The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
There are two kinds of pride, both good and bad. ‘Good pride’ represents our dignity and self-respect. ‘Bad pride’ is the deadly sin of superiority that reeks of conceit and arrogance.
- John C. Maxwell
The story drives the mission.
- Jim Cathcart
Nowhere are the benefits of closer economic ties more pronounced than in Mainland China and Hong Kong. The two places have their own advantages. One has the manpower, natural resources and manufacturing might, while the other has the management skills and marketing know-how.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Success doesn’t make you and failure doesn’t break you.
- Zig Ziglar
I’ve got to keep breathing. It’ll be my worst business mistake if I don’t.
- Steve Martin
Whenever you are speaking, both your passion for your business and your appearance will have a lasting impact on your audience.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
- Steve Jobs
There’s a sucker born every minute.
- P.T. Barnum
At the end, the acquisition of wealth is ignoble in the extreme. I assume that you save and long for wealth only as a means of enabling you the better to do some good in your day and generation.
- Andrew Carnegie
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
- William Arthur Ward
It’s paradoxical, but you want to identify the things that can kill you and engage them sooner. This is part of the metric behind fail fast. Of course, you’re not actually trying to fail; you want to succeed. But failing fast is much better than failing slowly, since it enables you to quickly to pivot, iterate, and redeploy capital. The one key mistake is that people tend to work first on the problems that they have the most confidence they can solve. In a good startup strategy you actually want to face death soonest because then you fail fast or get on a great path to success fast. Identify the hardest problems and try to solve those as soon as you can.
- Reid Hoffman
The funny thing is people won’t let me pay for things. I’ll be in a restaurant and the manager will say, ‘Oh nom it’s on the house.’
- Richard Branson
Care more than others think wise.
- Howard Schultz
Before you take on the media, you have to know something about The Pitch.
- Michael Levine
You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it.
- Oprah Winfrey
While the uncertainties that the economic climate holds are a challenge for all companies, we are confident that by drawing from the strengths of our people, as well as on our core values of quality, initiative, trust and creativity, we will maintain our focus and strategic direction.
- Cheng Yu-tung
One thing I’ve always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they’ll tell you, ‘We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.
- Bill Gates
The austerity policies for the mainland property market will remain intact in 2011.
- Lee Shau Kee
At the start of any business, keeping the cash flowing in is the entrepreneur’s most IMPORTANT JOB.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.
- Bill Gates
There’s plenty about God that I don’t understand and can’t explain. But I come back to my core belief that God is good, that He’s for us.
- Joel Olsteen
We appreciate size, but only if it is robust growth. Just to be big is not a target.
- Alexei Mordashov
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
- Warren Buffett
There is no such thing as a good tax.
- Winston Churchill
I believe in benevolent dictatorship provided I am the dictator.
- Richard Branson
Choose wise and Godly people to advise you.
- George Foreman
The memory of my mother will always be a blessing to me….
- Thomas Edison
Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.
- Peter Thiel
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
You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
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
I like all kinds of music. I listen to Abigail Washburn, the Punch Brothers, and Marc Johnson, the great clawhammer player. I also listen a lot to Sirius Radio, there’s a lot of bluegrass there.
- Steve Martin
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
Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
- Elon Musk
There is no elevator to success…you have to take the stairs.
- Zig Ziglar
A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast. Good news travels slow.
- Ben Horowitz
When you have one million dollars, you’re a lucky person. When you have 10 million dollars, you’ve got trouble, a lot of headaches. When you have more than one billion dollars, or a hundred million dollars, that’s a responsibility you have – it’s the trust of people on you, because people believe you can spend money better than the others.
- Jack Ma
Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes – and most fools do – but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one’s mistakes.
- Dale Carnegie
My first account was Neiman Marcus. I cold-called them just like I had cold-called businesses when I was selling fax machines for seven years.
- Sara Blakely
Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game, because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win. Setting your own standards–and living up to them–is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put into it.
- Seth Godin
There are two types of people in the world. One type is known as leaders and the other as followers. Decide at the outset whether you intend to become a leader in your chose calling or remain a follower. The difference in compensation is vast. The follwer cannot reasonably expect the compensation to which a leader is entitled, although many followers make the mistake of expecting such pay.
- Napoleon Hill
Whenever you have multiple devices including multiple PCs that you want to share information with, it’s always been a bit complicated.
- Bill Gates
Uncontrolled Desire For Something For Nothing.
- Napoleon Hill
About 80% of our locations are second-generation. In other words, the building used to be, say, a Wal-Mart that moved out to become a Super Wal-Mart, or a Kmart that closed. It seems that such a site becomes available almost every year in every city.
- David Green
I’m not a businessman — I’m a business, man.
- Jay-Z
I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I’ve got kids and responsibilities, so I can’t be my own test pilot. That wouldn’t be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it’s a sensible thing to do.
- Elon Musk
Only by believing in and looking for secrets could you see beyond the convention to an opportunity hidden in plain sight.
- Peter Thiel
Opening new stores outside of Japan is important, but training our employees is even more important.
- Tadashi Yanai
Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
- Steve Jobs
Why don’t you start believing that no matter what you have or haven’t done, that your best days are still out in front of you.
- Joel Olsteen
Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
- Harry Truman
People are fond of using the its not what you know, its who you know adage as an excuse for inaction, as if all successful people are born with powerful friends. Nonsense.
- Timothy Ferriss
It turns out that all Netflix streaming peak on Saturday night can fit inside a single fiber optic, which is the size of one human hair.
- Reed Hastings
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
- Peter Drucker
If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.
- Peter Thiel
It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.
- John D. Rockefeller
Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.
- P.T. Barnum
You must focus on WIN. What’s important now.
- Lee Cockerell
A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.
- Ralph Lauren
People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete – the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.
- Peter Drucker
(1) Define a to-do list and (2) define a not-to-do list. In general terms, there are but two questions:
- Timothy Ferriss
Casino gambling is colorful and dramatic and theatrical.
- Stephen Wynn
The essential thing to know about the Dip is that it’s there. Knowing that you’re facing a Dip is the first step in getting through it.
- Seth Godin
Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
- Bill Gates
Anyone who thinks my story is anywhere near over is sadly mistaken.
- Donald Trump
I have thought about some kind of musical involving my music. That would be kind of interesting. I have thought of it in that way, as a creator of something, not so much a performer. So that’s in my head.
- Steve Martin
Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.What makes someone an artist? I don’t think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren’t artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.That’s why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That’s why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He’s an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn’t care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it’s important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does.Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
- Seth Godin
Policies are many, Principles are few, Policies will change, Principles never do.
- John C. Maxwell
To my mind the old masters are not art, their value is in their scarcity.
- Thomas Edison
Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn’t do with anything else, we just have to do it.
- Mark Zuckerberg
An attributable HK$9,892 million worth of properties in Hong Kong was sold, an increase of 25% as compared with HK$7,895 million for the year before.
- Lee Shau Kee
There’s no single company in the whole world that has a big-scale production base and at the same time has screening and distribution channels. Wanda Group is the first one in the world.
- Wang Jianlin
The better at communicating you are, and the more people you communicate to, the better your cash flow will be.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Since Henry Ford. It is changing the way every idea is handled, every product is created, every person interacts. It’s not going to be willing to make a detour around your gig, it’s not going to be interested in giving you a permanent sinecure. No, the revolution doesn’t care.
- Seth Godin
As a group, we feel that our daughters are financially handicapped in comparison to our sons. Men seem to make much more money even within the same occupational categories. That is why most of us would not hesitate to share some of our wealth with our daughters. Our sons, and men in general, have the deck of economic cards stacked in their favor. They should not need subsidies from their parents.
- Thomas J Stanley
Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.
- Steve Jobs
A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
- Peter Thiel
One has to live with the fact that some corporate decisions are going to be wrong. As long as most of the decisions are right.
- Michael Otto
I loved the work – and that’s an important point: To succeed in retail, you have to love it. The process of bringing items in, displaying them attractively, and seeing them miraculously change into actual cash in the drawer has to gt your blood racing. You can triple the sale of an item just by how and where you display it.
- David Green
Time – the one asset none of us are ever gonna get more of.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
People who smile tend to manage, teach and sell more effectively, and to raise happier children.
- Dale Carnegie
Be honest, always.
- Jack Dorsey
That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity. —BERYL MARKHAM, West with the Night1
- James C. Collins
We live in a culture that relishes tearing others down. It’s ultimately more fulfilling, though, to help people reach their goals. Instead of feeling jealous, remember: If God did it for them, He can do it for you.
- Joel Olsteen
By June this year, the [Henderson] Group had sold approximately 9,500 residential units totally around HK$21 billion in aggregate value.
- Lee Shau Kee
The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged in the work.
- Peter Drucker
All of us profit from being corrected – if we’re corrected in a positive way.
- Sam Walton
Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.
- Dale Carnegie
There is a certain amount of dissatisfaction that goes with knowing your time, talent and abilities are not being properly used.
- Zig Ziglar
The man who wavers in his decisions, shows that he is not sure of himself. He cannot lead others successfully.
- Napoleon Hill
If failure is not an option, then neither is success.
- Seth Godin
I know something about how to build constituencies in an independent way.
- Michael Bloomberg
Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.
- Bill Gates
Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually.
- George Soros
I kicked but I also hugged.
- Jack Welch
Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.
- Warren Buffett
Today the financial market is no good, but the money is there.
- Jack Ma
People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonald’s? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly.
- Ben Horowitz
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
- Winston Churchill
