Notable Quotables

Why don’t you start believing that no matter what you have or haven’t done, that your best days are still out in front of you.

- Joel Olsteen

“What would you do if capital were free?” is a dangerous question to ask an entrepreneur. It’s kind of like asking a fat person, “What would you do if ice cream had the exact same nutritional value as broccoli?”

- Ben Horowitz

If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.

- Bill Gates

True leadership cannot be awarded, appointed or assigned. It comes only from influence, and that can’t be mandated. It must be earned. The only thing that a title can buy is a little time.

- Napoleon Hill

I have had a long, long life full of troubles, but there is one curious fact about them-nine-tenths of them never happened.

- Andrew Carnegie

People who enjoy what they are doing invariably do it well.

- Joe Gibbs

Expect the unexpected. And whenever possible, be the unexpected. I try to live by that on a daily basis.

- Jack Dorsey

Every breakthrough business idea begins with solving a common problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. I discovered a big one when I took apart an IBM PC. I made two interesting discoveries: The components were all manufactured by other companies, and the system that retailed for $3,000 cost about $600 in parts.

- Michael Dell

The choice to be excellent begins with aligning your thoughts and words with the intention to require more from yourself.

- Oprah Winfrey

Starting isn’t like that. Starting something is not an event; it’s a series of events. You decide to walk to Cleveland. So you take a first step in the right direction. That’s starting. You spend the rest of the day walking toward Cleveland, one step at a time, picking your feet up and putting them down. At the end of the day, twenty miles later, you stop at a hotel. And what happens the next morning? Either you quit the project or you start again, walking to Cleveland. In fact, every step is a new beginning. Sure, you’re closer than you were yesterday or last week, but you’re still…

- Seth Godin

When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves – their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

- Peter Drucker

We may get knocked down on the outside, but the key to living in victory is to learn how to get up on the inside.

- Joel Olsteen

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Just learn from the guys who have already done it well. You need a mentor, a seasoned coach who is willing to share his wisdom and experience with you. Ask someone who has already been successful to guide you.

- George Foreman

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

You can abuse me, you can strike me, so long as you let me have my own.

- Ron Chernow

I don’t think we like the precedent of it, and so we’re fighting it. I think we’re right.

- Sergey Brin

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

- Jeff Bezos

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

It may look like the difficulty is going to defeat you. But you need to keep telling yourself, This sickness can’t take my life.” This cancer can’t defeat me.” No bad break, no disappointment, no accident can shorten one second of my divine destiny.

- Joel Olsteen

If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.

- Seth Godin

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

- Bob Dylan

Over the years, Hong Kong has been confronted with various challenges. On every occasion, we were able to rely on our unique qualities – resourcefulness, perseverance, diligence and passion for excellence – to rise above our difficulties.

- Cheng Yu-tung

America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.

- Elon Musk

I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage — leverage being borrowed money. You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing.

- Warren Buffett

In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will.

- Bill Gates

I was leading a lot of idea and the vision for where the product was going. Ev [Evan Williams] was funding and supporting what we were doing. He put the shelter over our heads. And Biz [Stone] was just an amazingly creative guy.

- Jack Dorsey

Today, we’ve begun to make the extraordinary historic films of the National Archives available to the world for the first time online. Students and researchers whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh can watch remarkable video such as World War II newsreels and the story of Apollo 11 — the historic first landing on the Moon.

- Sergey Brin

Well we know that people in Austrailia love the idea of both Impulse and Virgin Blue getting up and adding a bit of competition, and it’s fun to be able to deliver it.

- Richard Branson

I’ve learned that people will seldom let you down if they understand that your destiny is in their hands, and vice versa.

- Harvey Mackay

The goal is to get the buyer to like and trust you.

- Clay Clark

I think they are fine. I don’t think you have a choice between iPad models so that’s just saying that the iPad is good … that’s a very different statement (and contrary to the implication) that, if I chose not to upgrade now, less than a year after my last upgrade, then I, Woz, am saying that the new Apple iPad is bad.

- Steve Wozniak

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

Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy. The other side of it is that you can’t cut enough costs to save your way to prosperity.

- Howard Schultz

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

We’ll continue to expand our footprint… Oracle’s Fusion cloud applications for HCM, CRM and ERP all have a new simplified user interface and an integrated social network that makes our enterprise applications as easy-to-use and familiar as Facebook, while enabling better collaboration and teamwork among your employees and your customers.

- Larry Ellison

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

- Winston Churchill

There is more treasure in books then in all pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

- Walt Disney

Allow yourself to get on the same side of the desk and solve the problems together.

- Jack Nadel

If we’re going to bring out the best in people, we, too, need to sow seeds of encouragement.

- Joel Olsteen

Throughout this quarter of a century, the entrepreneurial outlook, versatility and vision of our employees have remained the crucial elements of our success…

- Cheng Yu-tung

Pick a movement. Pick something you believe in. Pick something you want to have an impact in and then question every single thing and be a founder, and be an entrepreneur inside those organizations and inside that movement.

- Jack Dorsey

Make your team feel respected, empowered and genuinely excited about the company’s mission.

- Tim Westergren

Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

- Peter Thiel

Control your own destiny or someone else will.

- Jack Welch

There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.

- Winston Churchill

When we recognize the fraud for what it is, we feel incredibly stupid. Something more than our bank accounts is damaged—our egos are damaged. As a result, it’s almost impossible for the marketer to regain our trust.

- Seth Godin

My first account was Neiman Marcus. I cold-called them just like I had cold-called businesses when I was selling fax machines for seven years.

- Sara Blakely

The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naïve optimism.

- Peter Thiel

In the simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where he wants to go, and gets up and goes.

- John Erskine

Life is actually far better than it is in the movies. And it takes longer.

- Seth Godin

The better at communicating you are, and the more people you communicate to, the better your cash flow will be.

- Robert Kiyosaki

We are focusing on the increasing need for mobility and growing demand from our industrial customers. The production volume for vehicles weighing up to six tons is expected to rise to between 100 million and 105 million vehicles. Furthermore, installation of electronics and software will continue to grow substantially, driven by growing demands from end-users and increasingly strict legal requirements for safety and energy consumption. It is partly on this basis that we are aiming for profitable sales of over €50 billion in 2020.

- Elmar Degenhart

The special prosecutor basically supported what we had told the Board of Elections all along.

- Michael Ward

I think we are not serious about attacking the long-term debt problem, and that’s one of the things that he’s going to have to find a way to get on the agenda.

- Michael Bloomberg

If you’re looking for an abdominal exercise well-suited to power development without bulk, look no further than the Janda sit-up.

- Timothy Ferriss

One of the most important management lessons for a founder/CEO is totally unintuitive. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.

- Ben Horowitz

A man must choose his own way of life, and…it is only by following out one’s own bent that there can be the really harmonious life.

- Winston Churchill

At 25, I was in the audience of my first professional speaker, Bob Bales. His presentation got my attention. I had never seen anyone having so much fun ‘at work’ and getting paid for it!

- Zig Ziglar

All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.

- Peter Thiel

We think a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade. We don’t decide for you.

- Larry Ellison

Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.

- Larry Ellison

It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.

- Winston Churchill

Many companies today are reducing hours of full-time people to get under the minimum so they don’t have to pay health care costs. I just shake my head because that’s not going to build long-term value and trust with your people.

- Howard Schultz

Southwest consistently turns a profit because they have an employee ownership program that gives their employees a sense of ownership that is very real. When the company does well financially, the employees do well financially. When the company struggles, the employees struggle.

- Clay Clark

You won’t get anything unless you have the vision to imagine it.

- John Lennon

I am going to enjoy some other things apart from business.

- Jack Ma

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

We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger, how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.

- Winston Churchill

With communication technology in general, there’s a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world’s entire population using one communication technology, that’s a big deal. It’s beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it’s a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.

- Ben Horowitz

The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs. It’s no surprise that entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975. To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make things better just by sending out more checks.

- Peter Thiel

You have in the U.S. around two million new diagnoses of cancer a year, and 13 million survivors, so you have about 10,000 patients that require analysis every day. That’s about five petabytes that need to be transmitted and computed on a daily basis.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

The question you should be asking isn’t, What do I want? or What are my goals? but What would excite me?

- Timothy Ferriss

If a job doesn’t excite you on some level—just because of the stuff of it—don’t settle.

- Jack Welch

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

- Helen Keller

Well, all comedy starts with anger. You get angry, and its never for a good reason, right? You know its not a good reason. And then you try and work it from there.

- Jerry Seinfeld

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

Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it’s a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.

- Ray Dalio

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

- Henry Ford

It’s hard for me to imagine how a $50 million marketing campaign is ever appropriate for any business to launch an ideavirus. If you need to interrupt that many people, you’re doing something wrong.

- Seth Godin

One of my favorite perks was picking out an issue and doing what I called a deep dive. It’s spotting a challenge where you think you can make a difference…one that looks like it would be fun, and then throwing the weight of your position behind it. Some might justifiably call it meddling….I followed up on all of them with a passion and a mania that often veered toward the lunatic fringe…To make the initiatives work, it took a passionate all-consuming commitment from the top. Beyond passion, there was alot of rigor…Making initiates successful is all about focus and passionate commitment. The drumbeat must be relentlessness. Every leadership action must demonstrate total committment to the initiative….I was an outrageous champion of everything that we did from our early need to face reality and change the culture to our major initiatives that reshaped the company. Whenever I had an idea or message that I wanted to drive into the organization, I could never say it enough. I repeated it over and over, at every meeting and review for years, until I could almost gag on the words.

- Jack Welch

Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.

- Seth Godin

I’m not a big believer in trying to jam stuff down somebody’s throat: ‘You’re going to do it my way.’ I’d rather show by example and live my life and have people say, ‘You know what, I want to live like Joel has. He’s got peace and joy, and he seems content.’

- Joel Olsteen

My big focus is China and OPEC and all of these countries that are just absolutely destroying the United States.

- Donald Trump

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

- Jeff Bezos

I definitely think there’s some way to understand how people emotionally feel about somebody, but I don’t think data collects it. They’re not going to click your bit.ly link or click your TweetMeme retweet every time.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

If your message is not getting heard, then it doesn’t much matter what it is…Breaking through the clutter is such a powerful concept that even when it’s done badly it can still work. Once I graduated from college I needed a job quickly. I was applying to advertising agencies, so rather than send out a typical one-page resume, I made up this dinky little brochure. It had my picture on the front and on the back a little poem I had written about why someone should hire me… – David Novak CEO of Yum! Brands

- David Novak

[On the cost to found Nike] Six hundred dollars each. Twelve hundred dollars total investment.

- Phil Knight

Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.

- Ray Dalio

Europe has always represented a major strategic opportunity to achieve our goal of creating and building an enduring global brand.

- Howard Schultz

If something is worth doing, it is worth doing right. I take that one step further. You shouldn’t do anything unless you do it right.

- George Foreman

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