People who build family businesses are not classically trained. They have to deal with an enormous amount of politics. You think corporate politics are tough? Go work for your dad or your mom.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Notable Quotables
In this sense, if nothing about our society changes for the next 100 years, then the future is over 100 years away.
- Peter Thiel
When I was 17 or 18 I wanted to become a wine expert, and my parents wouldn’t let me drink. So I was devastated. All I could do was read, and I read and I read. And I’d read something like, you know, ‘Subtle hints of cassis.’
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I have always said that everyone is in sales. Maybe you don’t hold the title of salesperson, but if the business you are in requires you to deal with people, you, my friend, are in sales.
- Zig Ziglar
We woke up one day, and all the sudden Starbucks was in the middle of this political crossfire between the people who want to bring a gun into Starbucks and the people who want to prevent it. It is a very difficult, fragile situation.
- Howard Schultz
Treasure the love you receive above all. It will survive long after your good health has vanished.
- Og Mandino
Give your subconscious a chance to work by turning your brain off from time to time. Don’t focus on work or solving problems constantly.
- Harvey Mackay
The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
- Warren G. Bennis
God’s desire is that we excel.
- Joel Olsteen
Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ is my go-to song to pump myself up if I’m having a tough time or if I get really nervous right before a speech.
- Sara Blakely
I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.
- Jeff Bezos
I’ve got to keep breathing. It’ll be my worst business mistake if I don’t.
- Steve Martin
I have had a long, long life full of troubles, but there is one curious fact about them-nine-tenths of them never happened.
- Andrew Carnegie
Winning isn’t everything but wanting to win is.
- Zig Ziglar
Incineration does not equal human digestion, eating a fireplace log will not store the same number of calories as burning one will produce.
- Timothy Ferriss
When obstacles arise, you change your direction to reach your goal; you do not change your decision to get there.
- Zig Ziglar
When I had made more money than I needed for myself and my family, I set up a foundation to promote the values and principles of a free and open society.
- George Soros
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
- Zig Ziglar
Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t feel comfortable reading about in the newspaper the next day.
- Joel Olsteen
My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.
- Joel Olsteen
Ohhh. Great warrior.Wars not make one great.
- Yoda
Strive to make every person feel special. After all, every person you meet is made in the image of God.
- Joel Olsteen
Last I looked – and I’m not a candidate – but last time I checked reading about the Constitution, the Electoral College has nothing to do with parties, has absolutely nothing to do with parties. It’s most states are winners take all.
- Michael Bloomberg
Be fair. You have to be able to see their point of view.
- Michael Levine
All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.
- John C. Maxwell
Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money
- Warren Buffett
Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
- David Ogilvy
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
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
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
As much as you need a strong personality to build a business from scratch, you also must understand the art of delegation. I have to be good at helping people run the individual businesses, and I have to be willing to step back. The company must be set up so it can continue without me.
- Richard Branson
The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events – Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima – so it’s more visible.
- Bill Gates
We’re trying to identify the key influencers and make them distribution points.
- Jack Dorsey
No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.
- Bill Gates
You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.
- Bill Cosby
There’s nothing – I’ve bought everything I want. I don’t like yachts or anything; you know, I’m not a yacht person, and I’ve got pretty much the nicest plane I’d want to have.
- Elon Musk
What’s amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It’s so far away in time that they can’t appreciate what it means for their whole life.
- Bill Gates
Business leaders cannot be bystanders.
- Howard Schultz
We wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.
- Phil Knight
You must have a vision and not just a vision but you must have a plan that would make you fulfil that vision.
- Aliko Dangote
When I was growing up my dad would encourage my brother and me to fail. We would be sitting at the dinner table and he would ask, so what did you guys fail at this week? If we didn’t have something to contribute, he would be disappointed. When I did fail at something, he’d high-five me. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was completely reframing my definition of failure at a young age. To me, failure means not trying; failure isn’t the outcome. If I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, I didn’t try that because I was scared, that is failure.
- Sara Blakely
No slovenly, careless person can become a successful leader. Leadership calls for respect. Followers will not respect a leader who does not grade high on all of the factors of a Pleasing Personality.
- Napoleon Hill
The big question is: When will the term structure of interest rates change? That’s the question to be worried about.
- Ray Dalio
You learn more in failure than you ever do in success.
- Jay-Z
Always seek out the seed of triumph in every adversity.
- Og Mandino
if you want to achieve consistent performance, you need both parts of a 20 Mile March: a lower bound and an upper bound, a hurdle that you jump over and a ceiling that you will not rise above, the ambition to achieve and the self-control to hold back.
- James C. Collins
Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.
- Peter Drucker
We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products. We did no manufacturing there. The garage didn’t serve much purpose, except it was something for us to feel was our home. We had no money. You have to work out of your home when you have no money.
- Steve Wozniak
If your business is not a brand, it is just a commodity.
- Donald Trump
The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.
- Bill Gates
I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.
- Warren Buffett
Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
- Bill Gates
In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.
- Stephen R. Covey
I want to help people to help themselves, which is much more valuable for both sides than just making a donation. By training the child of a farmer you compound the value of that dollar spent on training since that child will now help their parents. This is the multiplier effect. There’s no point in just feeding them or just giving them money.
- Lee Shau Kee
I believe in motivating with humor. … – David Novak CEO OF Yum! Brands
- David Novak
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
- Charles Darwin
I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic … It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine’s works in my boyhood … it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker’s views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine’s writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, ‘What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!’ My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days.
- Thomas Edison
Two men looked out from prison bars, One saw the mud, the other saw the stars.
- Dale Carnegie
Storytelling is the game. It’s what we all do. It’s why Nike is Nike, it’s why Apple is Apple, it’s why Walt Disney built Disney World and it’s why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
- Winston Churchill
I made a conscious decision not to tell anyone in my life. Now I tell people–don’t tell anyone your idea until you have invested enough of yourself in it that you are not going to turn back. When a person has an idea at that conception moment, it is the most vulnerable–one negative comment could knock you off course.
- Sara Blakely
In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we’d go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father’s televised service for 17 years.
- Joel Olsteen
I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.
- Bill Gates
For every sale you miss because you were too enthusiastic, you’ll miss a hundred because you weren’t enthusiastic enough.
- Zig Ziglar
You reach a point where you don’t work for money.
- Walt Disney
Some of the biggest failures I’ve ever met, are people that have never failed.
- Robert Kiyosaki
When we had seventy-five stores in Arkansas, seventy-five in Missouri, eighty in Oklahoma, whatever, people knew who we were, and everybody except the merchants who weren’t discounting looked forward to our coming to their town.
- Sam Walton
There are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft.
- Bill Gates
You do not get what you want. You get what you negotiate.
- Harvey Mackay
It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.
- Steve Jobs
Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.
- Larry Page
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’m for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children?
- Steve Martin
Lady Nancy Astor: Winston, if you were my husband, I’d poison your tea. Churchill: Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.
- Winston Churchill
Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.
- Napoleon Hill
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
Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don’t approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.
- Bill Gates
We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft
- Bill Gates
If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can’t be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?
- Dale Carnegie
In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.
- Bill Gates
I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don’t believe in the whole thing of just using other people’s money. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not going to ask other people to invest in something if I’m not prepared to do so myself.
- Elon Musk
When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.
- Bill Gates
For Roosevelt knew, as all leaders know, that the royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.
- Dale Carnegie
We can never own property (because of property taxes) we can just control it (by renting it from the government by paying taxes).
- Robert Kiyosaki
Today I will be a successful sales professional, and I will learn something today that will make me even more professional tomorrow.
- Zig Ziglar
The plot is certainly sensational, but it hardly represents what actually happened. It is difficult to believe that the European emigrants by whom America has been populated took away with them all the virtues and left behind them all the vices of the races from which they had sprung; or that a few generations of residence on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to create an order of beings definitely superior in morals, in culture, and in humanity to their prototypes in Europe. The American.
- Winston Churchill
Make a point to continually search for a better way of doing things, even when things are going well, to ensure that a better alternative has not been overlooked and to keep your creative talents in practice.
- John C. Maxwell
Your faith is very important. I have done the math, and you are going to be dead a whole lot longer that you will be alive.
- Zig Ziglar
The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.
- Anthony Robbins
Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted. It’s more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted.
- Bill Gates
I think when I was young, let’s call it high school, and even before that, I just loved comedy, and I loved comedians. I grew up watching Laurel and Hardy. That’s really a long time ago. I loved Jerry Lewis. I just loved comedians.
- Steve Martin
Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.
- Bill Gates
The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.
- Andrew Carnegie
The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure, but to build one that is worthy of enduring.
- Jim Collins
In philosophy, politics, and business, too, arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.
- Peter Thiel
When you acknowledge God, He will go before you and make the crooked places straight.
- Joel Olsteen
A great business has to have a conscience. You have to know who you are and who you are not.
- Howard Schultz
I already told you that it is 100% outside buyers.
- Lee Shau Kee
