Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.
- Phil Knight
Notable Quotables
Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.
- Elon Musk
What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!
- Larry Page
Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.
- Sam Walton
From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional.
- Peter Thiel
I’ve always believed that there are funny people everywhere, but they’re just not comedians. In fact, some of my best comedic inspirations were not professional entertainers.
- Steve Martin
No matter how many times people say it – ‘Oh, I’m just writing this for myself’ ‘Oh, I’m just doing this for myself’ – nobody’s doing it for themselves! You’re doing it for an audience. So whether I’m performing or writing a book or playing music, it’s definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way, definitely.
- Steve Martin
The successful leader must be in sympathy with his followers. Moreover, he must understand them and their problems.
- Napoleon Hill
Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse.
- Timothy Ferriss
THE MOST CONTENTIOUS question in business is whether success comes from luck or skill.
- Peter Thiel
True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
- Helen Keller
If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.
- Warren Buffett
El séptimo imperativo • El primer imperativo es estar al tanto; al tanto del mercado, de las oportunidades y de quién eres. • El segundo imperativo es estar preparados, para entender lo que sucede a tu alrededor. • El tercer imperativo es estar conectado, para que confíen en ti. • El cuarto imperativo es ser coherente, para que el sistema sepa qué esperar de ti. • El quinto imperativo es crear un valor, para tener algo que vender. • El sexto imperativo es ser productivo, para ofrecer un buen precio. No obstante, es posible que hagas todas estas cosas y aun así fracases. Un empleo no es suficiente, ni una fábrica, ni una industria. Solían serlo, pero ya no lo son. El mundo está cambiando muy rápido, y sin la chispa de la iniciativa te limitas a reaccionar ante lo que te rodea. Asimismo, sin la capacidad de incitar y experimentar estás estancado, a la deriva, esperando el empujón…
- Seth Godin
Wild Turkey whiskey and Philip Morris cigarettes are essential to the maintenance of human life!
- Herb Kelleher
The people’s ability to achieve is determined by their leader’s ability to empower.
- Napoleon Hill
It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
- Warren Buffett
I know Bo Xilai well. But our relationship was based on our work, we didn’t have a personal relationship.
- Wang Jianlin
If one dream dies, dream another dream. If you get knocked down, get back up and go again.
- Joel Olsteen
I’ve actually not read any books on time management.
- Elon Musk
If you cannot save money, then the seeds of greatness are not in you.
- Brian Tracy
The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,
- Peter Thiel
Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn’t willing to.
- Bill Gates
To be awake is to be fully present, no noise, just you and God. Most of us only have seconds of full consciousness. To live in a state of Samadhi – that’s what we’re here for.
- Russell Simmons
Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle…
- Napoleon Hill
Arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.
- Peter Thiel
You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in – in 2007, we just didn’t know it was uncertain. It was – uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn’t know it.
- Warren Buffett
A valuable business must start by finding a niche and dominating a small market.
- Peter Thiel
I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Learning to be a CEO through classroom training would be like learning to be an NFL quarterback through classroom training.
- Ben Horowitz
I will everyday as just a blow from my blade against a mighty oak…strike until it falls quote.
- Og Mandino
Poke the box How do computer programmers learn their art? Is there a step-by-step process that guarantees you’ll get good? All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works. The box might be a computer or it might be a market or it might be a customer or it might be your boss. It’s a puzzle, one that can be solved in only one way—by poking.
- Seth Godin
I’m not a big believer in trying to jam stuff down somebody’s throat: ‘You’re going to do it my way.’ I’d rather show by example and live my life and have people say, ‘You know what, I want to live like Joel has. He’s got peace and joy, and he seems content.’
- Joel Olsteen
I’m anti-tax, but I’m pro-carbon tax.
- Elon Musk
I guarantee you it will not be anyone from the outside.
- Jack Welch
If we can put a man on the moon, we can make pantyhose comfortable.
- Sara Blakely
In tennis, you strike a ball just after the rebound for the fastest return. It’s the same with investment.
- Masayoshi Son
Hmm. In the end, cowards are those who follow the dark side.
- Yoda
I can’t afford to be indifferent to politics, but I don’t have personal ambitions.
- Vagit Alekperov
But Governments and peoples do not always take rational decisions. Sometimes they take mad decisions, or one set of people get control who compel all others to obey and aid them in folly.
- Winston Churchill
Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.
- Napoleon Hill
MAY 31 The Power of Your Words Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit. PROVERBS 18:21 NASB OUR WORDS have tremendous power and are similar to seeds. By speaking them aloud, they are planted in our subconscious minds, take root, grow, and produce fruit of the same kind. Whether we speak positive or negative words, we will reap exactly what we sow. That’s why we need to be extremely careful what we think and say. The Bible compares the tongue to the small rudder of a huge ship, which controls the ship’s direction (see James 3:4). Similarly, your tongue will control the direction of your life. You create an environment for either good or evil with your words, and if you’re always murmuring, complaining, and talking about how bad life is treating you, you’re going to live in a pretty miserable world. Use your words to change your negative situations and fill them with life.
- Joel Olsteen
We’ll make cloud computing announcements because, you know, if orange is the new pink, we’ll make orange blouses. I mean, I’m not gonna fight this thing … well, maybe we’ll do an ad. Uh, I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing, other than market … you know, change the wording on some of our ads.
- Larry Ellison
The Group sold an attributable HK$3,434.6 million worth of properties in Hong Kong as compared with HK$6,810.9 million for the year before. In light of the then cautious market sentiment, the Group decided to defer the launch of a few new developments…
- Lee Shau Kee
This is not to imply that we agree on everything because we don’t. Nor does it mean there are no arguments because there are. It does mean there is never any maliciousness or bitterness in our differences. It does mean each is willing to admit a mistake and apologize if he or she is wrong. It means we enjoy each other and love each other enough to put the other one first. We never part company or go to sleep without settling our differences and reaffirming our love. We’re both grateful that God has let us spend enough years together to develop a relationship and discover what real love is all about. Our prayer is that God will permit us to have many more years together before we start our walk though eternity—together.
- Zig Ziglar
One who buys things to write them off for their business whether they need them or not and who borrows massive sums of money to buy frozen yogurt and cupcake franchises that cannot possibly generate enough money to produce a livable wage, much less anything approaching prosperity.
- Clay Clark
My organization, my colleagues and I, are paid to run hotels in good times and fair times. We’re professionals. That’s what we do. I don’t give a damn about the short-term market implications.
- Stephen Wynn
The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.
- Bill Gates
Alibaba is an ecosystem that helps small business to grow.
- Jack Ma
Successful heretics create their own religions….You can recognize the need for faith in your idea, you can find the tribe you need to support you, and yes, you can create a new religion around your faith. Steve Jobs did it on purpose at Apple and Phil Knight is famous for doing it at Nike.
- Seth Godin
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
In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.
- Ben Horowitz
You can make a positive out of the most negative if you work at it hard enough.
- Sam Walton
By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: ‘John, I’d love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I’ve got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said ‘no’ yesterday. Gotta run!
- Timothy Ferriss
Only men of character are trusted.
- Zig Ziglar
In periods of stress and grief, not only does your mind do funny things, you say things that surprise you.
- Phil Knight
I always say, ‘To have a big dream requires the same effort as having a small dream. Dream big!’
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
We live in an age where everything is based on the short term.
- Howard Schultz
If you are starting a business I believe it has to be your passion.
- David Robinson
During the epidemic period of SARS, the Group purchased large quantities of disinfectant materials for donation to the local communities.
- Lee Shau Kee
The bible says no man can take your joy. That means no person can make you live with a negative attitude. No circumstance, no adversity can force you to live in despair. As Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of wheelchair-bound President Franklin D. Roosevelt, often said, ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
- Joel Olsteen
In the U.S. there are many people willing to work on $9 per hour, which is causing Tasmania to lose its famous apple industry and Australia to import more and more of its fruit and food from lower cost countries. In fact, all over Australia there are warning signs of us killing or restricting our own industries.
- Gina Rinehart
To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organization for the job as well.
- Clayton M. Christensen
You can dramatize your ideas in business or in any other aspect of your life. It’s easy.
- Dale Carnegie
We saw that a thousand results weren’t necessarily as useful as 10 good ones.
- Sergey Brin
John, never lend money to your friends; it will spoil your friendships.
- John D. Rockefeller
I’m a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome. I don’t believe in equal outcome because unfortunately life’s not like that. It would be a pretty boring place if it was. But I really believe in equal opportunity. Equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great education.
- Steve Jobs
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.
- Oscar Wilde
There’s always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It’s long since passed that a typical person doesn’t leave footprints.
- Bill Gates
Motivation needs to be a part of your own life for you to be effective in conveying it to other people.
- Zig Ziglar
Will flash cards invade the disk drive makers’ core markets and supplant magnetic memory? If they do, what will happen to the disk drive makers? Will they stay atop their markets, catching this new technological wave? Or will they be driven out?
- Clayton M. Christensen
A good thing to remember is somebody’s got it a lot worse than we do.
- Joel Olsteen
The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively – I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook – it sounds trivial, but people matter.
- Reid Hoffman
The part of uranium that’s fissile – when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two – is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.
- Bill Gates
Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.
- Warren Buffett
His strategy would be to subjugate one part of the battlefield, consolidate his forces, then move briskly on to the next conquest. His victory over the Cleveland refiners would be the first but alos the most controversial compaign of his career.
- Ron Chernow
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.
- Winston Churchill
The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.
- Bill Gates
The craftsman and the artist say, “Here, I made this.” The workingman is asked to follow instructions.
- Seth Godin
If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.
- Elon Musk
You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.
- Dale Carnegie
Action is the real measure of intelligence.
- Napoleon Hill
Don’t treat your customers like a bunch of purses and wallets.
- Chris Brogan
In the context of body redesign, there are two fundamental MEDs to keep in mind: To remove stored fat → do the least necessary to trigger a fat-loss cascade of specific hormones. To add muscle in small or large quantities → do the least necessary to trigger local (specific muscles) and systemic (hormonal2) growth mechanisms.
- Timothy Ferriss
Disneyland is a show.
- Walt Disney
Even leaders with the best of intentions can have dumb ideas sometimes, and if you have good people around you, then hopefully they’ll stop you before you’ve done too much damage.
- David Novak
You may live or work around a bunch of weeds, but don’t let that stop you from blooming. Realize that your environment does not prevent you from being happy. Some people spend all their time trying to pull up all the weeds. Meanwhile, they miss much of their lives. Don’t worry about things you can’t change. You can’t change the traffic in the morning. You can’t fix everybody at work. You can’t make all your family members serve God. But you shouldn’t let that keep you from being happy. Bloom anyway and focus on the things that you can change. You can change your own attitude. You can choose to be happy right where you are.
- Joel Olsteen
At the end of the day you have to keep emotions away.
- Lakshmi Mittal
Ridiculous yachts and private planes and big limousines wont make people enjoy life more, and it sends out terrible messages to the people who work for them. It would be so much better if that money was spent in Africa and its about getting a balance.
- Richard Branson
A goal is a dream with a deadline.
- Napoleon Hill
I believe we are in at least a two-quarter slowdown.
- John Chambers
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
In the States, there’s ESPN3, and each country has different options, and other than premiere league football, there tends to be very little global content. And movie and TV rights are pretty broad content.
- Reed Hastings
My father had a series of blue-collar jobs and never made more than $20,000 a year. When I was seven, he got injured on a job. That was a very important point – because of the injury, he couldn’t walk, and the company he was working for did not pay him. There was no compensation. So there was no money and no food.
- Howard Schultz
By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.
- Timothy Ferriss
People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
- Timothy Ferriss
There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.
- Henry Ford
We’ve been trained to prefer being right to learning something, to prefer passing the test to making a difference, and most of all, to prefer fitting in with the right people, the people with economic power. Now it’s your turn to stand up and stand out.
- Seth Godin
You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.
- Jeff Bezos
My little girls are the most beautiful women in the world. I am a lucky, lucky man. I will spend every day making sure that they know this.
- Russell Simmons
