With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top.
- Seth Godin
Notable Quotables
The thing that’s confusing for investors is that founders don’t know how to be CEO. I didn’t know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don’t know how to be CEOs, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn. The question is… can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
- Ben Horowitz
I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.
- Warren Buffett
I’m not trying to follow a set of rules and stuff. I’m just living my life.
- Joel Olsteen
Looking? Found someone you have, eh?
- Yoda
The buyer needs to talk at least 70% of the time.
- Clay Clark
Mr Churchill, to what do you attribute your success in life? Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down
- Winston Churchill
If you’re going to be thinking, you may as well think big.
- Donald Trump
We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.
- Bill Gates
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 bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don’t have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.
- Ben Horowitz
It is not so much that I am a blue-blooded oligarch: I just don’t feel like an oligarch.
- Vladimir Potanin
So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.
- Thomas Edison
Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don’t approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.
- Bill Gates
Before you can be sure of your ability to transmute DESIRE into its equivalent, you will require SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE of the service, merchandise or profession which you intend to offer in return for fortune.
- Napoleon Hill
I go to yoga every day. I meditate every morning.
- Russell Simmons
When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
- Winston Churchill
Only the paranoid survive.
- Andrew Grove
Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.
- Michael Gerber
The lower and individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his potential.
- John Maxwell
20% of what you do accounts for 80% of your results
- Brian Tracy
People ask me what’s the most important function when you’re starting an organization or setting up the kind of culture and values that are going to endure. The discipline I believe so strongly in is H.R., and its the last discipline that gets funded.
- Howard Schultz
Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.
- Bill Gates
I don’t want people in China to have deep pockets but shallow minds.
- Jack Ma
Simple works, complex fails.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
Life is too short to be small.
- Benjamin Disraeli
You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.
- Walt Disney
Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.
- Bill Gates
I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.
- Bill Gates
Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.
- Andrew Carnegie
Happiness does not depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.
- Dale Carnegie
Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity. The things that we were forced to learn and do, because we started out underfinanced and undercapitalized in these remote small communities, contributed mightily to the way we’ve grown as a company. Had we been capitalized, or had we been the offshoot of a large corporation the way I wanted to be, we might not ever have tried…
- Sam Walton
Reckless he is. Matters are worse.
- Yoda
The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your relationships. The quality of your business is no different.
- Harvey Mackay
Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s really a full-time job to manage our lives.
- Sara Blakely
Cleantech shows the result: hundreds of undifferentiated products all in the name of one overbroad goal.
- Peter Thiel
We’ve seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we’re seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.
- Sergey Brin
innovation without discipline leads to disaster.
- James C. Collins
My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.
- Richard Branson
Life’s too short to spend it trying to keep others happy. You can’t please everyone. To fulfill your destiny, stay true to your heart.
- Joel Olsteen
I thought of a remark . . . that the United States is like a ‘gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.’ Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.
- Winston Churchill
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
- Winston Churchill
I spend a lot of time reading.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft
- Bill Gates
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
- Jeff Bezos
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
- Winston Churchill
Certainly, we continue to bring in new people. We’ll hire, net new, over 4,000 people this year, and attract great people into the company. I’m very bullish about the employee base and what it can accomplish.
- Steve Ballmer
It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.
- Larry Page
Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.
- Bill Gates
Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
- Warren Buffett
Education and the Internet must go hand in hand, … It will serve as one of the great equalizers.
- John Chambers
We were pretty schizophrenic. We were going to take on the world, but we couldn’t make payroll.
- Phil Knight
The Group adopts a two-pronged strategy in its business development in mainland China. In the prime cities, the Group targets those prime sites with heavy pedestrian flow and easy access for development into large-scale complexes of exceptional design and quality. In the second-tier cities, which are mostly provincial capitals or municipalities with a preponderance of middle class residents, the Group focuses on large-scale developments so as to achieve an efficient use of land as well as long-term appreciation in property value.
- Lee Shau Kee
A great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future. Investors expect Twitter will be able to capture monopoly profits over the next decade, while newspapers’ monopoly days are over.
- Peter Thiel
My son is now an ‘entrepreneur.’ That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job
- Ted Turner
It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.
- John C. Maxwell
A man has not right to occupy another man’s time unnnecessary
- Ron Chernow
We all must recognize that homeland security funds should be allocated by threat and no other reason.
- Michael Bloomberg
The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit… a reputation, character.
- John D. Rockefeller
Success-minded people have no trouble at all following proven instructions. We all would be happy to follow a map if the map came with a guarantee. There is no guarantee, though. There are no maps. They’ve all been taken, and their value is not what it used to be, because your competitors have maps, too. The opportunity lies in pursuing your curiosity instead. Curiosity is not allergic to failure. Curiosity drives us to the haunted house because the thrills lie in what we don’t expect, not in what’s safe. Curiosity can start us down the path to shipping, to bringing things to the world, to examining them, refining them, and repeating the process again (and again).
- Seth Godin
When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren’t very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.
- Ben Horowitz
If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.
- Bill Gates
Complaints are your best learning opportunity
- Bill Gates
Giving away money to the right cause, with a leveraged effect and your own involvement in how it is spent, will ‘give you peace of mind.’
- Lee Shau Kee
But the three rules I always stuck with were 1) Be on time 2) No profanity and 3) Never criticize a teammate.
- David Novak
I really chess-play culture shifts. I’m really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That’s what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Be a coach, not a cheerleader
- Stacy Thorn
Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.
- Mark Zuckerberg
What I know for sure is that if you want success, you can’t make success your goal. The key is not to worry about being successful, but to instead work toward being significant, and the success will naturally follow.”
- Oprah Winfrey
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
The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.
- Peter Thiel
We’d like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers.
- Seth Godin
Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it’s a powerful metaphor: in business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.
- Peter Thiel
History is more or less bunk.
- Henry Ford
Nobody kicks a dead dog.
- Dale Carnegie
The abundance mindset makes it easier to be graceful.
- Seth Godin
Fortunately we’re not a public company – we’re a private group of companies, and I can do what I want.
- Richard Branson
One must marry one’s feelings to one’s beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one’s life.
- Napoleon Hill
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
- Robert Frost
Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see.
- Peter Thiel
Only God can look at somebody’s heart.
- Joel Olsteen
hombre que conozco es superior a mí en algún sentido. En ese sentido, aprendo de él.
- Dale Carnegie
I move onward, the only direction Can’t be scared to fail in search of perfection.
- Jay-Z
I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.
- Bill Gates
This has been a very positive test for Kawasaki.
- Yoda
Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.
- Jim Rohn
In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.
- Reed Hastings
Delegating doesn’t mean passing off work you don’t enjoy, but letting your employees stretch their skills and judgment.
- Harvey Mackay
Well, today the Grammys is much much better than the Oscars. I think the differences in the shows are that the Grammys are much wilder. The Oscars is much more people in the industry. And people dress wilder, I think, at the Grammys.
- Steve Martin
We were always trying to look for people who could help us beyond what we were doing.
- Phil Knight
In bad times and good, I have never lost my sense zest for life
- Walt Disney
One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But… I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
- Thomas Edison
Perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular.
- Peter Thiel
People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonald’s? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly.
- Ben Horowitz
Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.
- Bill Gates
Heretics are the new leaders. The ones who challenge the status quo, who get out in front of their tribes, who create movements.
- Seth Godin
Speed is of the essence in responding to a crisis situation, and our focus is squarely on mobilizing resources to help in the relief and rebuilding efforts, while also helping customers and employees recover.
- John Chambers
Today, Andy Quinn pitched a great game finally, and that’s what he’s capable of. He fell behind a few hitters, but he got stronger as he went on.
- Jack Taylor
