The Cul-de-Sac ( French for “dead end” ) … is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing much changes.
- Seth Godin
Notable Quotables
In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.
- Yoda
Delegating doesn’t mean passing off work you don’t enjoy, but letting your employees stretch their skills and judgment.
- Harvey Mackay
This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.
- Bill Gates
The special prosecutor basically supported what we had told the Board of Elections all along.
- Michael Ward
There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
- Ben Horowitz
If your offering itself isn’t remarkable, then it’s invisible — no matter how much you spend on well-crafted advertising.
- Seth Godin
What options expensing will determine is job creation and job loss, … This is why we are debating it so strongly and I’m proud to champion it.
- John Chambers
When you expect your employees to act like adults, they generally do. If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.
- Ben Horowitz
A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today.
- Peter Thiel
Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl – no superior alternative has yet been found.
- Winston Churchill
In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.
- Sid Caesar
As it happened, we did extraordinarily well with our Newport Wal-Mart, and it wasn’t too long before the old Ben Franklin store I had run on Front Street had to close its doors. You can’t say we ran that guy – the landlord’s son – out of business. His customers were the ones who shut him down. They voted with their feet. Quite a few smaller stores have gone out of business during the time of Wal-Mart’s growth. Some people have tried to turn it into this big controversy, sort of a Save the Small-Town Merchants deal, like they were whales or whooping cranes of something that has the right to be protected…If you become a large-scale success it’s Katie bar the door. Suddenly, you make a very convenient villian because everybody seems to love shooting at who’s on top.
- Sam Walton
I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category.
- Jeff Bezos
This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.
- Winston Churchill
Success occurs when opportunity meets preparation.
- Zig Ziglar
The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits. There is just less competition for bigger goals.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
Lack of A Well Defined Power of Decision.
- Napoleon Hill
To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
- Elbert Hubbard
A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.
- Winston Churchill
The sooner you accept the fact that you will have both successes and failures, the easier it will be to get your business and personal life headed in the right direction.
- Harvey Mackay
We’re better than the rest of the country but we shouldn’t believe it too much.
- Peter Thiel
The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo, the job is to invent the status quo.
- Seth Godin
All I want is compliance with my wishes, after reasonable discussion.
- Winston Churchill
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it’s a powerful metaphor: in business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.
- Peter Thiel
the average person is more interested in his or her own name than in all the other names on earth put together.
- Dale Carnegie
In the game of life, before you get anything out, you must put something in!
- Zig Ziglar
You can’t jump to vegan if you’re not. Some people are absolute. Some people are able to be gradual.
- Russell Simmons
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
One of my goals is to inspire everyone I meet to become a better person.
- George Foreman
It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word ‘pessimist’ was not in our vocabulary at that time. It’s a modern ‘invention’ which I believe we should ‘dis-invent.’
- Zig Ziglar
The maxim, “Nothing prevails but perfection,” may be spelled PARALYSIS.
- Winston Churchill
I would always be studying a map.
- Jack Dorsey
Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.
- Winston Churchill
Windows 8 is key to the future, the Surface computer.
- Bill Gates
I don’t want to be too critical of what other people do, but when people go back to do the same thing that they did, I’m completely confused. I’m like, ‘Didn’t you make that movie already?’ I’ve been very fortunate, and I’m well taken care of, so the least I can do is try to go forward.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That’s why there’s the old saw: location, location, location.
- Jeff Bezos
The first complaint we hear from everyone is: ‘Why would I want to join this stupid useless thing and know what my brother’s eating for lunch?’ But that really misses the point because Twitter is fundamentally recipient-controlled – you choose to listen and you choose to leave. But you also choose what to put down and what to share.
- Jack Dorsey
Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.
- Bill Gates
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
There is a kind of intolerant spirit now abroad which arises out of the growing power of party and other machinery — a spirit which resents individual opinion, which clamours for uniformity and political Test Acts.
- Winston Churchill
The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
WHY 20 MILE MARCHERS WIN 20 Mile Marching helps turn the odds in your favor for three reasons: 1. It builds confidence in your ability to perform well in adverse circumstances. 2. It reduces the likelihood of catastrophe when you’re hit by turbulent disruption. 3. It helps you exert self-control in an out-of-control environment.
- James C. Collins
Competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking.
- Peter Thiel
I like winning. There’s also a certain joy in it. I feel fulfilled by it.
- Carl Icahn
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
A good idea is never lost. Even though its originator or possessor may die without publicizing it, it will someday be reborn in the mind of another….
- Thomas Edison
I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Everyone has the potential, but it isn’t accomplished overnight. It requires perseverance.
- John Maxwell
Profitability comes from loyalty, productivity, and having a character base from which to work.
- Zig Ziglar
We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.
- Joel Olsteen
Business Coach Quotes: A bully is playing a game, one that he or she enjoys and needs
- Seth Godin
I know if I stopped hosting ‘Wine Library TV,’ we’d probably lose 75 percent of our audience, but the remaining 25 percent is still a big number.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Research indicates that employees have three prime needs: Interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company.
- 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
So go ahead. Fall down. The world looks different from the ground.
- Oprah Winfrey
Access to play should be a kid’s inalienable right.
- Phil Knight
You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse.
- Elon Musk
Become genuinely interested in other people.
- Dale Carnegie
Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, ‘I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.’ That is why dogs make such a hit. They are so glad to see us that they almost jump out of their skins. So, naturally, we are glad to see them.
- Dale Carnegie
Don’t solicit feedback on your product, your idea, or your business just for validation purposes. Be really careful about that. You want to tell the people that can help move your idea forward. But if you’re just looking to your friend, coworker, husband, wife, for validation, be careful. Because out of love… a lot of people will express some concerns, and it can stop a lot of multi-million dollar ideas right in their tracks.
- Sara Blakely
The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.
- Peter Thiel
It’s the power of the brand. We’ve never formally advertised.
- Sara Blakely
But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you’re confident that you’ll catch a bird flying by. It’s an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn’t come by, but a few times it does.
- Reed Hastings
I don’t think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You’re always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it’ll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it’s always meant to be something. So, to me, there’s no practicing; there’s only editing and publishing or not publishing.
- Steve Martin
Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
- Ben Horowitz
You are the only person on earth who can use your ability. It’s an awesome responsibility.
- Zig Ziglar
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
If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it’s an incomparable experience.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Nobody is actually a natural C.E.O.
- Ben Horowitz
Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I’d put myself in the latter category. But I’d never call myself a normal designer of anything.
- Steve Wozniak
Excepting for reading my numbers on Saturday morning and going to our regular meetings, I don’t have much of a routine for anything else. I always carry my little tape recorder on trips, to record ideas that come up in my conversations with the associates. I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.
- Sam Walton
You guarantee a good meal by picking the recipes well, not by following recipes well.
- Timothy Ferriss
Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.
- Henry Ford
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise – security, quality and worms.
- Ben Horowitz
People development should be a daily event, integrated into every aspect of your regular goings-on.
- Jack Welch
We want Google to be the third half of your brain.
- Sergey Brin
Stay focused instead of getting offended or off track by others.
- John C. Maxwell
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
You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.
- Elon Musk
The real benefit of having goals is what you become by reaching them.
- Zig Ziglar
I love doing a lot of things I’m told I can’t do. I think that’s what drives me and keeps me awake every day.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Save them [Luke and Leia], we must. They are our last hope.
- Yoda
If you pay people peanuts, you will get monkeys.
- Andy Pearson
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
China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country but we turned them into coffee drinkers.
- Howard Schultz
Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.
- Reed Hastings
Over the past ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
- Ben Horowitz
Amateurs wait for inspiration. The real pros get up and go to work.
- Harvey Mackay
Poker is a game where you don’t have to have the best hand to win. Poker is really reading other people and reading human emotion, which certainly comes into play in business.
- Charles Ergen
There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.
- Henry Ford
The way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it.
- Phil Knight
We will make our products work out of the box.
- Steve Ballmer
Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.
- Donald Trump
I learned that a long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.
- Seth Godin
About two-thirds of us work between forty-five and fifty-five hours per week.
- Thomas J Stanley
