If you do not believe in your product or service enough to offer it to your own family and friends, then you should question the value of what you are selling.
- Zig Ziglar
Notable Quotables
Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.
- Reed Hastings
People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.
- Theodore Roosevelt
When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this – you haven’t.
- Thomas Edison
The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side.
- Yoda
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
- Winston Churchill
If you want your life to be more rewarding, you have to change the way you think.
- Oprah Winfrey
It is clothes. It is parts. Therefore, you combine the parts differently to create your own unique expression.
- Tadashi Yanai
The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.
- John D. Rockefeller
Long ago, Ben Graham taught me that ‘Price is what you pay; value is what you get.’ Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.
- Warren Buffett
Some people do really find fault like there’s a reward for it.
- Zig Ziglar
It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow through.
- Zig Ziglar
Think global, but start local.
- Jack Nadel
In order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done.
- Peter Thiel
The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.)
- James C. Collins
The thing that I’m going to focus on today is essentially the cloud that has been over Nike’s head over the last couple years.
- Phil Knight
My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.
- Steve Wozniak
The thing you fear most has no power. Your fear of it is what has the power. Facing the truth really will set you free.
- Oprah Winfrey
To lead people, walk beside them. As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence … When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’
- Lao Tzu
The result of information overload is usually distraction, and it dilutes your focus and takes you off your game.
- Zig Ziglar
I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.
- Winston Churchill
Initiative and starting are about neither of these. They are about “let’s see” and “try.” If there’s no clear right answer, perhaps the thing you ought to do is something new. Something new is often the right path when the world is complicated.
- Seth Godin
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.
- Peter Thiel
Properly run startups place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting and the interview process in order to build their talent base. Too often the investment in people stops there.
- Ben Horowitz
I will not lose, for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned so it evens up for me.
- Jay-Z
If it’s a good idea, someone has already probably thought about it first.
- Jack Nadel
A record isn’t like a movie – you can get it together pretty fast.
- Steve Martin
The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad.
- Ben Horowitz
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
I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I’ve tried to really stress that.
- Larry Page
We were old sinners – but when we came to Christ we are not sinners anymore.
- Joel Olsteen
[On the three keys to Twitter’s success.] The first lesson: Draw. The most important thing you can do with an idea: get it out of your head. Second lesson: Luck. Be able to recognize when luck is happening around you. Third lesson: iteration. Originally Twitter asked ‘What’s your status?’ Bonus fourth lesson: know when to stop. Sometimes put the idea away, that idea will often emerge later.
- Jack Dorsey
If you are a leader, you should never forget that everyone needs encouragement. And everyone who receives it – young or old, successful or less-than-successful, unknown or famous – is changed by it.
- John C. Maxwell
Stop talking and start doing
- Walt Disney
If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.
- Elon Musk
You are the only person on earth who can use your ability. It’s an awesome responsibility.
- Zig Ziglar
60% of the bonus was based on financials and 40% on Six Sigma (quality) results.
- Jack Welch
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
- Ben Horowitz
The beauty of this deal is bringing a clinical expertise. Medco had developed therapeutic resource centers, where they got their pharmacist to have specialties in things like diabetes, heart problems and asthma. Express Scripts took a different approach. We tried to understand why people do what they do with behavioral economics, which is: What drives human behaviors? What drives people to do what they did? By combining those two pieces, we get that much stronger.
- George Paz
Use every customer point of contact to weave stories about who you are and what your brand stands for.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Any of us can be happy and have a good attitude when everything is going our way. But I believe it’s the real test of your character and of your faith to say, ‘Things are not going our way, but I’m still being good to people; I’m still attending church; I still have a good attitude.’
- Joel Olsteen
A decision without an alternative is a desperate gambler’s throw.
- Peter Drucker
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
- Aristotle
Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me better.
- Winston Churchill
Over the long run, the price of gold approximates the total amount of money in circulation divided by the size of the gold stock. If the market price of gold moves a long way from this level, it may indicate a buying or selling opportunity.
- Ray Dalio
Sure, ideas that spread, win, but ideas that don’t get spoken always fail.
- Seth Godin
Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.
- Bill Gates
How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?
- Seth Godin
Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
- Winston Churchill
I think that business book reporting, it’s all Jim Collins, it’s the story of victory; it’s success bias over and over again.
- Ben Horowitz
I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters – to make them personalities.
- Walt Disney
So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.
- Peter Drucker
If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.
- Dale Carnegie
The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo, the job is to invent the status quo.
- Seth Godin
Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.
- Henry Ford
As kids, we all worked for the company in one way or another. I got to work behind the candy counter or run the popcorn stand when I was five years old. The business was part of life, and it was always included in the dinner conversation. We learned a lot about the debt it took to open new stores, and I worried about it. I remember confiding to my girlfriend one time – crying and saying, I don’t know what we’re going to do. My daddy owes so much, and he won’t quit opening.
- Alice Walton
No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.
- Michael Bloomberg
People are skeptical of many televangelists, and I’m sensitive to that.
- Joel Olsteen
Our thoughts make us what we are.
- Dale Carnegie
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.
- Sam Walton
I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.
- Reid Hoffman
Residential property prices will pick up steadily.
- Lee Shau Kee
A successful manager told me that stopped wearing a watch. She found that the work was so immersive, anchoring it to whatever hour it happened to be was pointless. The watch reminded her of the rigors of appointments and the status quo, while her goal was to be there, right here, right now, in the moment, and to do the work in front of her. The watch had no role in doing that right, so, for now, it’s gone.
- Seth Godin
Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is–the strong horse that pulls the whole cart.
- Winston Churchill
In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.
- Winston Churchill
Truly wonderful the mind of a child is.
- Yoda
The freedom of the new kind of work (which most of us do, most of the time) is that the tasks are vague and difficult to measure. We can waste an hour surfing the ’Net because no one knows if surfing the ’Net is going to help us make progress or connections. This freedom is great, because it means no one is looking over your shoulder; no one is using a stopwatch on you. This freedom is a pox, because it’s an opening for the resistance. Freedom like this makes it easy to hide, easy to find excuses, easy to do very little.
- Seth Godin
The successful leader must be in sympathy with his followers. Moreover, he must understand them and their problems.
- Napoleon Hill
If you can’t be a pine on the top of the hill.Be a scrub in the valley-but beThe best little scrub by the side of the rill;Be a bush, if you can’t be a tree.If you can’t be a bush, be a bit of the grass.If you can’t be a muskie, then just be a bass-But the liveliest bass in the lake!We can’t all be captains, we’ve got to be crew.There’s something for all of us here.There’s big work to do and there’s lesser to doAnd the task we must do is the near.If you can’t be a highway, then just be a trail,If you can’t be the sun, be a star;It isn’t by the size that you win or you fail-Be the best of whatever you are!
- Douglas Malloch
I’m a normal guy.
- Jack Ma
My popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.
- Dale Carnegie
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Why do I need succession planning? I’m very alert, I’m very vibrant. I have no intention to retire.
- Sheldon Adelson
I’m skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education…. People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it’s very unclear how viable they are in many cases.
- Peter Thiel
What’s got me excited about the education space is the growth of the Internet over the next 10, 20, 30 years.
- Reed Hastings
I think Bible principles are principles for life.
- Joel Olsteen
Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.
- Richard Branson
People really criticize professional athletes going into the Olympics. People don’t like change. A bunch of people don’t like the Olympics now because we’ve added skateboarding… We’re modernizing the sport.
- Larry Ellison
Start calling yourself healed, happy, whole, blessed, and prosperous. Stop talking to God about how big your mountains are, and start talking to your mountains about how big your God is!
- Joel Olsteen
Passion is everything. In fact, you’ve got to be borderline fanatical about what you do.
- Chris Gardner
Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.
- Winston Churchill
People have been indoctrinated so completely by their jobs that they don’t want to know how something works, they’re willing to accept that perhaps the laws of nature don’t work as they expect, and by the way, can I have the remote?
- Seth Godin
The regulatory systems in place disincentive innovation. It’s intense to fight the red tape.
- Travis Kalanick
Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ is my go-to song to pump myself up if I’m having a tough time or if I get really nervous right before a speech.
- Sara Blakely
I tell my employees that we’re in the service business, and it’s incidental that we fly airplanes.
- Herb Kelleher
I can become someone’s miracle.
- Joel Olsteen
When we had seventy-five stores in Arkansas, seventy-five in Missouri, eighty in Oklahoma, whatever, people knew who we were, and everybody except the merchants who weren’t discounting looked forward to our coming to their town.
- Sam Walton
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
- Dale Carnegie
I’m not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I’m doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.
- George Soros
You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.
- Elon Musk
Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you’re good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well.
- Bill Gates
The path of least resistance makes all rivers, and some men, crooked.
- Napoleon Hill
The question is not, ‘Do you have a problem?’ The question is, ‘Does the problem have you? ‘
- Joel Olsteen
Simple works, complex fails.
- Timothy Ferriss
This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.
- Bill Gates
As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.
- Ben Horowitz
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
- Winston Churchill
As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
- Peter Thiel
As long as a person doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, he doesn’t grow.
- John Maxwell
