How we respond to the opportunities and challenges of the outside world now determines how much the outside world values us.
- Seth Godin
Notable Quotables
I’m constantly amazed that owners and managers of all businesses don’t train their people to call the person who pays by credit card by name. It definitely makes the customer feel good and will be a factor in bringing them back to your place of business.
- Zig Ziglar
I did not like the way I looked in a pair of white pants.
- Sara Blakely
A lot of psychological principles and even medical principles, you see them coming around to what the Bible said hundreds of years ago: a merry heart is good like a medicine.
- Joel Olsteen
Often people fail to start or complete a task because they don’t see any connection between what they’re doing and what they really want to accomplish in life.
- John C. Maxwell
Markets are designed to allow individuals to look after their private needs and to pursue profit. It’s really a great invention and I wouldn’t under-estimate the value of that, but they’re not designed to take care of social needs.
- George Soros
I was raised with ‘Laurel and Hardy’ and ‘I Love Lucy’ and Jerry Lewis, and I just loved it. And I had a friend in high school and we would just laugh all day and put on skits. You know, it’s the Andy Kaufman thing or the Marty Short thing where you’re performing in your bedroom for yourself.
- Steve Martin
Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to ‘gamble’ on an unknown.
- Zig Ziglar
Treat your life like a game.
- Ray Dalio
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
- Elon Musk
No one lives long enough to learn it all..
- Brian Tracy
An organization takes its cue from the person on top. I always told our business leaders their personal intensity determined their organization’s intensity….For me intensityh covers a lot of sings. If there’s one characteristic all winners share, it’s that they care more than anyone else. No detail is too small to sweat or too large to dream. Over the years I have looked for this characteristic in the leaders we selected. It doesn’t mean loud or flamboyant. It’s something that comes from deep inside. Great organizations can ignite passion….Leaders must have courage to kick ass and break glass.
- Jack Welch
Le Reve’ may be one of the three best pictures Pablo Picasso ever painted.
- Stephen Wynn
One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That’s why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.
- Ben Horowitz
Sometimes God gives instructions that go against conventional wisdom, such as treating people kindly when they’re hateful. Who really wants to do that? Instructions like that my not always make sense, so that’s why I need to trust and obey the One who inspired them.
- George Foreman
In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.
- Jeff Bezos
To me, job titles don’t matter. Everyone is in sales. It’s the only way we stay in business.
- Harvey Mackay
There are several styles of pitching, but all have two principles in common: they appeal personally to the individual being contacted, even if he or she is a stranger and they rely on logic to make a case.
- Michael Levine
If the broadcasters were to win on their claims, they’d outlaw the DVR.
- Charles Ergen
Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.
- Napoleon Hill
I can’t stress enough the essential nature of really hearing what someone has to say even if it is totally contradictory to your own beliefs, and I wish this was a lesson I only had to learn once.
- David Novak
Did you eat half an Oreo cookie? No problem. If you’re a 220-pound male, you just need to climb 27 flights of stairs to burn it off.
- Timothy Ferriss
Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.
- Jerry Seinfeld
When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.
- Bill Gates
To find the right things, we’ll need to go to the garden.
- Timothy Ferriss
Other people and things can stop you temporarily. You’re the only one who can do it permanently.
- Zig Ziglar
When you supervise something, it is one thing. When you are in the middle of something, there is a different pace of life.
- Vladimir Potanin
Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.
- Oprah Winfrey
The internet population is going up and up. I am confident that this will be a huge market.
- Robin Li
Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.
- Bill Gates
And then you take a look at Spaces, there is this great innovation that came out of nowhere. We have the number one blogging site in the world because of the innovation that’s there.
- Steve Ballmer
Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.
- Bill Gates
If it’s not meeting a need, turn it into a seed. Remember, we will reap what we sow. When you do good for other people, that’s when God is going to make sure that His abundant blessings overtake you.
- Joel Olsteen
The British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.
- Winston Churchill
And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.
- John D. Rockefeller
Don’t criticize them, they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.
- Dale Carnegie
It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested? Collin’s advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.
- James C. Collins
The way of the warrior: keep death in mind at all times. If a warrior keeps death in mind at all times and lives as though each day might be his last, he will conduct himself properly in all his actions.
- Principle of the Bushido
The people currently in charge have forgotten the first principle of an open society, namely that we may be wrong and that there has to be free discussion. That it’s possible to be opposed to the policies without being unpatriotic.
- George Soros
As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.
- Peter Thiel
This implies two very strange rules for VCs. First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. This is a scary rule, because it eliminates the vast majority of possible investments. (Even quite successful companies usually succeed on a more humble scale.) This leads to rule number two: because rule number one is so restrictive, there can’t be any other rules.
- Peter Thiel
The Law of the Garbage Truck,” was this: Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Believe me, you’ll be happier.
- Joel Olsteen
We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.
- Thomas Edison
Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
- Winston Churchill
The people of Southwest have always been my pride, my joy and my love. Their indomitable dedication and esprit de corps have taken Southwest from a three-airplane dream to a 500-airplane reality.
- Herb Kelleher
There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.
- Winston Churchill
No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.
- Winston Churchill
Play like you’re ten points behind in the final quarter. I’ve always heard this defined as operational cadence – creating a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm of doing business that drives the relentless pursuit of results. Whatever I’ve learned about creating a sense of urgency started when I worked for Howard Davis at Tracy Locke. He really knew how to push people. Everything had to be done yesterday. And I was one of the people who go pushed. Howard was a master of intimidation. Everyone knew if you didn’t give him what he wanted, he was going to find another way to get it, and if your weren’t part of the solution then you were part of the problem. The clients loved Howard because they knew he’d kill for them (and none of us wanted to be killed). It wasn’t always comfortable, but it taught me the value of constantly putting pressure on myself and the people who work for me. In corporate America, pressure is a way of life, so rather that resist it or merely accept it, you have to learn to use it as a personal motivator.
- David Novak
A good book can be both a window to the world and a mirror to one’s self. It is easier to build community and remain true to the brand when you have zealots instead of marketing mercaries.
- Radical Marketing
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
- Winston Churchill
Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract failure.
- Timothy Ferriss
Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.
- Walt Disney
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
It’s all a risk. Always. That’s not true, actually. The only exception: it’s a certainty that there’s risk. The safer you play your plans for the future, the riskier it actually is. That’s because the world is certainly, definitely, and more than possibly changing.
- Seth Godin
Bush’s war in Iraq has done untold damage to the United States. It has impaired our military power and undermined the morale of our armed forces. Our troops were trained to project overwhelming power. They were not trained for occupation duties.
- George Soros
Don’t be cocky. Don’t be flashy. There’s always someone better than you.
- Tony Hsieh
Whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh, students and researchers can watch remarkable video such as World War II newsreels and the story of Apollo 11 — the historic first landing on the Moon.
- Sergey Brin
Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.
- Winston Churchill
By the end of the war (the civil war) John D. Rockefeller had established the foundations of his personal and professional life and was set to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities beckoning him in postwar America. From this point forward, there would be no zigzags, or squandered energy, only a single-minded focus on objectives that would make him both the wonder and terror of American business.
- Ron Chernow
My training of cold-calling and everyone under the sun telling me no, and my keeping going, was a huge part of the first two years of Spanx.
- Sara Blakely
In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren’t management books out there that could help me.
- Ben Horowitz
We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers. That is my new battle cry. Live and breathe Starbucks the way our customers do.
- Howard Schultz
If you don’t see yourself as a winner, then you cannot perform as a winner.
- Zig Ziglar
She came up with what is now the Swoosh for $35 which is a pretty good bargain.
- Phil Knight
If you are a big company, a big website, and lots of users come to your website, you will have attacks, and you have to deal with that. It just cannot be a reason to take actions to exit certain markets.
- Robin Li
I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
- Thomas Edison
Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.
- Winston Churchill
The way to achieve happiness is to try for perfection that is impossible to achieve, and spend the rest of your life trying to achieve it.
- Winston Churchill
This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put
- Winston Churchill
Thomas Edison had only three months of schooling during his entire life. He did not lack education, neither did he die poor. Henry Ford had less than a sixth grade schooling but he has managed to do pretty well for himself financially.
- Napoleon Hill
If you look at space companies, they’ve failed either because they’ve had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.
- Elon Musk
There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth. Not going all the way, and not starting.
- Siddhartha Gautama
We’ll be watching as the storm approaches. If we see a service area is about to be hit by high winds, we will literally have crews loaded and sitting in trucks, ready to go.
- Ed Clark
You cannot tailor make your situation in life, but you can tailor make your attitudes to those situations.
- 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
Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.
- Rupert Murdoch
I’m much more concerned about America than the Democratic Party.
- Howard Schultz
I hate writing about personal stuff. I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.
- Elon Musk
Doing a mall is not only construction of the physical place, what’s important is the merchandising mix.
- Henry Sy
Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.
- Peter Thiel
When you come in to court as a plaintiff or as a defendant, it is terribly important that you look up at the bench and feel that that person represents you and will understand you, that that person is reflective of our community and of our society.
- Michael Bloomberg
The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself.
- Peter Thiel
Every enterprise is a learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levels—training and development that never stop.
- Peter Drucker
Backed by our conviction, we remain committed to investing wholeheartedly to improve the people’s living conditions, regardless of all uncertainties.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Remarkable visions and genuine insights are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths – whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it’s over. If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it’s unlikely to be worth the journey. Persist.
- Seth Godin
I DECLARE God’s dream for my life is coming to pass. It will not be stopped by people, disappointments, or adversities. God has solutions to every problem I will ever face already lined up. The right people and the right breaks are in my future. I will fulfill my destiny. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun together.
- Walt Disney
Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ we will fall, but ‘when.’ There are no exceptions.
- John C. Maxwell
The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.
- Andrew Carnegie
I believe luck is preparation meeting opportunity. If you hadn’t been prepared when the opportunity came along, you wouldn’t have been lucky
- Oprah Winfrey
Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable
- Peter Thiel
Rule No.1: Never lose money.Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.
- Warren Buffett
The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.
- Peter Thiel
One of [Bill] Bowerman’s more legendary innovations is the Waffle outsole, which he discovered by pouring rubber into a waffle iron.
- Phil Knight
Make your desires clear and reduce them to writing.
- Napoleon Hill
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
- Winston Churchill
I am a fifty-seven-year-old male, married with three children. About 70 percent of us earn 80 percent or more of our household’s income.
- Thomas J Stanley
My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. It was just, over the years it continued to grow.
- Joel Olsteen
I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.
- Joel Olsteen
