies out of. So the user only has to pay that 2.75 percent. They don’t pay any credit card fees. They don’t have to have a setup charged. They don’t have to pay for the hardware or even the software.
- Jack Dorsey
He was probably America’s first capitalist.
- Travis Kalanick
The thing about the banjo is, when you first hear it, it strikes many people as ‘What’s that?’ There’s something very compelling about it to certain people; that’s the way I was; that’s the way a lot of banjo players and people who love the banjo are.
- Steve Martin
Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.
- Steve Jobs
The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
The nuclear approach I’m involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There’s a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true – many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.
- Bill Gates
As a general rule, everyone you involve with your company should be involved full-time. Sometimes you’ll have to break this rule; it usually makes sense to hire outside lawyers and accountants, for example. However, anyone who doesn’t own stock options or draw a regular salary from your company is fundamentally misaligned.
- Peter Thiel
To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments.
- Dale Carnegie
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
- John C. Maxwell
innovation without discipline leads to disaster.
- James C. Collins
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
Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.
- Phil Knight
In life, you don’t have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you’re a CEO. CEOs aren’t born.
- Ben Horowitz
Be careful not to compromise what you want most for what you want now.
- Zig Ziglar
I really chess-play culture shifts. I’m really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That’s what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Do you ever worry’ asked Dale Carnegie, I replied: ‘No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?’
- Henry Ford
To achieve stable growth, an enterprise must live up to its conviction.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is ‘Don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.’
- Ben Horowitz
You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger.
- John C. Maxwell
In general, the apparel industry isn’t about continual process improvement or making the perfect piece of denim; it’s about chasing trends.
- Tadashi Yanai
There are many different kinds of PCs. You have fixed, virtual, tablets, notebooks, ultrabooks, desktops, workstations. What you find in commercial PCs, business PCs, is that there’s a really long tail of usage on client devices.
- Michael Dell
Here is the salient fact which distinguishes the English Revolution from all others: that those who wielded irresistible physical force were throughout convinced that it could give them no security. Nothing is more characteristic of the English people than their instinctive reverence even in rebellion for law and tradition. Deep in the nature of the men who had broken the King’s power was the conviction that law in his name was the sole foundation on which they could build.
- Winston Churchill
