If you believe, as I do, that your employees truly are your most valuable asset, you will do whatever you can to help them do their jobs as well as possible.
- Harvey Mackay
Notable Quotables
When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren’t very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.
- Ben Horowitz
They want good stories. They aren’t paid to say, no. They’re paid to say yes to the right stories.
- Michael Levine
I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.
- Elon Musk
My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.
- Elon Musk
You are responsible for your life. If you’re sitting around waiting on somebody to save you, to fix you, to even help you, you are wasting your time. Only you have the power to move your life forward.
- Oprah Winfrey
To integrate the new information into your existing network, you need to do three things: prioritize, organize and follow up on your contacts. You will follow your own inclinations, preferences and criteria for accomplishing each of these tasks, but the end result of your efforts should always be to strengthen, extend and enhance the effectiveness of your network of contacts.
- Ivan Misner
The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.
- John D. Rockefeller
We do not need to teach students to embrace the status quo.
- Seth Godin
Failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. This way, it is about answering to yourself.
- Sara Blakely
There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.
- Bill Gates
A true entrepreneur is someone who seeks to profitably solve a problem that the world has in exchange for enough monetary compensation to achieve their dreams.
- Clay Clark
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
In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.
- Winston Churchill
One of the most powerful forms of communication that affects a business is one over which you have little control (after the conversation has already begun): The communication from your existing customers to your potential customers. At CASHFLOW Technologies, Inc. we attribute a large part of our success to our customers telling other people about us. The power of this word-of-mouth advertising is immeasurable.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The basic principle is I command, and my employees carry it out immediately.
- Wang Jianlin
Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.
- Winston Churchill
I think if you look at people, whether in business or government, who haven’t had any moral compass, who’ve just changed to say whatever they thought the popular thing was, in the end they’re losers.
- Michael Bloomberg
Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.
- Winston Churchill
If you wake up deciding what you want to give versus what you’re going to get, you become a more successful person. In other words, if you want to make money, you have to help someone else make money.
- Russell Simmons
All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.
- Peter Thiel
Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.
- Napoleon Hill
By becoming interested in the cause, we are less likely to dislike the effect.
- Dale Carnegie
99.5 percent of the people that walk around and say they are a social media expert or guru are clowns. We are going to live through a devastating social media bubble.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.
- Peter Drucker
There’s never been a doctor who served many patients who, despite their best efforts, did not lose some of them to death. But they understood that was part of life itself.
- Zig Ziglar
One piece of advice that always stuck in my mind is that people should be respected and trusted as people, not because of their position or title.
- Herb Kelleher
Better to be called a cult—or even a mafia
- Peter Thiel
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
- Herbert Simon
It doesn’t matter who likes you or doesn’t like you, all that matters is that God likes you. He accepts you, he approves of you.
- Joel Olsteen
The future of advertising is the Internet.
- Bill Gates
Other people do not determine your potential.
- Joel Olsteen
A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.
- Jeff Bezos
Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.
- Henry Ford
It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.
- Jeff Bezos
Yes, I think it’s okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It’s okay to say to them, “You’re not going where I need to go, and there’s no way I’m going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I’m heading off. I’m betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.
- Seth Godin
Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds.
- Zig Ziglar
Art is what we call…the thing an artist does. It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the …eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.
- Seth Godin
I’m a big supporter of President Obama.
- Russell Simmons
Most salespeople won’t stop talking long enough to let the Buyer make a decision.
- Jerry Vass
What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Thinking back to old-time computer programming in the days before programming languages supported internationalization, we used to have to “internationalize” our code. We called this internationalization process “I18N” for short (localization was L10N), which meant I followed by eighteen letters followed by N.
- Ben Horowitz
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
- Winston Churchill
A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.
- George Soros
Over three hundred years ago Galileo said: You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.
- Dale Carnegie
Whatever the trend in exchange rates or whatever the external factors, a manufacturing company is always faced with the mission of transforming itself into a company that can produce higher value-added to absorb the increase in the cost of living in the country it’s operating in.
- Fujio Mitarai
You can be happy where you are.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Our goal is very simply to become the desktop for e-businesses.
- Larry Ellison
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
- Ben Horowitz
Customers today are strongly value oriented. But just what does that mean? Customers tell us that value means the results they receive in relation to the total costs (both the price and other costs to customers incurred in acquiring the service).
- Gary W. Lo
A story is at its best when it’s not intrusive, when it brings value to a platform’s consumers, and when it fits in as a natural step along the customer’s path to making a purchase.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The prevailing low mortgage rate, reasonable affordability and the low completion volumes for private-residential units in the coming few years should lend support to the local residential property market.
- Lee Shau Kee
I’ve viewed myself as slightly above average in talent. And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic.
- Will Smith
I encourage all my key people to bring their mobiles when they travel.
- Raymond Kwok
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
Networking is one of the most valuable uses of your time in terms of return—and not just in monetary terms.
- Business Insider.com
Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.
- Seth Godin
There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.
- Andrew Carnegie
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
Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace: “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.
- Michael Gerber
People are always coming up to me and saying, ‘I heard your dad’s speech, and it’s really great.’ And they’ll mention some place I didn’t even know my dad was going to.
- Bill Gates
No effort has been spared in ensuring the best designs for all our projects.
- Lee Shau Kee
The beauty of this deal is bringing a clinical expertise. Medco had developed therapeutic resource centers, where they got their pharmacist to have specialties in things like diabetes, heart problems and asthma. Express Scripts took a different approach. We tried to understand why people do what they do with behavioral economics, which is: What drives human behaviors? What drives people to do what they did? By combining those two pieces, we get that much stronger.
- George Paz
President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy.
- Harold Hamm
In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
- Harry Truman
With the casino and the beds, our passengers will have at least two ways to get lucky on one of our flights.
- Richard Branson
You can win more friends with your ears than with your mouth. People who feel like they’re being listened to feel accepted and appreciated. They feel like they’re being taken seriously and what they say really matters.
- Harvey Mackay
Unless you choose to do great things with it, it makes no difference how much you are rewarded, or how much power you have.
- Oprah Winfrey
If you look at the purported dangers of salt or fat, there is no consensus of support in scientific literature. So I would ask first: ‘Is it possible to have an informed government that actually follows the science?’ From what I’ve seen, it’s not likely.
- Timothy Ferriss
If the broadcasters were to win on their claims, they’d outlaw the DVR.
- Charles Ergen
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
- Mark Twain
Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you.
- James C. Collins
A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
- Henry Ford
Great and good are seldom the same man.
- Winston Churchill
Seeds of discouragement cannot take root in a grateful heart.
- Joel Olsteen
Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.
- Winston Churchill
Money has always been in politics. And I’m not sure you’d want money to be completely out of politics.
- Bill Gates
For any business to grow, individuals must be accountable for each of the systems, and a general overall director must be in charge of making sure all the systems operate at the highest capacity.
- Robert Kiyosaki
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.
- Dale Carnegie
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln
We do not covet anything from any nation except their respect.
- Winston Churchill
I’m not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I’m doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.
- George Soros
To achieve stable growth, an enterprise must live up to its conviction.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The jet stream is a very strong force and pushing a balloon into it is like pushing up against a brick wall, but once we got into it, we found that, remarkably, the balloon went whatever speed the wind went.
- Richard Branson
I have been very fortunate to be successful in business, and I believe that it is right that people who have this type of wealth should give something back into society.
- Alisher Usmanov
It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.
- Robert Kiyosaki
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
- Seneca
The boy you trained, gone he is. Consumed by Darth Vader.
- Yoda
Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.
- Napoleon Hill
When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.
- Winston Churchill
Real change rarely comes from the front of the line. It happens from the middle or even the back. Real change happens when someone who cares steps up and takes what feels like a risk. People follow because they want to, not because you can order them to.
- Seth Godin
I didn’t used to wear a watch. Now I have a SPOT watch, which I wear all the time.
- Bill Gates
When you encourage others, you in the process are encouraged because you’re making a commitment and difference in that person’s life. Encouragement really does make a difference.
- Zig Ziglar
I remember one time I didn’t want to spend any money on motels so we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor of one of our guys’ houses. His furniture hadn’t gotten there yet.
- Sam Walton
Common Core is a big win for education.
- Bill Gates
Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started ‘Wine Library TV.’ They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The Arab League tells us to go in and take out Qaddafi. We’ve spent billions of dollars already with respect to the Arab League. Billions of dollars, because they told us to do it. Why aren’t they paying for it? They don’t like Qaddafi, Qaddafi’s been a terrible thorn in their side.
- Donald Trump
Dig your well before you’re thirsty.
- Seth Godin
A bunch of high-IQ people with the wrong kind of ambition won’t work.
- Ben Horowitz
