Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
Never, never, never give up.
- Winston Churchill
Cooperativeness in conversation is achieved when you show that you consider the other person’s ideas and feelings as important as your own.
- Dale Carnegie
The Bible says, See that none of you repays another evil for evil, but always aim to show kindness and seek to do good to one another and to everybody.
- Joel Olsteen
There is no substitute for hard work. There is no such thing as overnight success or easy money.
- Henry Sy
They did not die because of sickness or anything but because of hunger. I remember that and how people suffered.
- Lui Che Woo
We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.
- Jeff Bezos
You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success.
- Zig Ziglar
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.
- Malcolm X
Enduring great companies don’t exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.
- James C. Collins
You cannot underestimate people’s ability to spot a soulless, bureaucratic tactic a million miles away. It’s a big reason why so many companies that have dipped a toe in social media waters have failed miserably.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Follow these five decision steps when hiring someone: Understand the job, consider three to five people, study candidates performance records to find their strengths, talk to the candidates’ colleagues about them, and once hired, explain the assignment to the new employee.
- Peter Drucker
I have made the tough decisions, always with an eye toward the bottom line. Perhaps it’s time America was run like a business.
- Donald Trump
Your real boss is the one who walks around under your hat.
- Napoleon Hill
The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did
- Ben Horowitz
Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.
- George Washington Carver
Leaders think like a revolutionary not a bureaucrat.
- Napoleon Hill
Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who’s going to build.
- Larry Ellison
Profit and cash flow are not the same thing.
- Robert Kiyosaki
There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
- Bill Gates
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. …
- Dale Carnegie
My biggest concern is that America is drifting towards mediocrity and that people don’t recognize – and by people I’m meaning Washington – don’t recognize the sense of urgency and the fact that I don’t think this is a crisis anymore. I think it’s an emergency.
- Howard Schultz
When advice is freely given, the receiver is free to use it as he or she sees fit.
- Harvey Mackay
Happiness is found in doing, not merely possessing.
- Napoleon Hill
Every twenty-four hours God has a fresh new supply of grace, of favor, of wisdom, of forgiveness.
- Joel Olsteen
As an entrepreneur, I try to push the limits. Pedal to the metal.
- Travis Kalanick
You have to respect your parents. They are giving you an at-bat. If you’re an entrepreneur and go into the family business, you want to grow fast. Patience is important. But respect the other party… My dad and I pulled it off because we really respect each other.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Its never too late…to start heading in the right direction.
- Seth Godin
I have plenty of money to do what I want to do, and I have the relationships.
- Timothy Ferriss
I’m interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you’re like, ‘Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?’
- Elon Musk
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
- Warren Buffett
Let us accept the natural order in which we move. Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time. Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows. The glory of light cannot exist without its shadows. Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together. The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making – once.
- Winston Churchill
For the employee, the goal is to have full access to necessary information and as much independent decision-making ability as possible. For the entrepreneur, the goal is to grant as much information and independent decision-making ability to employees or contractors as possible.
- Timothy Ferriss
Microsoft is not about greed. It’s about innovation and fairness.
- Bill Gates
You can’t depend on polls.
- Michael Bloomberg
The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.
- Peter Thiel
When there is no job related stress, you are more aware of your mate and children, if you are a parent.
- Zig Ziglar
Every patient is a consumer, and every consumer is a potential patient. What NantWorks is doing is building the world the way Da Vinci saw it, and augmenting every frame a human being sees as they work, live and play.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.
- Bill Gates
What you tolerate you can not change.
- Joel Olsteen
I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that’s true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.
- Mark Zuckerberg
By spring of ’98, each company’s stock had more than quadrupled. Skeptics questioned earnings and revenue multiples higher than those for any non-internet company. It was easy to conclude that the market had gone crazy.
- Peter Thiel
Only engage in mutually beneficial relationships.
- Clay Clark
If you learn to pray bold prayers… it allows God to do big things in your life.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.
- Bill Gates
You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that’s wrong with it and fix it. Seek negative feedback, particularly from friends.
- Elon Musk
Barring serious accidents, if you are not preoccupied with worry and you work hard, you can look forward to a reasonably lengthy existence…. Its not the hard work that kills, its the worrying that kills.
- Thomas Edison
When you are truly interested in other people, you will learn what they are interested in and if they have a need for your product. If they like you, and most people like folks who take an interest in them, they’ll help you find people who do need what you have to sell, even if they don’t.
- Zig Ziglar
We had been kicked out of one bank… The second, it was touch and go…
- Phil Knight
People in tough times – it doesn’t mean they don’t have a great attitude.
- Joel Olsteen
Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.
- Winston Churchill
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?
- Peter Thiel
People everywhere love Windows.
- Bill Gates
When we face with a steady eye the difficulties which lie before us, we may derive new confidence from remembering those we have already overcome.
- Winston Churchill
I’ve traveled around the world, and what’s so revealing is that, despite the differences in culture, politics, language, how people dress, there is a universal feeling that we all want the same thing. We deeply want to be respected and appreciated for our differences.
- Howard Schultz
Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.
- Benjamin Franklin
Steve Jobs didn’t really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don’t deny that.
- Steve Wozniak
One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice.
- Seth Godin
Students of public speaking continually ask, How can I overcome self-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before an audience? Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that some horses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at the thundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing a farmer’s wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse as the train goes by? How would you cure a horse that is afraid of cars—graze him in a back-woods lot where he would never see steam-engines or automobiles, or drive or pasture him where he would frequently see the machines? Apply horse-sense to ridding yourself of self-consciousness and fear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying. You can never attain freedom from stage-fright by reading a treatise. A book may give you excellent suggestions on how best to conduct yourself in the water, but sooner or later you must get wet, perhaps even strangle and be half scared to death. 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
Your legacy is being written by yourself. Make the right decisions.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
[In February 2011 on Square.] Starting a startup after twitter is so much easier than before.
- Jack Dorsey
I readily absorb ideas from every source, frequently starting where the last person left off.
- Thomas Edison
Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.
- Steve Wozniak
Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Because ideas have to be original only with regard to their adaptation to the problem at hand, I am always extremely interested in how others have used them….
- Thomas Edison
The microprocessor is a miracle.
- Bill Gates
Selling is essentially a transfer of feelings.
- Zig Ziglar
I DECLARE I have the grace I need for today. I am full of power, strength, and determination. Nothing I face will be too much for me. I will overcome every obstacle, outlast every challenge, and come through every difficulty better off than I was before. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
Being a winner is much different from having the potential to win. Everyone has the potential, it’s what you do with that potential that really matters.
- Zig Ziglar
The result of information overload is usually distraction, and it dilutes your focus and takes you off your game.
- Zig Ziglar
What I mean is that none of my talents had a – what’s that great word – rubric. A singer, an actor, a dancer – there was nothing I could really say I was. The writing came much later. And, actually, thank God, because if I had said I’m a singer, I would really have just had one thing to do.
- Steve Martin
It’s not enough to do good things. You have to let people know what you’re doing.
- Phil Knight
The ballplayer who loses his head can’t keep his cool, is worse than no ballplayer at all.
- Lou Gehrig
A company can seize extra-ordinary opportunities only if it is very good at the ordinary operations.
- Marcel Herrmann Telles
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
- Winston Churchill
I’ve got to confess I’m a pragmatic optimist myself.
- Zig Ziglar
Everything we do is about getting people to be more open, more creative, more courageous.
- Jack Dorsey
People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.
- John C. Maxwell
We all must recognize that homeland security funds should be allocated by threat and no other reason.
- Michael Bloomberg
I am both pleased but astonished by the fact that mankind has not yet begun to use all the means and devices that are available for destruction. I hope that such weapons are never manufactured in quantity.
- Thomas Edison
We won’t change at all, … We feel consolidation will continue. We’re seeing more and more movement to fewer networking vendors.
- John Chambers
The most important thing to understand is that the job of a big company executive is very different from the job of a small company executive. When I was managing thousands of people at Hewlett-Packard after the sale of Opsware, there was an incredible number of incoming demands on my time. Everyone wanted a piece of me. Little companies wanted to partner with me or sell themselves to me, people in my organization needed approvals, other business units needed my help, customers wanted my attention, and so forth. As a result, I spent most of my time optimizing and tuning the existing business. Most of the work that I did was “incoming.” In fact, most skilled big company executives will tell you that if you have more than three new initiatives in a quarter, you are trying to do too much. As a result, big company executives tend to be interrupt-driven. In contrast, when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days of a company, you have to take eight to ten new initiatives a day or the company will stand still. There is no inertia that’s putting the company in motion. Without massive input from you, the company will stay at rest.
- Ben Horowitz
When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
- Steve Jobs
I’d always try to remind managers at every level that they had to share my passion for developing people.
- Jack Welch
The time is always right to do what is right.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.
- Andrew Carnegie
Over the course of your career, your Detroit will surely call you at one point or another. If you can go, that’s great. If you can’t, make peace with the reasons why.
- Jack Welch
Creating ideas that spread and connecting the disconnected are the two pillars of our new society, and both of them require the posture of the artist.
- Seth Godin
We learn by doing.
- Aristotle
High expectations are the key to everything.
- Sam Walton
The question isn’t ‘What do we want to know about people?’ It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?
- Mark Zuckerberg
Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best….”
- Thomas Edison
Mrs. Carnegie and I had dinner at a friend’s house in Chicago. While carving the meat, he did something wrong. I didn’t notice it; and I wouldn’t have cared even if I had noticed it. But his wife saw it and jumped down his throat right in front of us. John,” she cried, watch what you are doing! Can’t you ever learn to serve properly!” Then she said to us: He is always making mistakes. He just doesn’t try.” Maybe he didn’t try to carve; but I certainly give him credit for trying to live with her for twenty years. Frankly, I would rather have eaten a couple of hot dogs with mustard—in an atmosphere of peace—than to have dined on Peking duck and shark fins while listening to her scolding.
- Dale Carnegie
Many people who want to be great aren’t willing to do the work to make it possible!
- Zig Ziglar
[On Twitter] This company is bigger than any individual.
- Jack Dorsey
Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as His divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I believe we are in at least a two-quarter slowdown.
- John Chambers
The world today is ruled by harassed politicians absorbed in getting into office or turning out the other man so that not much room is left for debating the great issues on their merits.
- Winston Churchill
The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great. Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must not look too good nor talk too wise.
- Dale Carnegie
I think I’m less afraid of failure than some others.
- Russell Simmons
