Notable Quotables

The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.

- Napoleon Hill

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

- Elon Musk

There is always room for those who can be relied upon to delivery the goods when they say they will.

- Napoleon Hill

With the addition of these volumes, our Gulf Coast region is off to a good start for 2006 in its effort to grow its production. Combined, all regions are now showing growth in both production and reserves which is very attractive, especially considering the organic strategy on which we have predominately focused.

- Dan Dinges

To do what you wanna do, to leave a mark – in a way that you think is important and lasting – that’s a life well-lived.

- Laurene Powell Jobs

The greatest business people I’ve met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost.

- Michael Gerber

I was dyslexic, I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. I certainly would have failed IQ tests. And it was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. And if I – if I’m not interested in something, I don’t grasp it.

- Richard Branson

Enduring great companies don’t exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.

- James C. Collins

I learned about why startups should train their people when I worked at Netscape. People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense.

- Ben Horowitz

Entrepreneurs are always biased to understate the scale of competition, but that is the biggest mistake a startup can make.

- Peter Thiel

I’m not in business to make money for the other guy. I’m in the business to make money for myself.

- Sheldon Adelson

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.

- Seth Godin

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

- Michael Bloomberg

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

There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, ‘The government’s corrupt,’ and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.

- Bill Gates

The record results for the third quarter once again demonstrate the ability of GE’s diverse mix of leading global businesses to deliver top-line growth, increased margins and strong cash generation.

- Jack Welch

I see tremendous imbalance in the world. A very uneven playing field, which has gotten tilted very badly. I consider it unstable. At the same time, I don’t exactly see what is going to reverse it.

- George Soros

Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.

- Bill Gates

If you want your life to be more rewarding, you have to change the way you think.

- Oprah Winfrey

Most good ideas are already out there, and to learn about them, all you have to do is ask the right people.

- David Novak

No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.

- Jack Welch

I think my father is nearly perfect. I think he’s quite handsome, except a bit fat.

- Gina Rinehart

The body is a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants.

- Thomas Edison

I don’t have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless.

- Thomas Edison

We’ve announced an Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, a bunch of low-cost commodity servers running Linux, integrated in our case, with InfiniBand – connected with InfiniBand vs. the traditional Ethernet.

- Larry Ellison

We believe our growth rate indicates that Cisco continues to gain market share against our traditional competitors in most product sectors.

- John Chambers

If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was ‘satisfactory,’ I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?

- Bill Gates

Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.

- James C. Collins

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

I had a terrible time hiring rich people. It sounds funny, but the problem is when things go wrong they can ask, ‘Why am I doing this?’ You don’t ever want anybody asking that question. You want them to say, ‘I know why I’m doing it, I need the money, let’s go’ or whatever it is that draws them.

- Ben Horowitz

Every day were saying, ‘How can we keep this customer happy?’ How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don’t, somebody else will.

- Bill Gates

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

I think that God gives you your own will and choices. I don’t believe that we’re supposed to drag ourselves through life defeated and not see God’s blessings. But you have to make the right choices and follow that still, small voice within you. Because I think that’s how God leads us.

- Joel Olsteen

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

- Winston Churchill

Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor. At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, ‘Goodbye, Daddy!’ and I frowned, and said in reply, ‘Hold your shoulders back!’ Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive – and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father! Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. ‘What is it you want?’ I snapped. You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs. Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding – this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years. And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed! It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: ‘He is nothing but a boy – a little boy!’ I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much. Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. ‘To know all is to forgive all.

- Dale Carnegie

You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.

- Andrew Carnegie

If you believe in quality, you can’t just tell everybody We believe in quality! You’ve got to pay bonuses based on quality. You’ve got to let everyone in the organization know that they are being judged on quality.

- Jack Welch

If you want to spend time saying this is cool, you’re going to get your ass kicked.

- Phil Knight

If you don’t have public hangings for bad culture in a company, if you don’t take people out and let them say, they went home to spend more time with the family. It’s crazy.

- Jack Welch

It’s not Pinterest where people are putting up pins. You’re changing the way cities work, and that’s fundamentally a third rail. We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an as—hole named Taxi.

- Travis Kalanick

I will not lose, for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned so it evens up for me.

- Jay-Z

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

- Jeff Bezos

Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.

- Napoleon Hill

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn’t get bigger or heavier.

- Bill Gates

You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.

- Dale Carnegie

You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

- Peter Thiel

I’ve got to keep breathing. It’ll be my worst business mistake if I don’t.

- Steve Martin

Encouragement is the fuel on which hope runs.

- Zig Ziglar

Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.

- P.T. Barnum

It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.

- Napoleon Hill

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.

- Peter Drucker

Everybody has a calling. And your real job in life is to figure out as soon as possible what that is, who you were meant to be, and to begin to honor that in the best way possible for yourself.

- Oprah Winfrey

The Franchise Prototype is also the place where all assumptions are put to the test to see how well they work before becoming operational in the business.

- Michael Gerber

It takes a decade to grow trees but a century to nurture human beings.

- Cheng Yu-tung

If you don’t agree with the core principles, which are the premise of that compromise, then you have to have what I call principled confrontation. And so that is the thing that we do that I think can rub some people the wrong way.

- Travis Kalanick

First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.

- Dale Carnegie

Isn’t it amazing how much stuff we get done the day before vacation?

- Zig Ziglar

Great design = getting people to do what you want.

- Seth Godin

Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you.

- Michael Gerber

Because we publicists are hired guns, reported don’t often put much stock in our pleas and arguments, at least not a first. I was told by one entertainment reporter from a large metropolitan paper, Publicists don’t believe in what they are selling. They’re just paid pitchmen.

- Michael Levine

Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.

- Winston Churchill

A smart, motivational good manager can work what some outsiders call Wal-Mart magic with folks everywhere. It make take more time. You may have to sift through more people, and you may have to become more skilled with your hiring practices. But I truly believe that people anywhere will eventually respond to the same sorts of motivational techniques we use, if they are treated right and are given the opportunities to be properly trained. If you are good to people, and fair with them, and demanding of them, they will eventually decide you’re on their side.

- Sam Walton

Worrying is a waste of time. Worrying gets in the way of solving problems.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Always seek out the seed of triumph in every adversity.

- Og Mandino

People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.

- Zig Ziglar

Let’s make it easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.

- Jack Dorsey

If I hadn’t given my money away, I’d have had more than anyone else on the planet.

- Bill Gates

Without the computer, Sam Walton could not have done what he’s done. HE could not have built it. He’s done a lot of other things right too, but he could have done it without the computer,. It would have been possible.

- Abe Marks

While there’s always room for improvement, … we were very pleased with our results in what is a seasonally-challenging quarter.

- John Chambers

Being a winner is much different from having the potential to win. Everyone has the potential, it’s what you do with that potential that really matters.

- Zig Ziglar

I have lots of sources of information about what’s going on at the company. I think I have a pretty good pulse on where we are and what people are thinking.

- Steve Ballmer

One has to live with the fact that some corporate decisions are going to be wrong. As long as most of the decisions are right.

- Michael Otto

When we bought it, Spiegel was in a difficult situation; it made a loss at that time. We invested in it and then it turned around, and then we bought Eddie Bauer and Newport News.

- Michael Otto

Extraordinary results are directlydetermined by how narrow you can make your focus.

- Gary Keller

The minimum effective dose (MED) is defined simply: the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome.

- Timothy Ferriss

In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive.

- Bill Gates

In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.

- Jorge Paulo Lemann

You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.

- Lee Iacocca

If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.

- Peter Thiel

Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario.

- Seth Godin

God wants to use you in spite of your weaknesses. Of God chose to use perfect people only, He’d have no one to use.

- Joel Olsteen

The misconception that aid falls straight into the hands of dictators largely stems from the Cold War era.

- Bill Gates

The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.

- Peter Drucker

Surely, we all can look back and see things in our lives that we wish we would have done differently. But the Bible says, Make the most of each day.”4 Yesterday is gone; tomorrow may not come. You must live for today. Start right where you are. You can’t do anything about what’s gone, but you can do a great deal about what remains.

- Joel Olsteen

Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic. The best way to approach a potential break is simple: Confide in them honestly but tactfully and explain your concerns. If they bite back, your conclusions have been confirmed. Drop them like any other bad habit. If they promise to change, first spend at least two weeks apart to develop other positive influences in your life and diminish psychological dependency. The next trial period should have a set duration and consist of pass-or-fail criteria. If this approach is too confrontational for you, just politely refuse to interact with them. Be in the middle of something when the call comes, and have a prior commitment when the invitation to hang out comes. Once you see the benefits of decreased time with these people, it will be easier to stop communication altogether.

- Timothy Ferriss

Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.

- Ben Horowitz

The final relationship that cannot be ignored is with disrupters: They are individuals who cause trouble for sport – inciting opposition to management for a variety of reasons, most of them petty. Usually these people have good performance – that’s their cover – and so they are endured or appeased. A company that manages people well takes disrupters head-on. First they give them very tough evaluations, naming their bad behaviour and demanding it change. Usually it won’t. Disrupters are a personality type. If that’s the case, get them out of the way of people trying to do their jobs. They’re poison.

- Jack Welch

When we recognize the fraud for what it is, we feel incredibly stupid. Something more than our bank accounts is damaged—our egos are damaged. As a result, it’s almost impossible for the marketer to regain our trust.

- Seth Godin

Projections are just bullshit. They’re just guesses.

- Jason Fried

No one can make you jealous, angry, vengeful, or greedy — unless you let him.

- Napoleon Hill

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