Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exup
Notable Quotables
The led must not be compelled. They must be able to choose their own leader.
- Albert Einstein
I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, ‘It’s all your fault.’ Your reaction is, ‘It’s not my fault.’ But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.
- Ben Horowitz
Reckless he is. Matters are worse.
- Yoda
You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself.
- Seth Godin
We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.
- Walt Disney
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
Hi-tech is best managed by younger people.
- Lee Shau Kee
There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.
- Winston Churchill
Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be.
- Sam Walton
Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Don’t criticize them, they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.
- Dale Carnegie
Be fair. You have to be able to see their point of view.
- Michael Levine
Put all good eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.
- Andrew Carnegie
The ultimate connection is when you are connected to the creator of the universe.
- Joel Olsteen
If GE’s strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.
- Jack Welch
Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.
- Dale Carnegie
The challenge is this: training creative, independent, and innovative artists is new to us.
- Seth Godin
the expression one wears on one’s face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one’s back
- Dale Carnegie
Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.
- Bill Gates
I can’t afford this land either, but my business can.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (iron ore or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of the companies on the list do that. The rest make unseemly profits by trafficking in ideas.
- Seth Godin
What I know for sure is that what you give comes back to you.
- Oprah Winfrey
You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.
- Elon Musk
Real entrepreneurs have what I call the three Ps (and, trust me, none of them stands for ‘permission’). Real entrepreneurs have a ‘passion’ for what they’re doing, a ‘problem’ that needs to be solved, and a ‘purpose’ that drives them forward.
- Michael Dell
A decade and a half ago an ‘Esquire’ magazine reporter, noting our advertising played up the heros as aspects of great atheletes asked the question, who is your hero? My answer was simple. My college track coach and partner, Bill Bowerman. He had won four national championships, coached more sub four minute milers than anyone when he retired. He was the 1972 Olympic coach yet he insisted he was not a track coach. He was a professor of competitive response.
- Phil Knight
College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.
- Peter Thiel
The most talented do not always end up as celebrities, and those with less talent often do. Upsets are written into our history and occur around us every day.
- John C. Maxwell
Through the wisdom of its government leaders and the entrepreneurship of its private sector, India has rapidly risen to become a major force in the global economy, … Cisco believes that the Internet, and related technologies, will be a key enabler for India to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation.
- John Chambers
Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. 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
Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.
- Warren Buffett
God is faithful to His word. All of His promises are Yes” and Amen.” That means if you will do your part and believe even though it looks impossible, and not let your mind, your emotions, or other people talk you out of it, then God promises in due season and at the right time He will bring it to pass. It may not happen the way you expect it or on your timetable, but God is a faithful God. It will happen.
- Joel Olsteen
I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
- Stephen R. Covey
There are a great many wetless” bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim in them. To plunge is the only way.
- Dale Carnegie
For me, my father was, and still is, a symbol of qualified persons in the Ministry of Foreign Trade under Soviet conditions.
- Vladimir Potanin
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
Sometimes when you take strong stands, if you’re not called to do it, you’re dividing the audience you’re trying to reach.
- Joel Olsteen
This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.
- Bill Gates
Cleantech shows the result: hundreds of undifferentiated products all in the name of one overbroad goal.
- Peter Thiel
The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.
- John C. Maxwell
The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
- Peter Drucker
Focus on your people – Without employees and customers, your’re going nowwhere.
- David Green
In line with the objective to diversify the business of your Group, Henderson Cyber was established to focus on businesses in the telecommunications and information technology fields.
- Lee Shau Kee
Good advertising should give the reader essential facts about the product or company advertised and should do so engagingly without trickery or hogwash.
- Leo Burnett
Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.
- Yoda
Team Together / Team Apart means you respect the final decision even if you would do something diffently, and make it happen with positive energy.
- David Novak
Whenever a company proudly announces the establishment of its beautiful, new, modern corporate headquarters, you can be sure it’s heading downhill. Why? Because instead of focusing on their business, the company’s managers are focusing on themselves. Messy desks, cramped quarters and unlovely surroundings are the physical manifestations of people too busy getting the work done to care much about their own creature comforts. The greatest danger to a business is not risk. It’s a lack of risk: complacency.
- Harvey Mackay
I am easily satisfied with the very best.
- Winston Churchill
The main thing that’s missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics.
- Bill Gates
In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
- Ben Horowitz
If You Have A Lemon, Make A Lemonade That is what a great educator does. But the fool does the exact opposite. If he finds that life has handed him a lemon, he gives up and says: I’m beaten. It is fate. I haven’t got a chance. Then he proceeds to rail against the world and indulge in an orgy of selfpity. But when the wise man is handed a lemon, he says: What lesson can I learn from this misfortune? How can I improve my situation? How can I turn this lemon into a lemonade?
- Dale Carnegie
The Overseas Chinese habit is to save a lot and make a lot of friends.
- Lee Shau Kee
A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to his religion before he explores it.
- Seth Godin
It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage.
- Ben Horowitz
Companies, exist and evolve over time and in fact they have multiple founding moments.
- Jack Dorsey
The bluegrass community… can be very strict. I didn’t know if I’d be welcomed into the bluegrass community or not, but I think they judge you very fairly… I felt really welcome.
- Steve Martin
All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. That’s why the word “salesman” can be a slur and the used car dealer is our archetype of shadiness. But we only react negatively to awkward, obvious salesmen—that is, the bad ones.
- Peter Thiel
If values do not affect daily life, they are not values.
- Marty St. George
Surprises and reverses can serve as an incentive for great accomplishment. There are no rules here, we’re just trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison
Are you committed to a life of continual counseling, growth, and education? Are you committed to a life of consistently receiving truth, of renewing your mind? From what sources do you receive your counseling? Are you reading books by authors who speak wisdom? Are you listening to music and watching movies that have redemptive and edifying themes? Are you involved in a small group or community of people that can offer you support, guidance, and encouragement, and in which you give back that which you have been given? Do you know of professional counselors you can see when needed? Are you asking God for wisdom about life on a regular basis? (He says if you will ask, He will provide [see James 1:5–8].)
- Zig Ziglar
You are what you are and you are where you are because of what has gone into your mind. You change what you are and you change where you are by changing what goes into your mind.
- Zig Ziglar
The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitable of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.
- Timothy Ferriss
Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical.
- Howard Schultz
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
If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.
- Seth Godin
We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.
- Jerry Seinfeld
We’ve all been guilty at one point or another in our careers of boasting of perfect hindsight. It’s a terrible sin. If you don’t make sure your questions and concerns are acted upon, it doesn’t count.
- Jack Welch
I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.
- Bill Gates
By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited… The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.
- Bill Gates
You don’t have to fear defeat if you believe it may reveal powers that you didn’t know you possessed.
- Napoleon Hill
The dove is my emblem…. I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it…. I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill…
- Thomas Edison
If you don’t have a competitive advantage — don’t compete.
- Jack Welch
They didn’t use discussion as a sham process to let people have their say” so that they could buy in” to a predetermined decision. The process was more like a heated scientific debate, with people engaged in a search for the best answers.
- James C. Collins
The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep form meddling with them while they do it.
- Theodore Roosevelt
Some people do really find fault like there’s a reward for it.
- Zig Ziglar
Company culture” doesn’t exist apart from the company itself: no company has a culture; every company is a culture. 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
Blind we are, if creation of this clone army we could not see.
- Yoda
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
- Thomas Edison
Surround yourself with the right people
- Tony Hsieh
I chose America as my home because I value freedom and democracy, civil liberties and an open society.
- George Soros
One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it’s making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it’s the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you’re dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.
- Reid Hoffman
If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.
- Ray Kroc
When growth is slower-than-expected, stocks go down. When inflation is higher-than-expected, bonds go down. When inflation is lower-than-expected, bonds go up.
- Ray Dalio
There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.
- Henry Ford
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
We’re getting hurt, but I’m a long-term investor.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. HEBREWS 11:1.
- Joel Olsteen
I used to believe that a good product sold itself.
- Phil Knight
The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. … The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
- Larry Ellison
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
- Benjamin Franklin
An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.
- Jack Welch
Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.
- Zig Ziglar
Seeds of discouragement cannot take root in a grateful heart.
- Joel Olsteen
The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively – I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook – it sounds trivial, but people matter.
- Reid Hoffman
Sometimes put the idea away…
- Jack Dorsey
Sometimes, “never let them see you sweat,” is truly bad advice. The work of an individual who cares often exposes the grit and determination and effort that it takes to be present.Perfecting your talk, refining your essay and polishing your service until all elements of you disappear might be obvious tactics, but they remove the thing we were looking for: you.
- Seth Godin
Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.
- Peter Thiel
Since all of them overestimated the competition, no one even showed up.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software.” We had dreams about the impact it could have.
- Bill Gates
