When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.
- Warren Buffett
Notable Quotables
Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. The reason is simple: it’s easier to dominate a small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.
- Peter Thiel
Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ we will fall, but ‘when.’ There are no exceptions.
- John C. Maxwell
The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.
- Thomas Edison
Meeting Coach Wooden, the most humble leader I’ve ever met, made me think about my ego, about as the wise John Weinberg once put it, the difference between growing and swelling.
- David Novak
Google’s motto—“Don’t be evil”—is in part a branding ploy, but it’s also characteristic of a kind of business that’s successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence.
- Peter Thiel
The skill sets it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, a successful marketer, or a relevant celebrity is a different skill set than you needed ten years ago, even though that was the skill set that mattered for decades.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Flavor is, counterintuitively, less than 10% taste and more than 90% smell.
- Timothy Ferriss
I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: He is nothing but a boy — a little boy!
- Dale Carnegie
[On Twitter] We believe that fundamentally we are building a utility.
- Jack Dorsey
The average occupancy rate of the core investment properties of the group was maintained at a high level of 96%.
- Lee Shau Kee
A plan is always successful if the plan is good.
- Zig Ziglar
Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.
- James C. Collins
I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.
- Seth Godin
I don’t believe that government is good at picking technology, particularly technology that is changing. By the time you get it done and go through democracy, it’s so outdated.
- Michael Bloomberg
If you can’t be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can.
- Seth Godin
The world of the 1990s and beyond will not belong to ‘managers’ or those who can make the numbers dance. The world will belong to passionate, driven leaders – people who not only have enormous amounts of energy but who can energize those whom they lead.
- Jack Welch
Frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
- Jeff Bezos
The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.
- Michael Bloomberg
Don’t think small when you pray. God has a way to bring your dreams to pass if you’ll dare to be bold enough to ask.
- Joel Olsteen
I once dieted so religiously I quit eating in church.
- Zig Ziglar
“It’s clear there’s a lot of room for improvement, there’s no inherent ceiling we’re hitting up on.
- Sergey Brin
I didn’t try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.
- Joel Olsteen
There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.
- Napoleon Hill
I never lie, so if somebody asked me a question, I told them.
- Michael Bloomberg
Some people keep God in a Sunday morning box and say, ‘Hey, I did my religious duty.’ That’s fine, but the scripture says to pray without ceasing. And I think that means all through the day you’re talking to God. Even if it’s in your thoughts.
- Joel Olsteen
Once you’ve engaged with an organization or a relationship or a community, you owe it to your team to start. To initiate. To be the one who makes something happen. To do less is to steal from them. If you hide your spark, bury your ideas, keep your questions and notions from the team, you have hurt them as badly as if you had stolen a laptop and fenced it on eBay.
- Seth Godin
Look back in forgiveness, forward in hope, down in compassion, and up with gratitude.
- Zig Ziglar
A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast. Good news travels slow.
- Ben Horowitz
I love creating partnerships; I love not having to bear the entire burden of the creative storytelling, and when I have unions like with George Lucas and Peter Jackson, it’s really great; not only do I benefit, but the project is better for it.
- Steven Spielberg
We are currently not planning on conquering the world.
- Sergey Brin
We are interested in any sector with good growth potential.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
Cisco’s collaboration with AT&T and GI will result in a New World network that will fundamentally change the way communications services are delivered to the consumer market.
- John Chambers
The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.
- Sergey Brin
Without failure there is no achievement.
- John C. Maxwell
There is a good saying to the effect that when a new book appears one should read an old one.
- Winston Churchill
Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital – the world’s best talents and greatest ideas.
- Jack Welch
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
- Walter Lippmann
I think Starbucks created a platform and, ultimately, a runway for many other companies to emulate. I suspect if we had not achieved what we have, there would have been many regional brands that would have succeeded. But I’m not sure there would have been a national brand of the scope of Starbucks.
- Howard Schultz
Salga de la rutina, extienda su visión y comience a dar gracias a Dios por las bendiciones explosivas que llegarán a su camino.
- Joel Olsteen
I want to challenge you today to get out of your comfort zone. You have so much incredible potential on the inside. God has put gifts and talents in you that you probably don’t know anything about.
- Joel Olsteen
Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.
- Peter Thiel
I’m not a tech guy. I’m looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people’s eyes.
- Jack Ma
By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.
- Mark Zuckerberg
I will always serve my country in any capacity, but I’m very happy with what I’m doing right now.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Sound character provides the power with which a person may ride the emergencies of life instead of being overwhelmed by them. Failure is… the highway to success.
- Og Mandino
Life is not fair – get used to it!
- Bill Gates
I told [John Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted ‘Mary had a little lamb’, etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly.
- Thomas Edison
[On the cost to found Nike] Six hundred dollars each. Twelve hundred dollars total investment.
- Phil Knight
Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.
- Napoleon Hill
We only get to play this game one time…one life.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
[In June 2011] I mean, what is Twitter? Ask 100 people, ‘what is the world?’ and you’ll get a thousand different answers. The same is true for Twitter. It’s different things to different people. Twitter is the world.
- Jack Dorsey
You cannot expect to live a positive life if you hang with negative people.
- Joel Olsteen
Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.
- Bill Gates
Our underwear used to just be cotton, but we wanted to see if we could create something out of synthetics.
- Tadashi Yanai
Long ago, Ben Graham taught me that ‘Price is what you pay; value is what you get.’ Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.
- Warren Buffett
The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.)
- James C. Collins
Dr. Carl Jung said: During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of hie, that is to say, over thirty-five, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.
- Dale Carnegie
Practice is simply preparation for success.
- Zig Ziglar
In fact, stories only magnify the need to have something remarkable (and honest) to say.
- Seth Godin
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
Value is what you get.
- Warren Buffett
Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.
- Seth Godin
In Riyadh, there’s going to be a huge project that will house at least 12,000 units with inhabitants of approximately 150,000 people. It’s like a city within a city.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
You know you’re getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It’s like, ‘See if you can blow this out.’
- Jerry Seinfeld
The market … demands a signal from you that you’re serious, powerful, accepted, and safe.
- Seth Godin
Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.
- Peter Thiel
Courage is on display every day, and only the courageous wring the most out of life.
- Zig Ziglar
all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.
- Timothy Ferriss
I would summarize the quarter as a solid quarter from a revenue and earnings per share perspective and a strong quarter from an orders perspective.
- John Chambers
I will not allow yesterday’s success to lull me into today’s complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure.
- Og Mandino
When I started working on Southwest Airlines, I kid you not, only people flying on business and very wealthy people ever flew.
- Herb Kelleher
Control your own destiny or someone else will.
- Jack Welch
I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.
- Andrew Carnegie
I believe that God breathed life into every person and that every person is made in the image of God and you have accept them as they are, on their journey. I’m not here to preach hate or push people down.
- Joel Olsteen
Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you’re average, and average is for losers.
- Seth Godin
I think the positive competition between states in India is one of the most positive dynamics that the country has.
- Bill Gates
Great ideas originate in the muscles.
- Thomas Edison
Globally, business and government leaders are beginning to dramatically transform their traditional business models into Internet economy business models, … Customers are increasingly seeking Cisco’s expertise to help them through this transformation.
- John Chambers
I now eat four Brazil nuts and one tablespoon of almond butter first thing upon waking.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.
- Benjamin Franklin
We just sort of factor all that information into the computer between the ears and come up with conclusions.
- Phil Knight
By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.
- Bill Gates
Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.
- Walt Disney
My dad is like a cactus – introverted and tough. I’m a people person, like my mom, but I got my competitiveness from my dad. He came to this country from Belarus with nothing and built a real business. He’s my hero for giving me that need to run a business and for having enormous confidence in me.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Do it, and then you will feel motivated to do it.
- Zig Ziglar
You are looking at an economy that most CEOs are going to believe will be a good economy for 2006. Most CEOs are saying they are going to spend both on hiring of people and on technology.
- John Chambers
A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.
- Peter Thiel
The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.
- Jeff Bezos
Make youself necessary to someone.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward.
- Thomas Edison
Psychological despotism, whether enlightened or not, is gross misuse of psychology. The main purpose of psychology is to acquire insight into, and mastery of, oneself. Not for nothing were what we now call the behavioral sciences originally called the moral sciences and “Know thyself” their main precept. To use psychology to control, dominate, and manipulate others is self-destructive abuse of knowledge. It is also a particularly repugnant form of tyranny.
- Peter Drucker
What you receive is directly connected to what you believe.
- Joel Olsteen
It was a big momentum deal, so when the bottom comes out from under it, you have to go back to the well and start the whole thing.
- Travis Kalanick
Some conflicts are simply territorial. For instance, I’ve rarely met a marketing person who wanted to raise prices and I’ve rarely met a finance person who wanted to lower prices.
- David Novak
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
- General George S. Patton
Maintain a pragmatic approach, keep up with the multitude of trials and strive to remain its level of attainment in order for achieving sound performance and scaling new heights.
- Cheng Yu-tung
When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world
- George Washington Carver
Chaos in the midst of chaos isn’t funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.
- Steve Martin
