As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. I got into this habit by attempting to contact celebrities and famous businesspeople for advice.
- Timothy Ferriss
Notable Quotables
Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
- Winston Churchill
Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done. That would be you.
- Seth Godin
There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
- Dale Carnegie
The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.
- Peter Thiel
China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.
- Bill Gates
I didn’t like the way it looked in white trousers, and I couldn’t find anything to work underneath them.
- Sara Blakely
Always pass on what you have learned.
- Yoda
I do not follow conventional wisdom.
- Phil Knight
It was really an easy decision for me to be a part of the Lakers. It’s priceless. It is one of the few places where I truly get lost in the joy of the moment of that game. All of the stresses and all the responsibilities are gone.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
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
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I do limit my exposure to the public. You only have so much time.
- Donald Bren
I know there’s a farmer out there somewhere who never wants a PC and that’s fine with me.
- Bill Gates
Try to look at your weakness and convert it into your strength. That’s success.
- Zig Ziglar
The CIA will only hire people with impeccable credentials to be a translator. ‘Impeccable credentials’ means you’ve never lived outside the United States.
- Michael Bloomberg
When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal. And it has nothing to do with money. I mean, you buy clothes with money, and cars. But I really wanted to work with people I enjoyed working with, who I admired and liked.
- Larry Ellison
When people come to Twitter and they want to express something in the world, the technology fades away. It’s them writing a simple message and them knowing that people are going to see it.
- Jack Dorsey
I think Tim being in the Guard is great. I hope all of my kids join the military. It teaches them discipline and respect.
- Michael Ward
The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.
- Timothy Ferriss
Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.
- Bill Gates
It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.
- John D. Rockefeller
Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.
- Jeff Bezos
Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you are ready or not to put this plan into action.
- Napoleon Hill
Part of being a winner is knowing when enough is enough. Sometimes you have to give up the fight and walk away, and move on to something that’s more productive.
- Donald Trump
The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong questionl
- Peter Drucker
Everyone is going to binge on a diet, for instance, so plan for it, schedule it, and contain the damage.
- Timothy Ferriss
Tip 49 – The trip to success should be as much fun as arriving at the destination.
- Jack Nadel
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?
- Peter Thiel
War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
- Winston Churchill
I look at Facebook as being more conscientious about operator concerns, we are not 100 percent there, but we are finding consensus.
- Jon Fredrik Baksaas
Just like Mark Snider told the Board of Elections within a couple hours of when he first became aware of it… first of all, Mike and I didn’t even know anything about this till March 16, … Second of all, nobody benefited from this in any way, shape or form whatsoever.
- Michael Ward
The Green Revolution focused on the big three – maize, rice and wheat – and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.
- Bill Gates
Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those who surrendered tamely were finished.
- Winston Churchill
American democracy is spoiled by people buying everything in sight and then selling and buying everything in sight, including our politicians.
- Russell Simmons
There is no shoe school, so where do you recruit people for a company that develops and markets running shoes? The running track… We and the consumer were one and the same.
- Phil Knight
It’s not going to happen alone.
- Jack Dorsey
Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad.
- Donald Trump
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
- Winston Churchill
You’re got to worry about what’s coming up to stay ahead of the curve…
- Phil Knight
The resentment that criticism engenders can demoralize employees, family members and friends, and still not correct the situation that has been condemned.
- Dale Carnegie
Some things you can only learn in the struggle. When it’s easy, when everything is going your way, that doesn’t take any faith.
- Joel Olsteen
You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There’s another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.
- Bill Gates
The Costa Rican government is prioritizing laying fiber optic over paving roads. Costa Rica is trying to become one of the Internet societies. This is happening throughout the world.
- Reed Hastings
It never hurts a fool to appear before an audience, for his capacity is not a capacity for feeling.
- Dale Carnegie
A waitress goes up to Winston Churchill and says, ‘Sir, your drunk.’ To which he replies, ‘I may be drunk, miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
- Winston Churchill
I don’t argue when people say that my message is simple, but I believe Jesus’ message was simple. Jesus didn’t go around condemning people.
- Joel Olsteen
VaynerMedia filters the world how humans interact. This is how people are going to make buying decisions.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.
- Larry Page
The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
I am optimistic that we can achieve a better future. It’s not true that the Philippines is a hopeless case.
- Henry Sy
A smart manager will establish a culture of gratitude. Expand the appreciative attitude to suppliers, vendors, delivery people, and of course, customers.
- Harvey Mackay
People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for them.
- Dale Carnegie
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
It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.
- Winston Churchill
I love building technology, I love programming. I love building teams. And I also love building beautiful things.
- Jack Dorsey
The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves
- Ray Kroc
Speak the truth. Transparency breeds legitimacy.
- John C. Maxwell
I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a might oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today.
- Og Mandino
Look – this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do – ultimately, you’re at the end.
- Ben Horowitz
If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you’ll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job.
- Seth Godin
Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.
- Richard Branson
We won’t change at all, … We feel consolidation will continue. We’re seeing more and more movement to fewer networking vendors.
- John Chambers
The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job – that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.
- Larry Page
Being great at everything is not an actionable message.
- Floris Maljers
As a freshman, I had to make one hell of an adjustment. I had to go from being a good high school competitor to a locker room with three Olympians in Dellinger, Bailey, and Grelle. Four, if you count Burley coming in my senior year. If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman.
- Phil Knight
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
The future is in green energy, it’s in making steel for energy-efficient cars.
- Alexei Mordashov
If you wake up deciding what you want to give versus what you’re going to get, you become a more successful person. In other words, if you want to make money, you have to help someone else make money.
- Russell Simmons
We gradually came to the realization that we were hurting not just ourselves but the Chinese people.
- Sergey Brin
This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
- Peter Drucker
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The Group will continue to press ahead steadily with an open mindset, a practical attitude, a broad vision and a unique insight, adhering to its ultimate objective of serving the nation and the wider community in the changing landscape.
- Cheng Yu-tung
You can literally force yourself to be courteous, happy and enthusiastic with every person you meet. After you have forced yourself to be so for a short period of time… the habit takes over.
- Zig Ziglar
Be candid with everyone.
- Jack Welch
What has sustained us through these years? Trust. Dedication. Discipline.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Treat your life like a game.
- Ray Dalio
You may think there is a lot wrong with you, but there is also a lot right with you.
- Joel Olsteen
Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.
- Ben Horowitz
Rockefeller never clarified why he dropped out of high school around May 1855, just 2 months shy of commencement, excercises on July 16…
- Ron Chernow
There is a strong tendency to get used to and accept very bad things that would be shocking if seen with fresh eyes.
- Ray Dalio
Learning is truly a value, growth for every employee is a real objective, mistakes aren’t always fatal, and there are lots of people around whom you can reach out to for coaching and mentoring.
- Jack Welch
In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.
- Reed Hastings
Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
- Jack Nadel
Post-9/11, we saw an immediate uptick in the amount of people in our stores, all over the country. People wanted that human connection. We are not going to fracture the Starbucks experience.
- Howard Schultz
Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember, the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bite out of you.
- Zig Ziglar
I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.
- Walt Disney
I am prepared to try anything once.
- Richard Branson
Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.
- Bill Gates
Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.
- 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
Japan’s biggest problems are conservatism and cowardice.
- Tadashi Yanai
In the next two to three years there will probably be only three to five players in this area. The chances to gain or lose market share are exciting.
- John Chambers
Tell them to grab on to the career that engages their brain and heart and soul and gives them meaning. Tell them that eventually, the money will come, and if it doesn’t, in time, they will find themselves rich with something money can’t buy. And that, obviously, would be happiness.
- Jack Welch
Our history is based on extending the brand to categories within the guardrails of Starbucks.
- Howard Schultz
I’m not averse to making a lot of money. But where does that end? I hang out with people with hundreds of millions of dollars. Is that the standard by which I should measure myself? Where does that take you if you’re in my business? I think it takes you to pretty dark, corrupt places.
- Timothy Ferriss
Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
- Oprah Winfrey
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
- General George S. Patton
I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
