Notable Quotables

The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand – without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it….

- Thomas Edison

I think George Will is somebody that said recently that the Republicans will not lose, as a Republican, that the Republicans will not win the election. I think it was a terrible statement.

- Donald Trump

Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make

- Donald Trump

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.

- Bill Gates

At Uniqlo, we’re thinking ahead. We’re thinking about how to create new, innovative products… and sell that to everyone.

- Tadashi Yanai

Smith never wavered. Twenty-five years later, Kimberly-Clark owned Scott Paper outright and beat Procter & Gamble in six of eight product categories.12 In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.

- James C. Collins

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

- Benjamin Franklin

TV is a great big megaphone,” and when you can only afford to spend dozens of dollars acquiring a new customer, you need the biggest megaphone you can find.

- Peter Thiel

Berkshire’s record would have been terrible if Warren didn’t keep learning.

- Charlie Munger

You have enough people against you… be for yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

Le Reve’ may be one of the three best pictures Pablo Picasso ever painted.

- Stephen Wynn

…The greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.

- Seth Godin

Gratitude is the single greatest treasure I will take with me from this experience.

- Oprah Winfrey

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

- Dale Carnegie

Money is like an arm or leg – use it or lose it.

- Henry Ford

In reality it is the focus on the first three D’s that ultimately gains you the data, and the dollars you need to become very, very rich…in other words the dollars are derived from having a dream, being dedicated, and having the drive to win.

- Robert Kiyosaki

My children – in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.

- Steve Ballmer

In business, if you don’t kick and hug, you don’t love.

- Clay Clark

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.

- Seth Godin

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.

- John C. Maxwell

I’m going to let God be the judge of who goes to heaven and hell.

- Joel Olsteen

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked, leadership is defined by results not attributes.

- Peter Drucker

Money is fun to make, fun to spend and fun to give away.

- Sara Blakely

We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.

- Elon Musk

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.

- Peter Thiel

Sometimes we look at gay being a bigger sin than being proud or not telling the truth. I don’t think God categorizes sins.

- Joel Olsteen

For a rich and reasonably successful guy, it is impossible not to enjoy your job; otherwise, why would you spend so much time and effort doing it? I am a great fan of Norilsk, and I like this kind of challenge.

- Vladimir Potanin

A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see and who sees before others see.

- Leroy Eimes

Our business is diversified across many sectors, be it supermarkets or finance. We can invest in many areas.

- Dhanin Chearavanont

Networking is one of the most valuable uses of your time in terms of return—and not just in monetary terms.

- Business Insider.com

Life isn’t fair. It’s true, and you still have to deal with it. Whining about it rarely levels the playing field, but learning to rise above it is the ultimate reward.

- Harvey Mackay

Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I very much believe that creating a sense of fun and keeping up everyone’s energy level is part of my job description. – David Novak CEO OF Yum! Brands

- David Novak

you don’t need to understand any of the biology, just as you don’t need to understand radiation to use a microwave oven.

- Timothy Ferriss

My favorite writers are all Jews – David, Solomon, Matthew, Mark – well, you get the picture.

- Zig Ziglar

I’ve seen executives improve their performance and skill sets, I’ve never seen one lose the support of the organization and then regain it.

- Ben Horowitz

Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.

- Peter Thiel

Art isn’t only a painting; it’s anything that changes someone for the better, any nonanonymous interaction that leads to a human (not simply a commercial) conclusion.

- Seth Godin

God will not pour fresh, creative ideas and blessing into old attitudes.

- Joel Olsteen

There’s room for another planet between Mars and Jupiter. Given that planets formed everywhere else, why couldn’t another planet have formed there?

- John Chambers

Confidence is a habit that can be developed by acting as if you already had the confidence you desire to have.

- Brian Tracy

There is no decision that we can make that doesn’t come with some sort of balance or sacrifice

- Simon Sinek

The successful leader must plan his work, and work his plan. A leader who moves by guesswork, without practical, definite plans, is comparable to a ship without a rudder. Sooner or later he will land on the rocks.

- Napoleon Hill

It’s a great thing when you can show that you’ve been successful and that you’ve made a lot of money and that you’ve employed a lot of people.

- Donald Trump

Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power.

- Sergey Brin

To a contrarian like me, constant advice not to do something almost always starts me quickly down the risky, unpopular path.

- Michael Bloomberg

I have asked thousands of business people to smile at someone every hour of the day for a week and then come to class and talk about the results.

- Dale Carnegie

It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.

- Timothy Ferriss

The Chinese people have always been determined to forge ahead.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Basically, our goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.

- Larry Page

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

- Bill Gates

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

- Peter Drucker

Market fundamentalists recognize that the role of the state in the economy is always disruptive, inefficient, and generally has negative connotations. This leads them to believe that the market mechanism can take care of all the problems.

- George Soros

Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense.

- Larry Page

The best way a mentor can prepare another leader is to expose him or her to other great people.

- John C. Maxwell

I broke into an industry that was completely money-focused. Nobody was paying attention to the women and thinking about how these undergarments felt, or how they fit…All of a sudden I showed up and charged more for one pair than anybody can comprehendand women lined up in droves to buy them. I think I left the industry in show, but I really believed that we needed to make it better not cheaper.

- Sara Blakely

A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy, so (he keeps) coming back, which pleases the shareholder.

- Herb Kelleher

Strong is Vader. Mind what you have learned. Save you it can.

- Yoda

Through the wisdom of its government leaders and the entrepreneurship of its private sector, India has rapidly risen to become a major force in the global economy, … Cisco believes that the Internet, and related technologies, will be a key enabler for India to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation.

- John Chambers

There is no accountability today… no willingness to focus on big ideas.

- Michael Bloomberg

It was a big momentum deal, so when the bottom comes out from under it, you have to go back to the well and start the whole thing.

- Travis Kalanick

That was so much fun. It’s been such a neat experience racing with these guys.

- Ed Clark

If all we do with these tools is teach compliance and consumption, that’s all we’re going to get. School can and must do more than train the factory workers of tomorrow.

- Seth Godin

If you want to conquer fear, don’t sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

- Dale Carnegie

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.

- Elon Musk

IN A NUTSHELL FUNDAMENTAL TECHNIQUES IN HANDLING PEOPLE PRINCIPLE 1 Don’t criticize, condemn or complain. PRINCIPLE 2 Give honest and sincere appreciation. PRINCIPLE 3 Arouse in the other person an eager want.

- Dale Carnegie

In motivating people, you’ve got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example – and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.

- Rupert Murdoch

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

- Joel Olsteen

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

- Bill Gates

We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.

- Walt Disney

the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability,” said John D., than for any other under the sun.

- Dale Carnegie

The alternative to tourism The linchpin, the engaged one, the graceful actor in an unfolding play—these people don’t seek to only inspect. They’re not traveling in order to tick a checkbox. Instead, they open themselves to the world they bought a ticket to, knowing full well that they will be changed.

- Seth Godin

Larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with taking a company from good to great. Ten of eleven good-to-great CEOs came from inside the company, whereas the comparison companies tried outside CEOs six times more often.

- James C. Collins

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

- Winston Churchill

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

- Winston Churchill

The Interros strategy toward various assets generally depends on the stage of their development and level of their maturity.

- Vladimir Potanin

Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.

- Ben Horowitz

In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn’t white and I wasn’t black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

I felt like Samson with a fresh haircut. But that dream of what the company could be sustained me.

- Ray Kroc

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

- Winston Churchill

It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.

- Bill Gates

Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production, using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.

- Timothy Ferriss

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.

- Richard Branson

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

- John D. Rockefeller

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

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

- Seth Godin

The difference between blues, jazz, rock n’ roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It’s scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.

- Russell Simmons

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