Notable Quotables

Consider scheduling a daily meeting with your new executive. Require them to bring a comprehensive set of questions about everything they heard that day but did not completely understand.

- Ben Horowitz

In the 1960s, if you introduced a new product to America, 90% of the people who viewed it for the first time believed in the corporate promise. Then 40 years later if you performed the same exercise, less than 10% of the public believed it was true. The fracturing of trust is based on the fact that the consumer has been let down.

- Howard Schultz

Wild Turkey whiskey and Philip Morris cigarettes are essential to the maintenance of human life!

- Herb Kelleher

I had a disc giving me a lot of trouble, and I had four surgeries. Then I had a staph infection, so they had to open me up five times in four months… It was in the bottom of my back, the same incision. They should have put a zipper on it.

- Stephen Wynn

You spend so much time in the world of virtual that the actual – which nothing is more actual than stand-up – it’s a painful experience for the audience, and the comedian a lot of time – we miss that.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn’t have that kind of personality, and it’s a terrifying thing to say.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

- Oscar Wilde

I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn’t turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book.

- Steve Martin

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage.

- Ben Horowitz

It’s absolutely true that unless you can instill discipline upon yourself, you will never be able to lead others.

- Zig Ziglar

Slow Dance: Have you ever watched kids, On a merry-go-round? Or listened to the rain, Slapping on the ground? Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight? Or gazed at the sun into the fading night? You better slow down. Don’t dance too fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. Do you run through each day, On the fly? When you ask: How are you? Do you hear the reply? When the day is done, do you lie in your bed, With the next hundred chores, Running through your head? You’d better slow down, Don’t dance too fast. Time is short, The music won’t last. Ever told your child we’ll do it tomorrow? And in your haste, Not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch, Let a good friendship die, Cause you never had time, To call and say Hi? You’d better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. When you run so fast to get somewhere, You miss half the fun of getting there. When you worry and hurry through your day, It is like an unopened gift thrown away. Life is not a race. Do take it slower. Hear the music, Before the song is over.

- Timothy Ferriss

You are safer here tonight than you would be on the streets of any other city in the world.

- Michael Bloomberg

People of excellence go the extra mile to do what’s right.

- Joel Olsteen

Hope is the power that gives a person the confidence to step out and try.

- Zig Ziglar

During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”

- Ben Horowitz

You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on… So it’s a fixer-upper of a planet.

- Elon Musk

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.

- Steve Jobs

I learned this early on in the variety business: You’ve got to give folks responsibility, you’ve got to trust them, and then you’ve got to check on them.

- Sam Walton

He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass.

- Ray Dalio

Conformity no longer leads to comfort. But the good news is that creativity is scarce, and more valuable than ever. So is choosing to do something unpredictable and brave: make art. Being an artist isn’t a genetic disposition or a specific talent. It’s an attitude we can all adopt. It’s a hunger to seize new ground, make connections, and work without a map. If you do those things you’re an artist, no matter what it says on your business card.

- Seth Godin

The Italians live well. They have problems, like all countries, but they are well-dressed, the women are pretty.

- Francois Pinault

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

I believe great people to be those who know how they got where they are, and what they need to do to get where they’re going. Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives. Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future, in the present. They compare what they’ve done with what they intended to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference.

- Michael Gerber

In a litigation-happy society, clear agreements often prevent small disagreements from becoming big ones.

- Harvey Mackay

Hay dos errores que podemos cometer en el camino hacia la verdad. No recorrer todo el camino, y no empezar.

- Siddhartha Gautama

One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.

- Richard Branson

A penguin cannot become a giraffe, so just be the best penguin you can be.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.

- Seth Godin

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

- Confucius

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren’t thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about – they weren’t putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

- Jeff Bezos

[On a company founder.] A founder is not a job, it’s a role, it’s an attitude. And it’s something that can happen again, and again, and again. In fact it has to happen, again and again and again. Otherwise we would not move forward.

- Jack Dorsey

Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

Steve Jobs’ ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.

- Bill Gates

Most fears of rejection rest on the desire for approval from other people. Don’t base your self-esteem on their opinions.

- Harvey Mackay

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent….

- Thomas Edison

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

You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.

- Elon Musk

Uber is efficiency with elegance on top. That’s why I buy an iPhone instead of an average cell phone, why I go to a nice restaurant and pay a little bit more. It’s for the experience.

- Travis Kalanick

Be more splendid, more extraordinary. Use every moment to fill yourself up.

- Oprah Winfrey

Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.

- Seth Godin

In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.

- Bill Gates

Computing shows up in many different ways. You have computing that you wear, computing that you carry. What you think of as the traditional PC market has a long tail of usage, particularly in the commercial world, but also in consumer.

- Michael Dell

You don’t make spending decisions, investment decisions, hiring decisions, or whether-you’re-going-to-look-for-a-job decisions when you don’t know what’s going to happen.

- Michael Bloomberg

McDonald’s is a people business, and that smile on that counter girl’s face when she takes your order is a vital part of our image.

- Ray Kroc

The Curveball. This approach appeals to the media’s innate curiosity. Whereas a fastball stresses logic over emotion, the curveball stresses emotion over logic.

- Michael Levine

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.

- Thomas Edison

Apple has always leveraged technologies that the PC industry has driven to critical mass – the bus structures, the graphics cards, the peripherals, the connection networks, things like that – so they’re kind of in the PC ecosystem and kind of not.

- Bill Gates

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

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

- Joel Olsteen

the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19

- James C. Collins

Consumers are spontaneous and if you can catch their attention, that’s going to increase the chance that they will look at your product.

- Jack Taylor

Profit and growth are stimulated primarily by customer loyalty. Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers. Value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees.

- Putting the Service-Profit Chain To Work - Ja

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

People shouldn’t have to spend a lot of money to get high-quality clothing.

- Tadashi Yanai

If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.

- Dale Carnegie

In between personal sales (salespeople obviously required) and traditional advertising (no salespeople required) there is a dead zone.

- Peter Thiel

War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war:

- Peter Thiel

Its never too late…to start heading in the right direction.

- Seth Godin

If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.

- Dave Ramsey

One of the things that school is for is to teach our children to understand and relish the idea of intellectualism, to develop into something more than a purpose-driven tool for the industrial state.

- Seth Godin

You have to keep your goal in mind and never lose sight of it. I envisioned myself winning the heavyweight title for ten years before I actually captured it. If you’re not driven to do your best, you’ll never reach the level of excellence in your life.

- George Foreman

The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble…We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table.

- Warren Buffett

Strive to make every person feel special. After all, every person you meet is made in the image of God.

- Joel Olsteen

And I keep saying, whether you like the president or not, everybody has to pull together and help the president because, as the president goes, so goes the country, as the country goes, so goes your job, your ability to feed your family, your government.

- Michael Bloomberg

It is possible to become world-class, enter the top 5% of performers in the world, in almost any subject within 6-12 months, or even 6-12 weeks.

- Timothy Ferriss

It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.

- Ben Horowitz

In Russia, or anywhere, people don’t like rich people. Yeah, OK, I have money, but the question is how I use it. It’s not easy, believe me; it’s not easy.

- Viktor Vekselberg

I think it is a sad day for the company and we are going to miss him. But, typically of him, he has planned his own succession immaculately. We will have a dinner and a nice party for him.

- Simon Wolfson

When I was at Kingsoft, I was under pressure and worked hard, but the results were not satisfactory.

- Lei Jun

To me there is no picture so beautiful as smiling, bright-eyed, happy children; no music so sweet as their clear and ringing laughter.

- P.T. Barnum

It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.

- Winston Churchill

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

- Peter Thiel

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

- Peter Thiel

And it turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.

- Seth Godin

HE RICH DON’T WORK FOR MONEY The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.

- Robert Kiyosaki

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

- Elon Musk

Well, you have the public not wanting any new spending, you have the Republicans not wanting any new taxes, you have the Democrats not wanting any new spending cuts, you have the markets not wanting any new borrowing, and you have the economists wanting all of the above. And that leads to paralysis.

- Michael Bloomberg

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

It’s true that I run a multi-national group but I have no interests in India. So please tell me, what should my identity be?

- Lakshmi Mittal

Comprehensive after-sale property management service is as important as building quality.

- Lee Shau Kee

You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth.

- Winston Churchill

I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

- Elon Musk

And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.

- Reid Hoffman

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

The purpose of process is communication. If there are five people in your company, you don’t need process, because you can just talk to each other.

- Ben Horowitz

The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.

- Walt Disney

Experience has taught me,” says Sam Wood, that it is safest to drop, as quickly as possible, people who pretend to be what they aren’t.

- Dale Carnegie

EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

- Peter Thiel

The employees who share innovative ideas may also be the folks who have some hidden talents that would help incorporate their suggestions.

- Harvey Mackay

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

- Jeff Bezos

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