When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.
- Jack Welch
Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress—stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.
- John C. Maxwell
It seems like a good cause. I’ve been watching it on TV and, it makes me want to help.
- Ed Clark
We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill
Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.
- Henry Ford
Exploring how you could make a bad situation worse can sometimes tell you what not to do.
- Harvey Mackay
Today, and I’m very strongly against tax increases.
- Donald Trump
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
- Bill Gates
Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.
- John C. Maxwell
Here’s a quote from ultramarathoner Dick Collins: Decide before the race the conditions that will cause you to stop and drop out. You don’t want to be out there saying, “Well gee, my leg hurts, I’m a little dehydrated, I’m sleepy, I’m tired, and it’s cold and windy.” And talk yourself into quitting. If you are making a decision based on how you feel at that moment, you will probably make the wrong decision.
- Seth Godin
Seek Criticism Not Praise.
- Paul Arden
EVERYBODY SELLS Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.
- Peter Thiel
Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.
- Walt Disney
Foreplay, cuddling – a Jedi craves not these things.
- Yoda
Jim Collins, in his bestselling book Good to Great, demonstrates through massive research and comprehensive analysis that when it comes to CEO succession, internal candidates dramatically outperform external candidates. The core reason is knowledge. Knowledge of technology, prior decisions, culture, personnel, and more tends to be far more difficult to acquire than the skills required to manage a larger organization.
- Ben Horowitz
It’s not about how to get started, it’s about how to get noticed.
- Steve Case
With an export-driven economy, Hong Kong is unavoidably affected by any hiccup in the outside world.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
- Seth Godin
Success is not final…Failure is not fatal…it’s the courage to continue that counts.
- Winston Churchill
I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family that would have killed for each other – and we still are. x
- Richard Branson
If you have the character to hang in there when its tough, you will develop or acquire every other characteristic necessary to WIN in the game of life.
- Zig Ziglar
The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
- Winston Churchill
We vote for a presidential candidate without saying, “Why not run the country for a month and then we’ll see . .
- Seth Godin
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
For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’, just do it and correct course along the way.
- Timothy Ferriss
The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.
- Bill Gates
To live your best life now, you must learn to trust God’s timing, you may not think He’s working, but you can be sure that right now, behind the scenes, God is arranging all the pieces to come together to work out His plan for your life.
- Joel Olsteen
The culture was strong enough to transcend the original company.
- Peter Thiel
I’ll trade glib for common sense any day.
- Stephen Wynn
You want to do good things, and once you’ve done a couple of good things in a row, you think ‘Well gee, let’s not mess this up.’ But I am lucky at this point that I have something I really love to do, and it completely holds my attention. I never feel frustrated by it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I took a Fear of Flying class, and I always missed the class, because I was always flying.
- Sara Blakely
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
- Albert Einstein
The most obvious market segment in email-based payments was the millions of emigrants still using Western Union to wire money to their families back home. Our product made that effortless, but the transactions were too infrequent.
- Peter Thiel
At the margin, they’ll be biased to claim value in the near term, not help you create more in the future. That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided,
- Peter Thiel
There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don’t usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.
- Mark Zuckerberg
When people write checks, they are depleting an asset. And when people are using credit cards, they are increasing their liabilities. In other words, credit cards make it so much easier to get deeper and deeper into debt by increasing your monthly liabilties.
- Robert Kiyosaki
You can change your world by changing your words… Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.
- Joel Olsteen
I’ve operated and launched newspapers all over the world.
- Rupert Murdoch
It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
The main thing that’s missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics.
- Bill Gates
The best way to predict the Future is with a Great, Unique Abilities Team
- Terry Powell
(Physics is) a good framework for thinking. … Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.
- Elon Musk
It helps to have founded and run a company if you’re going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.
- Ben Horowitz
I know I could be the host of ‘SportsCenter’ in two years if I changed my show today to sports.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.
- Arnold Glasow
The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.
- Michael Bloomberg
The student who elects to risk it all—which is nothing—to establish an online video rental service that delivers $5,000 per month in income from a small niche of Blu-ray aficionados, a two-hour-per-week side project that allows him to work full-time as an animal rights lobbyist.
- Timothy Ferriss
Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.
- Mark Zuckerberg
I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating – is this the exact right mix? I think that’s – to me it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC-nonsense.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.’ Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.
- Larry Ellison
You might well remember that nothing can bring you success but yourself.
- Napoleon Hill
Speak the truth. Transparency breeds legitimacy.
- John C. Maxwell
Mormonism is a little different, but I still see them as brothers in Christ.
- Joel Olsteen
The internet population is going up and up. I am confident that this will be a huge market.
- Robin Li
Not an hour is lost that is spent in the saddle.
- Winston Churchill
In America, when you bring an idea to market, you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share. In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China – execution is.
- Ma Huateng
A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.
- Peter Thiel
Where I get my energy is: ‘How can I make it better?’
- Sara Blakely
I’m in two modes when I’m on Lanai: In engineering mode, I’m trying to find the right place for the reservoir and the desalination plant, and looking at designs for new hotel rooms. The rest of the time, I’m in decompression mode. I’m on Hulopoe Beach, going for a swim, or on my paddleboard surrounded by 100 spinner dolphins.
- Larry Ellison
What I most identify with is effortless fashion, looking as if someone’s not put a lot of effort into their look.
- Sara Blakely
The object of the new school is to teach reasonable doubt. Not the unreasonable doubt of the wild-eyed heckler, but the evidence-based doubt of the questioning scientist and the reason-based doubt of the skilled debater.
- Seth Godin
If you want to reap financial blessings, you have to sow financially.
- Joel Olsteen
A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.
- Warren Buffett
I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.
- Bill Gates
Sometimes adversity is what you need to face in order to become successful.
- Zig Ziglar
A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.
- Rosalynn Carter
Frank Wells 1888 instruction to his agents: The most polite and gentlemanly treatment of all customers, however insignificant in their business, is insisted upon. Proper respect must be shown to all – let them be men, women or children, rich or poor, white or black – it must not be forgotten, that the company is dependent on these people for its business.
- Frank Wells
What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.
- Dave Thomas
Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them.
- Bill Cosby
The real benefit of having goals is what you become by reaching them.
- Zig Ziglar
To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.
- Bill Gates
People everywhere love Windows.
- Bill Gates
Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP.
- Peter Thiel
I don’t believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.
- Oprah Winfrey
I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.
- Jeff Bezos
Great music and art are earthly wonders, but I think ‘cubist’ songs and paintings are hideous.
- Thomas Edison
The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.
- Ray Kroc
Schools have figured this out. They need shortcuts in order to successfully process millions of students a year, and they’ve discovered that fear is a great shortcut on the way to teaching compliance.
- Seth Godin
…Treasure what it means to do a day’s work. It’s our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it’s certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day’s work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you’ll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.
- Seth Godin
Teams only succeed when the players have a unified vision, no matter how much talent or potential there is.
- John Maxwell
You can’t fault government for seizing that opportunity. But it has an impact on Barbados’ current account deficit and it does bring with it attended risks. And, therefore, you have to ask whether or not the tourism business that is going to be generated from the publicity around the cricket matches will be sustained after the cricket matches are over.
- John Chambers
Half the battle is selling music, not singing it. It’s the image, not what you sing.
- Rod Stewart
Be careful not to compromise what you want most for what you want now.
- Zig Ziglar
Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.
- Oprah Winfrey
Exchanging practically all the British infantry and artillery in India for Territorial batteries and battalions, and the formation of the 27th, 28th and 29th Divisions of regular troops. The New Zealand contingent must be escorted to Australia and there, with 25,000 Australians, await convoys to Europe. Meanwhile the leading troops of the Canadian Army, about 25,000 strong, had to be brought across the Atlantic. All this was of course additional to the main situation in the North Sea and to the continued flow of drafts, reinforcements and supplies across the Channel. Meanwhile the enemy’s Fleet remained intact, waiting, as we might think, its moment to strike; and his cruisers continued to prey upon the seas. To strengthen our cruiser forces we had already armed and commissioned twenty-four liners as auxiliary cruisers, and had armed defensively fifty-four merchantmen. Another forty suitable vessels were in preparation. In order to lighten the strain in the Indian Ocean and to liberate our light cruisers for their proper work of hunting down the enemy, I proposed the employment of our old battleships (Canopus class) as escorts to convoys.
- Winston Churchill
Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation.
- P.T. Barnum
Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurt his sense of importance and arouses resentment.
- Dale Carnegie
Leadership, very simply, is about two things: 1. Truth and trust. 2. Ceaselessly seeking the former, relentlessly building the latter.
- Jack Welch
I think that the first thing is you should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don’t know what the future is going to hold.
- Ray Dalio
As an entrepreneur, remove obstacles for your team. If there is anything that is holding the team back, get it out of the way.
- David Nilssen
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
The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.
- Dale Carnegie
You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.
- Larry Ellison
[On Howard White] Rather than say to young people that they should have a goal and focus on it, he reverses it: ‘Any road will get you there if you don’t know where you’re going.’ Most often, on reflection, you will grow to understand that what had passed for a funny commnet of the moment has a good deal of wisdom behind it.
- Phil Knight
Fear is one of the worst things in business.
- Jack Nadel
Anyone, even a child, can be taught to develop a positive mental attitude. The method is to repeat positive affirmations such as: Day by day, in every way, through the grace of God, I am getting better and better.
- Napoleon Hill
Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.
- Yoda
