Notable Quotables

Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires.

- Seth Godin

Being nice to people is just 20% of providing good customer service. The important part is designing systems that allow you to do the job right the first time. All the smiles in the world arent going to help you if your product or service is not what the customer wants. –

- Service Profit Chain

I had a terrible time hiring rich people. It sounds funny, but the problem is when things go wrong they can ask, ‘Why am I doing this?’ You don’t ever want anybody asking that question. You want them to say, ‘I know why I’m doing it, I need the money, let’s go’ or whatever it is that draws them.

- Ben Horowitz

Exploring how you could make a bad situation worse can sometimes tell you what not to do.

- Harvey Mackay

If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.

- Mario Andretti

We are approaching a new age of synthesis. Knowledge cannot be merely a degree or a skill… it demands a broader vision, capabilities in critical thinking and logical deduction without which we cannot have constructive progress.

- Li Ka-shing

What we do not see, what most of us never suspect of existing, is the silent but irresistible power which comes to the rescue of those who fight on in the face of discouragement.

- Napoleon Hill

I’m very careful about saying who would and wouldn’t go to heaven. I don’t know.

- Joel Olsteen

The single reason for a salesperson’s existence is to get the Buyer’s commitment. Just how poor are salespeople at their jobs? In a study of professional sales people (those who sell full time), 50% failed to ask for the buyer’s commitment to buy.

- Jerry Vass

Giving should be entered into in just the same way as investing. Giving is investing.

- John D. Rockefeller

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked

- Warren Buffett

A company only has so much money. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest… Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.

- Jack Welch

Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

- John D. Rockefeller

Every right implies a responsibility; Every opportunity, an obligation, Every possession, a duty.

- John D. Rockefeller

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.

- Peter Drucker

Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.

- Bill Gates

How to walk to Cleveland Shipping is an event. There’s life before you ship and then there’s the moment you ship. And then there’s life after you ship. Starting isn’t like that. Starting something is not an event; it’s a series of events. You decide to walk to Cleveland. So you take a first step in the right direction. That’s starting. You spend the rest of the day walking toward Cleveland, one step at a time, picking your feet up and putting them down. At the end of the day, twenty miles later, you stop at a hotel. And what happens the next morning? Either you quit the project or you start again, walking to Cleveland. In fact, every step is a new beginning. Sure, you’re closer than you were yesterday or last week, but you’re still heading toward Cleveland. Keep starting until you finish.

- Seth Godin

You build trust with others each time you choose integrity over image, truth over convenience, or honor over personal gain.

- John C. Maxwell

You can abuse me, you can strike me, so long as you let me have my own.

- Ron Chernow

We are currently not planning on conquering the world.

- Sergey Brin

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.

- Ben Horowitz

What I would say to young entrepreneurs is there’s so many moments in your life where you have these dreams, and people are trying to protect you, and they say, perhaps, friends, family, parents sometimes, they don’t agree with it, they think, ‘This is just too high of a hurdle.’ And I don’t agree with that.

- Howard Schultz

Students of public speaking continually ask, How can I overcome self-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before an audience? Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that some horses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at the thundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing a farmer’s wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse as the train goes by? How would you cure a horse that is afraid of cars—graze him in a back-woods lot where he would never see steam-engines or automobiles, or drive or pasture him where he would frequently see the machines? Apply horse-sense to ridding yourself of self-consciousness and fear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying. You can never attain freedom from stage-fright by reading a treatise. A book may give you excellent suggestions on how best to conduct yourself in the water, but sooner or later you must get wet, perhaps even strangle and be half scared to death. There are a great many wetless bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim in them. To plunge is the only way.

- Dale Carnegie

As a company it is always better for us to work with more customers than fewer customers. The more people that we serve, the more money that we will make.

- Napoleon Hill

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

- Bill Gates

It’s really complex to make something simple…

- Jack Dorsey

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

- Mark Twain

An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople. In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups: 1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes. This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider 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

The person who knows one thing and does it better than anyone else, even if it only be the art of raising lentils, receives the crown he merits. If he raises all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor of mankind and its rewarded as such.

- Og Mandino

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

Selling an electric sports car creates an opportunity to fundamentally change the way America drives.

- Elon Musk

We have set the course for the future and are very happy about a successful generational change at the top of the company.

- Stefan Quandt

The buyer needs to talk at least 70% of the time.

- Clay Clark

General and undifferentiated pitches don’t say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of many others.

- Peter Thiel

[On the cost to found Nike] Six hundred dollars each. Twelve hundred dollars total investment.

- Phil Knight

Any area of achievement in your life required you to stick with the basics until you became great…it’s not about learning 4,000 moves but about doing just a handful of moves 4,000 times.

- Chet Holmes

No effort has been spared in ensuring the best designs for all our projects.

- Lee Shau Kee

Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.

- Ben Horowitz

Good management consists in showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

- John D. Rockefeller

A pay increase of 5 percent is more than justified. It would compensate for losses we’ve had in the past and I’d like to be able to buy the everyday things I’ve put off for years, like a new TV.

- Michael Gerber

I loved doing ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ Because you have to understand that I’d been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don’t think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.

- Steve Martin

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.

- Thomas Edison

Southwest Airlines is successful because the company understands it’s a customer service company. It also happens to be an airline.

- Harvey Mackay

Of course motivation is not permanent. But then, neither is bathing; but it is something you should do on a regular basis.

- Zig Ziglar

I’ve run into people in my life who were so dramatic; people who are so extreme and so frustrating to be around that you end up thinking about them and talking about them for literally years after your experience with them is over. I’ve had that happen to me, and I’ve seen it happen to other people. I find it fascinating.

- Steve Martin

G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. … We found that they don’t predict anything.

- Laszlo Bock

Every time you walk down the street people are screaming, ‘You’re fired!’

- Donald Trump

I move onward, the only direction Can’t be scared to fail in search of perfection.

- Jay-Z

The good-will of a business which is losing money is not worth much.

- Ron Chernow

My belief as a Christian is when we receive Christ as salvation, that that gives us a guarantee for Heaven.

- Joel Olsteen

It’s easy to get negative because you get beat down. You go through a few disappointments and it’s easy to stay in that negative frame of mind. Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is a whole cliche, but your attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.

- Joel Olsteen

When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal.

- Napoleon Hill

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.

- Elon Musk

It helps to have founded and run a company if you’re going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.

- Ben Horowitz

Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy, profit from folly rather than participate in it.

- Warren Buffett

Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars.

- Rupert Murdoch

The secret to being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal.

- Seth Godin

The Successful leader must understand and apply the principle of cooperative effort and be able to induce his followers to do the same. Leadership calls for power and power calls for cooperation.

- Napoleon Hill

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

- Alexander Graham Bell

I work hard, I eat fishballs and nood­les. I drink coffee and tea from a street vendor. I am quite casual about personal wealth, life hasn’t changed at all.

- Lui Che Woo

We vote for a presidential candidate without saying, “Why not run the country for a month and then we’ll see . .

- Seth Godin

The future of gambling is as an entertainment business.

- Lui Che Woo

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

- Mark Zuckerberg

If you’ve found some way to educate yourself about engineering, stocks, or whatever it is, good employers will have some type of exam or interview and see a sample of your work.

- Bill Gates

We’re living in what I like to call the ‘Thank You Economy,’ because only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way – and do it authentically – are going to have a prayer of competing.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?

- Michael Bloomberg

The local property market remained volatile throughout the period under review due to negative developments occurring both in the local as well as overseas markets.

- Lee Shau Kee

I believe social responsibility begins with a strong, competitive company. Only a healthy enterprise can improve and enrich the lives of people and their communities.

- Jack Welch

[As a child] I would just question things…

- Elon Musk

My big advantage was to have my father accept me as first-generation.

- Mukesh Ambani

RULE 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.

- Jack Welch

You cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure.

- Zig Ziglar

You’ve got to listen to what God’s telling you and not to what other people may tell you. People will try to talk you out of the dream in your heart.

- Joel Olsteen

God doesn’t look at how much we do, but with how much love we do it.

- Mother Teresa

That’s an issue dear to my heart, because I was born in the Soviet Union during the communist era.

- Sergey Brin

Sure I am this day we are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us.

- Winston Churchill

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

- Henry Ford

That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.

- Peter Thiel

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

Happens to every guy sometimes this does.

- Yoda

Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they’ve succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.

- Ben Horowitz

Successful leadership calls for mastery of details of the leader’s position.

- Napoleon Hill

Remember that other people may be totally wrong. But they don’t think so.

- Dale Carnegie

Change is powerful, but change always comes with the possibility of failure as its partner. “This might not work” isn’t merely something to be tolerated; it’s something you must seek out.

- Seth Godin

A CEO’s job is to supervise all systems and to indentify weaknesses before the weaknesses turn into system failures. This can happen in many different ways, but it is exceptionally disconcerting when you company is growing rapidly. Your sales are increasing, your product of service is getting attention from the media, and suddenly you can’t deliver. Why? Uusually, it’s because your systems imploded from the increased demand. You didn’t have enough phone lines, or operators answering the phones. You didn’t have enough production capacity or enough hours in the week to meet the demand; or you didn’t have the money to build the product or hire additional help. Whatever the reason, you missed the opportunity to move your business to the next level of success due to failure of one of your systems…At each new level of growth, the CEO must start planning the systems needed to support the next level of growth, from phone lines to lines of credit for production needs. Systems drive both cash flow management and communication. As your systems get better, you or your employees will have to exert less and less effort. Without well-designed and successful operating systems, your business will be labor intensive. Once you have well-designed and successful operating systems, you will have a saleable business asset.

- Robert Kiyosaki

I believe God’s keeping the records, and I believe you will be rewarded even in this life. Somehow, someway, God will make it up to you. It may be He protected you from an accident you never knew. You can’t give God something without God giving you more in return, whether it’s peace or joy or satisfaction.

- Joel Olsteen

I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.

- Peter Thiel

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