if you want to achieve consistent performance, you need both parts of a 20 Mile March: a lower bound and an upper bound, a hurdle that you jump over and a ceiling that you will not rise above, the ambition to achieve and the self-control to hold back.
- James C. Collins
Notable Quotables
People with the right kind of ambition would not likely use the word play to describe their effort to work as a team to build something substantial. Finally, people who use the “me” prism find it natural and obvious to speak in terms of “building out my résumé” while people who use the “team” prism find such phrases to be somewhat uncomfortable and awkward, because they clearly indicate an individual goal that is separate from the team goal.
- Ben Horowitz
I’m not ashamed of any of my papers at all and I’m rather sick of snobs that tell us that they’re bad papers, snobs who only read papers that no one else wants. I doubt if they read many papers at all.
- Rupert Murdoch
No leader enjoys making the tough decision. We constantly faced severe resistence from even the best people in our organization. I’ve struggled with this problem myself and have often been guilty of not being rigorous enough. Every impulse is to look the other way.
- Jack Welch
My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.
- Larry Page
Whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh, students and researchers can watch remarkable video such as World War II newsreels and the story of Apollo 11 — the historic first landing on the Moon.
- Sergey Brin
The POSITIVE THINKER sees the INVISIBLE, feels the INTANGIBLE, and achieves the IMPOSSIBLE.
- Winston Churchill
Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice.
- Dale Carnegie
I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.
- Elon Musk
Arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.
- Dale Carnegie
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
Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.
- John Wooden
The safest plan, and the one most sure of success for the young man starting in life, is to select the vocation which is most congenial to his tastes.
- P.T. Barnum
Even freebies must be delivered with a certain salesmanship or the receiver does not perceived the true value of the gift.
- Jerry Vass
People are afraid of failure – they don’t like to work so hard and have people keep saying, ‘No.’ I think that’s what people fear most.
- Russell Simmons
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
This office is smaller than the last one I had. I’m not trying to impress people. I want to be close to them.
- Stephen Wynn
Luck plays a role in business but whether you succeed or fail depends on many other factors. I haven’t really had a failure.
- Lui Che Woo
Remember the proverb of Solomon: “He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand; but the hand of the diligent maketh rich.
- P.T. Barnum
Every great business is built on friendship.
- JC Penney
Civilization is meant to be easy…
- Jack Dorsey
Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?
- Rupert Murdoch
Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.
- Winston Churchill
The future may be made up of many factors but where it truly lies is in the hearts and minds of men. Your dedication should not be confined for your own gain, but unleashes your passion for our beloved country as well as for the integrity and humanity of mankind.
- Li Ka-shing
Extraordinary benefits also accrue to the tiny majority with the guts to quit early and refocus their efforts on something new.
- Seth Godin
An enterprise shall take care of the people’s livelihood, through thick and thin…
- Cheng Yu-tung
The difference between being mediocre and magical is often the difference between letting people take creative risk and holding them too tightly accountable. Accountability is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important.
- Ben Horowitz
The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability… When the leader demonstrates vulnerability and sensibility and brings people together, the team wins.
- Howard Schultz
The number of residential units which have been booked in the financial statements of the Group in the period under review totalled 5,800 and amounted to approximately HK$14 billion in aggregate value.
- Lee Shau Kee
Level 5 leaders display a workmanlike diligence – more plow horse than show horse.
- James C. Collins
They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.
- Thomas Edison
When you are committed to doing what’s right, you are sowing seeds for God’s blessings. You will never go wrong by taking the high road and doing more that is required.
- Joel Olsteen
When you live for others’ opinions, you are dead. I don’t want to live thinking about how I’ll be remembered.
- Carlos Slim Helu
It was much easier to reach a few thousand people who really needed our product than to try to compete for the attention of millions of scattered individuals.
- Peter Thiel
Until you have learned to be tolerant with those who do not always agree with you, you will be neither successful nor happy.
- Napoleon Hill
Winning isn’t everything but wanting to win is.
- Zig Ziglar
If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.
- Peter Thiel
Common mission trap for companies: trying to be all things to all people at all times.
- Jack Welch
To do the most good requires saying no to pressures to stray, and the discipline to stop doing what does not fit.
- Peter Drucker
If you think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself.
- Woodrow Wilson
Leaders don’t rise to the pinnacle of success without developing the right set of attitudes and habits, they make every day a masterpiece.
- John C. Maxwell
I think our leadership team is a highly accountable leadership team.
- Steve Ballmer
The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.
- Warren Buffett
We see no indications in the marketplace that the radical Internet business transformation in practices like customer service, supply-chain management, employee training, empowerment, and e-commerce that is taking place around the world today is slowing — in fact, we believe it is accelerating globally.
- John Chambers
It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them. The first month cost perhaps $200 more than if I had been micromanaging.
- Timothy Ferriss
In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle.
- Peter Thiel
Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.
- Sara Blakely
I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America.
- Sam Walton
Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love.
- Buddha
Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
- Bill Gates
Crash diets don’t work.They don’t work for losing weight, they don’t work for making sales quota and they don’t work for getting and keeping a job.The reason they don’t work has nothing to do with what’s on the list of things to be done (or consumed). No, the reason they don’t work is that they don’t change habits, and habits are where our lives and careers and bodies are made.
- Seth Godin
I don’t consider myself enigmatic, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my public persona.
- Phil Knight
To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.
- Timothy Ferriss
Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember Life is too short to be little.
- Dale Carnegie
I think alot about money when I do not have it.
- Stacy Thorn
You can change everything about your business by changing your thinking about your business.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s so easy to tweet from wherever you are.
- Jack Dorsey
The most impressive person I’ve ever met? Elaine Wynn is no slouch. She’s a much better person than me. But I’ve got her. Finders keepers, losers weepers. And it’s been forty-seven years.
- Stephen Wynn
Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.
- Bill Gates
To do what you wanna do, to leave a mark – in a way that you think is important and lasting – that’s a life well-lived.
- Laurene Powell Jobs
You must make a decision that you are going to move on. It wont happen automatically. You will have to rise up and say, ‘I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.
- Joel Olsteen
Wouldn’t it be great to be gifted? In fact… It turns out that choices lead to habits. Habits become talents. Talents are labeled gifts. You’re not born this way, you get this way.”
- Seth Godin
If you’re going to have to swallow a frog, you don’t want to have to look at that sucker too long!
- Zig Ziglar
If the Starbucks secret is a smile when you get your latte… ours is that the Web site adapts to the individual’s taste.
- Reed Hastings
I’ve actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don’t mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.
- Elon Musk
It also makes clear that it is her meeting and will take as much or as little time as she needs. During the meeting, since it’s the employee’s meeting, the manager should do 10 percent of the talking and 90 percent of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most one-on-ones.
- Ben Horowitz
I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.
- Elon Musk
God, Family, Country.
- Zig Ziglar
You can’t move people to action unless you first move them with emotion. The heart comes before the head…to lead yourself use your head, to lead others use your heart.
- John 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
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human body, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.
- Thomas Edison
When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.
- Howard Schultz
In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
- Ben Horowitz
Three out of four of us who are self-employed consider ourselves to be entrepreneurs. Most of the others are self-employed professionals, such as doctors and accountants.
- Thomas J Stanley
Americans believe cotton is best, but we’ve invented new fabrics that will change your lifestyle.
- Tadashi Yanai
The [Henderson] Group continuously strives to upgrade the quality of its development properties by applying new technologies and building materials to improve the efficiency and lower the cost of construction.
- Lee Shau Kee
Answer me this: would you work harder to earn $100 or avoid losing $100? The smiley optimist says the former, but if research from the Center for Experimental Social Science at New York University is any indication, fear of loss is the home-run winner. Experimental groups given $15 and then told the $15 would be rescinded if they lost a subsequent auction routinely overbid the most. Groups offered $15 if they won weren’t nearly as committed.
- Timothy Ferriss
We intend to focus all our attentions in the coming years on three core growth forces. These are: 1. The massive expansion of our considerable software expertise. After all, in our eyes, software is the “new wheel” of mankind and our industry. Processes with regard to mobility are becoming increasingly complex and more strongly interconnected. These processes need to be controlled and managed reliably, requiring ever greater amounts of software. In the future, practically nothing will move without software. 2. In the fields of technology relevant for us, we want to be regarded as a pioneering and leading technology partner – especially by our customers. 3. Finally, and above all, with our pioneering corporate culture we want to be the preferred employer for people who want to fully develop and expand their skills and abilities with us and make rapid progress.” “Continental has had a good start into 2015, thus confirming our expectations for the entire year.
- Elmar Degenhart
There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.
- Peter Drucker
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
- Peter Thiel
Consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.
- Seth Godin
Selling an electric sports car creates an opportunity to fundamentally change the way America drives.
- Elon Musk
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
- Steve Jobs
Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it’s a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.
- Ray Dalio
Our business practices are no different than those of our competitors, but we are bigger, and thus more visible, so we get more flack.
- Phil Knight
I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
- Ben Horowitz
I am upset with the effect that both of these issues have had on the public,
- Michael Gerber
Safari, so goody.
- Winston Churchill
I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.
- Warren Buffett
Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be. If we do our best, we are a success.
- Zig Ziglar
We always try to look three to five years out in the decisions we make and there’s no question that the Cisco brand, our opportunity in the commercial market and the evolution of our leaders are going to take us to the next level.
- John Chambers
The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say.
- Sam Walton
When my dad founded our church, he used either a globe or a map of the world behind him. It was symbolic of what Christ said: to go forth and preach hope to the world. We believe in the cross, but we just continued with the globe.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Our line of business structure has served us very well in the past, when customer segments and product requirements were very distinct. Today, the differences have blurred between these customer segments and Cisco is in a unique position to provide the industry’s broadest family of products united under a consistent architecture designed to help our customers improve productivity and profitability.
- John Chambers
Think and grow rich.
- Napoleon Hill
When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think (puff) my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.
- Winston Churchill
Success doesn’t make you and failure doesn’t break you.
- Zig Ziglar
I do think that religion has turned a lot of people off. Part of it is because it was all about the rules and was political. I think now people have a hunger for God, they want to have a relationship, but they don’t want to be called religious. I’m not trying to get them to join my religion, I’m just trying to plant a seed of hope in their heart.
- Joel Olsteen
The next season starts right now.
- Tom Izzo
