Notable Quotables

One of my lifelong practices is to pay my obligations on time, especially my suppliers. Even in my early years as retailer, I didn’t delay my payments to suppliers, because I tell my kids that we have to be considerate to suppliers and think of their own hinyong or how they have to protect their sense of trustworthiness with others.

- Henry Sy

When those in power use shame to bully the weak into compliance, they are stealing from us. They tell us that they will expose our secrets (not good enough, not hardworking enough, not from the right family, made a huge mistake once) and will use the truth to exile us from our tribe. This shame, the shame that lives deep within each of us, is used as a threat. And when those in power use it, they take away part of our humanity.

- Seth Godin

You have to know what sparks the light in you so that you, in your own way, can illuminate the world.

- Oprah Winfrey

I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the site, and we’ve funded ever since by putting ads on the site.

- Mark Zuckerberg

The earnings from Hong Kong and China Gas and rental property portfolio serve as a solid base for the Group’s sustainable growth.

- Lee Shau Kee

When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough.

- Donald Trump

You may not realize initially how many other opportunities are wrapped up inside the first one. After you go through the first door, you’ll then discover more doors automatically opening behind that one. One door leads you to another door, which leads to another door, and so one. It’s like ten other boxes packed inside one box. The initial door that God opens is your access to more opportunities. But you must be willing to walk through the first one to get to the other good things God has for you.

- George Foreman

Keep costs low and spirits high, and the people of Southwest Airlines will keep LUV in the air.

- Herb Kelleher

We believe that it is better to give one a rod to fish rather than just dole out fish to them.

- Henry Sy

I took a Fear of Flying class, and I always missed the class, because I was always flying.

- Sara Blakely

I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.

- Jeff Bezos

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.

- Rosalynn Carter

The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitable of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

- Timothy Ferriss

Keep doing the right. God is building character in you, and you are passing that test. Remember, the greater the struggle, the greater the reward.

- Joel Olsteen

Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.

- Oprah Winfrey

Desire is the ingredient that changes the hot water of mediocrity to the steam of outstanding success.

- Zig Ziglar

If you complain you will remain, if you praise you will be raised.

- Joel Olsteen

I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

- Elon Musk

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

- Napoleon Hill

We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – and then they figured out where to drive it.

- James C. Collins

I fell in love with flora of all types, especially ferns. Loved the sparse structure and repetition of shape – almost fractal.

- Jack Dorsey

What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.

- Steve Martin

Hong Kong’s history of success is built on its flexibility in the ever-changing global economy.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The challenge is to focus on the work, not on the fear that comes from doing the work.

- Seth Godin

Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.

- Winston Churchill

I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.

- Jeff Bezos

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

People who do not succeed have one distinguishing trait in common. They know all the reasons for failure, and have what they believe to be air-tight alibis to explain their lack of achievement: 1) If I had the money… 2) If I could get the job… 3) If I had been given a chance… 4) If I were younger… 5) If I were older… 6) If I only had a better education… 7) If I could just save some money… 8) If I lived in a big city… 9) If I were not so fat… 10) If my talents were better known… 11) If I didn’t have a past… 12) If I had my own business… 13) If I had the courage…

- Napoleon Hill

Henceforth, I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a mighty 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. I will be likened to the raindrop, which washes away the mountain; the ant who devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking. I will persist until I succeed.

- Og Mandino

Well, you have the public not wanting any new spending, you have the Republicans not wanting any new taxes, you have the Democrats not wanting any new spending cuts, you have the markets not wanting any new borrowing, and you have the economists wanting all of the above. And that leads to paralysis.

- Michael Bloomberg

When a study was made a few years ago on runaway wives, what do you think was discovered to be the main reason wives ran away? It was lack of appreciation.

- Dale Carnegie

If there’s a problem, we at Wine Library never tell ourselves that once we handle this issue, we’ll never have to deal with the person again. We talk to every single person as though we’re going to wind up sitting next to that person at his or her mother’s house that night for dinner.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.

- Richard Branson

We have a very high churn rate, but as soon as we turn on email marketing to our user base, people will come back.” Yes, of course. The reason that people leave our service and don’t come back is that we have not been sending them enough spam. That makes total sense to me, too.

- Ben Horowitz

Veal is a very young beef and, like a very young girlfriend, it’s cute but boring and expensive.

- P.J. O'Rourke

We have tried to define precisely what it means to be a force for good – always do the right, ethical thing. Ultimately, ‘Don’t be evil’ seems the easiest way to summarize it.

- Sergey Brin

I shopped for body shapers for the first time in my life and I was horrified. They were thick – it was like wearing workout clothes and they all had a leg band on one side that showed through the pants.

- Sara Blakely

As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible.

- Peter Thiel

I was always fascinated by the decision-making process and the managerial process and just business in general.

- Ronald Perelman

I’m the No. 1 developer in New York, I’m the biggest in Atlantic City, and maybe we’ll keep it that way.

- Donald Trump

Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.

- Dale Carnegie

An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn’t have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.

- Jack Welch

Do you know how many companies have wanted me to do an energy drink for them because I named my book ‘Crush It!’? It might be fun one day, but right now I think it would undermine the personal brand I’ve built.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Being surrounded by educated people makes democracy stronger, and it benefits our entire economy.

- Seth Godin

I’m trying to throw a big broad net to try to get people interested in God and believe that He’s for them and has a purpose.

- Joel Olsteen

I wasn’t prepared for this big room with clattering typewriters and teletype printers. You could hardly hear yourself think.

- Ray Kroc

We live well below our means. We wear inexpensive suits and drive American-made cars. Only a minority of us drive the current-model-year automobile. Only a minority ever lease our motor vehicles.

- Thomas J Stanley

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne, knowing him was like drinking it.

- Winston Churchill

Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.

- Warren Buffett

Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.

- Elon Musk

If you have your health, if you have people in your life to love, you are blessed. Slow down and enjoy the simple things in life.

- Joel Olsteen

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.

- Bill Gates

Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support – a significant problem in the software industry.

- Bill Gates

Knowledge will not attract money, unless it is organized, and intelligently directed through practical plans of action…Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when and if it is organized into definite plans of action, and directed to a definite end.

- Napoleon Hill

More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.

- Peter Thiel

My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

- Peter Drucker

We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.

- Joel Olsteen

IQ is a commodity, data is a commodity. I’m far more interested in watching people interact at a restaurant with their smartphone. We can all read ‘Tech Crunch,’ ‘Ad Age.’ I would rather be living in the trenches. I would rather be going to Whole Foods in Columbus Circle to watch people shop with their smartphones.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I guess the worst moment I ever had in business was the fear that Southwest Airlines wouldn’t get off the ground.

- Herb Kelleher

If you hold on to what you want so tightly, it almost becomes an idol.

- Joel Olsteen

Make a point to continually search for a better way of doing things, even when things are going well, to ensure that a better alternative has not been overlooked and to keep your creative talents in practice.

- John C. Maxwell

DAY FOURTEEN I DECLARE that I will use my words to bless people. I will speak favor and victory over my family, friends, and loved ones. I will help call out their seeds of greatness by telling them I’m proud of you, I love you, you are amazing, you are talented, you are beautiful, you will do great things in life.” This is my declaration.

- Joel Olsteen

Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have.

- Thomas Edison

If David our CEO, devotes so much of his time to this, then all this stuff about teamwork and learning how to be a great leader must be pretty important.

- David Novak

Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago? How did they work out? Didn’t you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn’t most of them turn out all right after all?

- Dale Carnegie

MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs. At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future. Note that there were many numbers as well as more qualitative goals that would have helped: Was our competitive win rate increasing or declining? Was customer satisfaction rising or falling? What did our own engineers think of the products? By managing the organization as though it were a black box, some divisions at HP optimized the present at the expense of their downstream competitiveness. The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company. It would have been better to take into account the white box. The white box goes beyond the numbers and gets into how the organization produced the numbers. It penalizes managers who sacrifice the future for the short term and rewards those who invest in the future even if that investment cannot be easily measured. CLOSING THOUGHT It is easy to see that there are many ways for leaders to be misinterpreted. To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors. Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create. Otherwise, the side-effect behaviors may be worse than the situation you were trying to fix.

- Ben Horowitz

Baseball is like cricket, and I grew up in a country where they had cricket. So I understand cricket, soccer and basketball. I played basketball at the club level and a little bit in college, so that’s why I’m a basketball fanatic.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

There is a revolution happening, and within two years I think that Wi-Fi and Netflix will be built into all the televisions.

- Reed Hastings

Treasure the love you receive above all. It will survive long after your good health has vanished.

- Og Mandino

Nobody walks this earth thinking he’s better than I think I am – I think I’m great. At the same time, it’s so obvious to me that I’m nobody.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I really chess-play culture shifts. I’m really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That’s what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.

- Andrew Carnegie

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.

- John D. Rockefeller

The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader’s charisma. What matters is the leader’s mission.

- Peter Drucker

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things.

- Yoda

“Pick me, pick me” acknowledges the power of the system and passes responsibility to someone else to initiate. Even better, “pick me, pick me” moves the blame from you to them. If you don’t get picked, it’s their fault, not yours. If you do get picked, well, they said you were good, right? Not your fault anymore. Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.

- Seth Godin

The thing about fashion – it’s like ducks going quack, quack quack. It’s being dictated from above, and it just makes me want to rebel against it.

- Sara Blakely

Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless.

- Thomas Edison

Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be.

- Sam Walton

Failure is a great teacher, and I have been its student on more than one occasion. – CEO David Novak of Yum! Brands

- David Novak

Creative leaders inherently know when rules need to be challenged, and they can see when a more flexible approach should be taken.

- John C. Maxwell

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