IN A NUTSHELL SIX WAYS TO MAKE PEOPLE LIKE YOU PRINCIPLE 1 Become genuinely interested in other people. PRINCIPLE 2 Smile. PRINCIPLE 3 Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. PRINCIPLE 4 Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. PRINCIPLE 5 Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. PRINCIPLE 6 Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.
- Dale Carnegie
Notable Quotables
At the start of any business, keeping the cash flowing in is the entrepreneur’s most IMPORTANT JOB.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.” Everyone around the table nodded assent. “Then,” continued Mr. Sloan, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.
- Peter Drucker
You can be happy where you are.
- Joel Olsteen
The most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.
- Ben Horowitz
My father worked all the time.
- Michael Bloomberg
As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot.
- Ray Kroc
If Vancouver did not succeed as Starbucks from ’87 on, our entire international business, which is now thousands of stores and a significant amount of growth and profit, may not have existed.
- Howard Schultz
For a while… to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don’t want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen… I don’t want to divide the very people I am trying to reach.
- Joel Olsteen
Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble
- Warren Buffett
If you look – look at – I mean, look at what’s going on with your gasoline prices. They’re going to go to $5, $6, $7 and we don’t have anybody in Washington that calls OPEC and says, ‘Fellas, it’s time. It’s over. You’re not going to do it anymore.’
- Donald Trump
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
Excellence isn’t achieved without inspiration and perspiration. You’ve got to have both.
- George Foreman
I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817–1862)
- Timothy Ferriss
The strange history of the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it. Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you.
- Peter Thiel
At its zenith Sears accounted for more than 2 percent of all retail sales in the United States. It pioneered several innovations critical to the success of today’s most admired retailers: for example, supply chain management, store brands, catalogue retailing, and credit card sales. The esteem in which Sears’ management was held shows in this 1964 excerpt from Fortune: “How did Sears do it? In a way, the most arresting aspect of its story is that there was no gimmick. Sears opened no big bag of tricks, shot off no skyrockets. Instead, it looked as though everybody in its organization simply did the right thing, easily and naturally. And their cumulative effect was to create an extraordinary powerhouse of a company.
- Clayton M. Christensen
We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn’t be in this business.
- Jeff Bezos
es it’s thinner, but I wanted storage. I don’t have broadband at home, and you can’t get great broadband connection in hotels, so I carry all my personal media in the iPad. So I was hoping Apple has a 256GB iPad. I was hoping for more storage so I could put every episode of Big Bang Theory on my iPad. So I emailed my wife and said ‘nope, I don’t want one of those.
- Steve Wozniak
Effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible.
- Jack Welch
Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.
- Walt Disney
[In February 2011] We’ve not done a lot of marketing whatsoever. A lot of it has just been word of mouth.
- Jack Dorsey
Motivation needs to be a part of your own life for you to be effective in conveying it to other people.
- Zig Ziglar
Policies are many, Principles are few, Policies will change, Principles never do.
- John C. Maxwell
Everything about my journey to get Spanx off the ground entailed me having to be a salesperson – from going to the hosiery mills to get a prototype made to calling Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. I had to position myself to get five minutes in the door with buyers.
- Sara Blakely
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart.
- Thomas J Watson
Entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.
- Peter Drucker
If you are a parent, you have probably already realized that your children are always watching what you do. And just as children watch their parents and emulate their behavior, so do employees who are watching their bosses.
- John C. Maxwell
Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market. That starts with asking yourself: what will the world look like 10 and 20 years from now, and how will my business fit in?
- Peter Thiel
I DECLARE that God has a great plan for my life. He is directing my steps. And even though I may not always understand how, I know my situation is not a surprise to God. He will work out every detail to my advantage. In His perfect timing, everything will turn out right. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?
- Rupert Murdoch
College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.
- Peter Thiel
Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.
- Peter Drucker
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
He will give you strength for every battle, wisdom for every decision, peace that passes understanding. God will vindicate you for the wrongs that have been done. He will pay you back for unfair situations. He promised He will not only bring your dreams to pass but He will give you even the secret desires of your heart. Dare to trust Him. Come back to that place of peace. Quit being worried, stressed out, wondering if it will happen. God has you in the palm of His hand. He has never once failed before, and the good news is He is not about to start now.
- Joel Olsteen
Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.
- Ben Horowitz
The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we’re not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.
- Elon Musk
If it’s a good idea, someone has already probably thought about it first.
- Jack Nadel
Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.
- Peter Thiel
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
- Jeff Bezos
There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.
- Jack Welch
Great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.
- Peter Thiel
It’s not how far you fall. But how high you bounce that counts.
- Zig Ziglar
Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.
- Bill Gates
To be a champion, you have to learn to handle stress and pressure. But if you’ve prepared mentally and physically, you don’t have to worry.
- Harvey Mackay
You can’t define what’s middle class, what is wealthy, what is poor.
- Michael Bloomberg
There is no business in America that would be prevented from taking results into account when making personnel decisions.
- Michael Bloomberg
People around the world, they want the authentic Starbucks experience.
- Howard Schultz
The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,
- Peter Thiel
A Carnegie or a Rockefeller or a James J. Hill or a Marshall Field accumulates a fortune through the applications of the same principles available to all of us, but we envy them and their wealth without ever thinking of studying their philosophy and applying it to ourselves. We look at a successful person in the hour of their triumph and wonder how they did it, but we overlook the importance of analyzing their methods. And we forget the price they had to pay in the careful, well-organized preparation that had to be made before they could reap the fruits of their efforts.
- Napoleon Hill
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
I’m in the shoe business. Look at these things. They’re called Tigers. I faked out the company. I’m the US distributor. Come with me.
- Phil Knight
I like the idea of putting your Christmas wish list up and letting people share it.
- Bill Gates
Success comes from doing the hard part. When the hard part is all you’ve got, you’re more likely to do it.And this is precisely why it’s difficult to focus. Because focusing means acknowledging that you just signed up for the hard part.
- Seth Godin
Pick a movement. Pick a revolution. And join it.
- Jack Dorsey
The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).
- Peter Thiel
I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.
- Elon Musk
When we began Starbucks, what I wanted to try to do was to create a set of values, guiding principles, and culture.
- Howard Schultz
My friend didn’t understand what it means to be in the world, to be present and aware.
- Seth Godin
Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
- Dale Carnegie
I have a calendar life that is complicated, so I use BusyCal and Google Calendar. I keep two different browsers open to avoid some confusion.
- Steve Wozniak
Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.
- P.T. Barnum
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
e liked to call them idiots for making it too expensive. Well, one megabyte of RAM back then cost 10,000 of today’s dollars. He made a cheap one — but what he did was he made a really weak, lousy computer, to tell you truth, in the Macintosh, and still at a fairly high price. He made it by cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there. It was a lousy product. Every time we improved the Macintosh, year by year by year, it got closer to what the Lisa had been.
- Steve Wozniak
Assetts put money in your pocket. Liabilities take money out of your pocket.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The hazards of imitative competition may partially explain why individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today.
- Peter Thiel
Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.
- Andrew Carnegie
When you’re green, your growing. When you’re ripe, you rot.
- Ray Kroc
I’ll trade glib for common sense any day.
- Stephen Wynn
You have a real chance to make an impact, but you have to do it in the first 90 days. Otherwise they’ll think it’s going to be business as usual.
- David Novak
Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.
- Dale Carnegie
Two metrics set the limits for effective distribution. The total net profit that you earn on average over the course of your relationship with a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV) must exceed the amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale—and the more it makes sense to spend it.
- Peter Thiel
No one can make you jealous, angry, vengeful, or greedy — unless you let him.
- Napoleon Hill
Friend, there’s no greater investment in life than in being a people builder. Relationships are more important than our accomplishments.
- Joel Olsteen
Do you ever worry’ asked Dale Carnegie, I replied: ‘No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?’
- Henry Ford
If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.
- Bill Gates
You can’t move people to action unless you first move them with emotion. The heart comes before the head…to lead yourself use your head, to lead others use your heart.
- John Maxwell
I’m a cynic about corporate democracy and boards.
- Carl Icahn
PRINCIPLE 1 The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. PRINCIPLE 2 Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, You’re wrong.” PRINCIPLE 3 If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. PRINCIPLE 4 Begin in a friendly way. PRINCIPLE 5 Get the other person saying yes, yes” immediately. PRINCIPLE 6 Let the other person do a great deal of the talking. PRINCIPLE 7 Let the other person feel that the idea.
- Dale Carnegie
The U.S. automotive industry has been selling cars the same way for over 100 years, and there are many laws in place to govern exactly how that is to be accomplished.
- Elon Musk
The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.
- Peter Drucker
To me, this is about preserving history and making it available to everyone
- Sergey Brin
Ahhh! Yoda’s little friend you seek!
- Yoda
People don’t want to embrace culture shifts because it’s not going to happen in the next 20 minutes.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.
- Ben Horowitz
God will not pour fresh, creative ideas and blessing into old attitudes.
- Joel Olsteen
I said a long time ago that Foursquare can make cities better. You have these augmented realities like Foursquare and Twitter and Facebook that provide these virtual nodes and instant feedback from anywhere, adding annotation around a physical places.
- Jack Dorsey
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.
- Winston Churchill
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.
- Henry Ford
I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.
- Jeff Bezos
The ability of a successful company to add functionality to its product has long been upheld.
- Bill Gates
I think our leadership team is a highly accountable leadership team.
- Steve Ballmer
The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.
- Peter Drucker
If we only have great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Economic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation.
- James C. Collins
The Chinese market is a very good expansion opportunity for us, and we will continue looking to buy stakes and make acquisitions.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad).
- Peter Thiel
If standard of living is your #1 objective, then quality of life almost never improves. But, if quality of life is your #1 objective, then standard of living improves.
- Zig Ziglar
I pay about a third in taxes, I give away about a third, and I follow the law.
- Ray Dalio
Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.
- Rupert Murdoch
People need to buy homes.
- Cheng Yu-tung
