In my weekly staff meeting, I inserted an agenda item titled “What Are We Not Doing?
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.
- Dale Carnegie
I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.
- Elon Musk
I never called my work an ‘art’. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.
- Walt Disney
That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.
- Ben Horowitz
Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.
- Winston Churchill
The more you are grateful for what you have the more you will have to be grateful for.
- Zig Ziglar
Most kids cannot ask questions. They can memorize, but they cannot learn.
- Terry Fischer
Encouragement to others is something everyone can give. Somebody needs what you have to give. It may not be your money, it may be your time. It may be your listening ear. It may be your arms to encourage. It may be your smile to uplift. Who knows?
- Joel Olsteen
The man who has no imagination has no wings.
- Muhammad Ali
I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.
- Reid Hoffman
You need to be around people who know more than you and have more talent than you. Don’t be intimidated by them, be inspired.
- Joel Olsteen
Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.
- Napoleon Hill
You have to learn to follow your heart. You can’t let other people pressure you into being something that you’re not. If you want God’s favor in your life, you must be the person He made you to be, not the person your boss wants you to be, not even the person your parents or your husband wants you to be. You can’t let outside expectations keep you from following your own heart.
- Joel Olsteen
My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people.
- Bill Gates
Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a byproduct – a byproduct of achievement.
- Ray Kroc
The bulk of the universities are about teaching kids.
- Bill Gates
The lizard isn’t listening and the lizard doesn’t care.
- Seth Godin
I’m an entrepreneur first and a wine critic second.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
When nobody else celebrates you, learn to celebrate yourself. When nobody else compliments you, then compliment yourself. It’s not up to other people to keep you encouraged. It’s up to you. Encouragement should come from the inside.
- Joel Olsteen
Becoming a member of the new rich is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.”Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness.”By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.
- Timothy Ferriss
We are interested in any sector with good growth potential.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
I know for sure that what we dwell on is who we become.
- Oprah Winfrey
What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.”
- James C. Collins
A business is a complex system of inter-operating systems.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Try not to be a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
- Albert Einstein
Advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away, it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later.
- Peter Thiel
India has the potential to be our biggest market in Asia, bigger than China, in as much as two to five years.
- John Chambers
Effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible.
- Jack Welch
There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.
- Winston Churchill
The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
- Timothy Ferriss
No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it’s going to be different, and it must be rooted in today’s world.
- Peter Thiel
You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.
- Sam Walton
People ask me all the time, ‘How can I become a successful entrepreneur?’ And I have to be honest: It’s one of my least favorite questions, because if you’re waiting for someone else’s advice to become an entrepreneur, chances are you’re not one.
- Michael Dell
The most important thing about education is appetite.
- Winston Churchill
If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.
- Simon Sinek
My wife thinks she’s better than me at puzzles. I haven’t given in on that one yet.
- Bill Gates
I have no interest in going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids. I’m just not that kind of dude.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The protestor I think will speak up for the world’s poorest.
- Bill Gates
I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.
- Joel Olsteen
We wouldn’t survive if people didn’t trust us.
- Sergey Brin
If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
- Henry Ford
If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores. That’s the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart’s success.
- Sam Walton
Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right.
- Dale Carnegie
If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.
- Seth Godin
Andrew Carnegie believed the formula (of Think & Grow Rich) should be taught in all public schools and colleges, and expressed the opinion that if it were properly taught it would so revolutionize the entire education system that the time spent in school could be reduced to less than half….As far as (formal) schooling is concerned, many of the (great american business) men had very little.
- Napoleon Hill
I do not believe that people want to work hard enough and they want to find the quick Twitter, SEO. Anybody who’s obsessed with SEO has lost already, period. I believe that firmly.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Now when I consider investing in a startup, I study the founding teams. Technical abilities and complementary skill sets matter, but how well the founders know each other and how well they work together matter just as much. Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together—otherwise they’re just rolling dice.
- Peter Thiel
Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.
- Dale Carnegie
Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
So you need two professions: the one you have studied all this time, and your other profession the profession of persuasion that allows you to make good use of all those years of education, practice and dues-paying.
- Jerry Vass
Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.
- Rupert Murdoch
Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.
- Warren Buffett
Infrastructure web services had to happen.
- Jeff Bezos
Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most.
- Seth Godin
When I was growing up, I always knew I’d be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence.
- Sergey Brin
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
- Winston Churchill
Well we know that people in Austrailia love the idea of both Impulse and Virgin Blue getting up and adding a bit of competition, and it’s fun to be able to deliver it.
- Richard Branson
You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do. Once you decide, you should immediately execute the reorg: Don’t leave time for leaks and lobbying.
- Ben Horowitz
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m not gonna give up, shut up, or let up… as a matter of fact, I’m just getting warmed up.
- Zig Ziglar
Possession of Power That Was Not Acquired Through Self Effort.
- Napoleon Hill
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.
- Winston Churchill
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
- Winston Churchill
While a definitely optimistic future would need engineers to design underwater cities and settlements in space, an indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers.
- Peter Thiel
China is the new horizon.
- Cheng Yu-tung
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
I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.
- Winston Churchill
I’m not speaking defeat into my future. I’m not speaking failure over my life. I will turn it around and speak favor into my future. I will declare, I’m blessed. I’m strong. I’m healthy. This will be a great year.” When you do that, you are blessing your future.
- Joel Olsteen
Much like us, our customers are rigorously working to improve their profitability and capacity for innovation. For us, this means doing everything possible when it comes to efficiency, effectiveness, and innovations – and all that on the basis of the highest quality. After all, quality creates trust – and trust creates orders. In short, we need to constantly become better and better at the high level we are already operating at.
- Elmar Degenhart
Momentum is a little fragile, and when people got excited before, they were disappointed, … But this is the most positive guidance we’ve given in eight quarters, going into a seasonally challenging quarter.
- John Chambers
The habit of doing more than is necessary can only be earned through practice.
- Seth Godin
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Wal-Mart is an amazing success story. What I particularly admire very much about the late Sam Walton was his policy of valuing his employees. Giving value to employees is very rare in the retail industry. I also admire the strategies Walton used to build up his discount store concept.
- Tadashi Yanai
When a person says No” and really means it, he or she is doing far more than saying a word of two letters. The entire organism—glandular, nervous, muscular—gathers itself together into a condition of rejection.
- Dale Carnegie
To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often.
- Winston Churchill
Newport Center has become a Mediterranean town. The climate here is the same as the Mediterranean’s, and so is the architecture. This center exudes a radiance, an energy. It will become a special way of life for everyone.
- Donald Bren
It’s pretty chilly by southern California standards.
- Ed Clark
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
- John F. Kennedy
There are two types of people in the world. One type is known as leaders and the other as followers. Decide at the outset whether you intend to become a leader in your chose calling or remain a follower. The difference in compensation is vast. The follwer cannot reasonably expect the compensation to which a leader is entitled, although many followers make the mistake of expecting such pay.
- Napoleon Hill
The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage
- Warren Buffett
Five percent of the people think;ten percent of the people think they think;and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.
- Thomas Edison
Make sure your ego lies in the performance of the company, not in the performance of the stock.
- Warren Buffett
I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man…Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters – seldom in any school of writing.Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object….we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration:’The world is my country; to do good my religion.’Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in ‘The Rights of Man’, and that genius busy at his favorite task – liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, ‘The Rights of Man’ yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke’s effort in his ‘Reflections’.Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him.’Tom Paine is quite right,’ said Pitt, the Prime Minister, ‘but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.’Here we see the progressive quality of Paine’s genius at its best. ‘The Rights of Man’ amplified and reasserted what already had been said in ‘Common Sense’, with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France.So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre’s enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument.But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of ‘The Age of Reason’ and now turned his time to the latter part.Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events ‘The Age of Reason’ appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle – a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking.
- Thomas Edison
When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right.
- Rupert Murdoch
Specifically, the following things that cause no trouble when you are small become big challenges as you grow: Communication Common knowledge Decision making.
- Ben Horowitz
I think everyone’s against abortion.
- Rupert Murdoch
Not long ago somebody showed me an article written for a local magazine in 1960. IT was called Success Story of the Year, and it described how we had built up an empire of nine variety stores. Then it quoted me as saying that we probably wouldn’t grow much more because I believed in personally supervising the nine-store group, and I thought any more stores would be unwieldy to manager without additional supervisors. So what the heck happened? How did we ever get to be the largest retailer in the world with a philosophy like that?
- Sam Walton
Death will come, no matter what anyone may think about it. Accept it as a necessity, and pass the thought out of your mind…Death is mere transition. If death is not mere a change, or transition then nothing comes after death except a long, eternal peaceful sleep and sleep is nothing to be feared. Thus you may wipe out, forever, the fear of Death….a busy person seldom has time to think about dying. He finds life too thrilling to worry about death
- Napoleon Hill
The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.
- Bill Gates
The chef that grew up with the grandma who cooks tends to always beat the chef that went to the culinary institute. It’s in the blood.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
All that hullabaloo about somebody’s net worth is just stupid, and it’s made my life a lot more complex and difficult.
- Sam Walton
The lifeblood of job creation in America is small business, but they can’t get access to credit.
- Howard Schultz
The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn’t thought of before and that aren’t talked about in the news all the time.
- Steve Wozniak
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
It is well documented that I am a lifelong football fan. My love of the British game started with the 1966 World Cup.
- Alisher Usmanov
The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.
- Timothy Ferriss
The power of this new era is simple: if you want to (need to, must!) lead, then you can. It’s easier than ever and we need you. But if this isn’t the right moment, if this isn’t the right cause, then hold off. Generous and authentic leadership will always defeat the selfish efforts of someone doing it just because she can.
- Seth Godin
Planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out.
- Peter Thiel
What is school for? If you’re not asking that, you’re wasting time and money.
- Seth Godin
