I kept saying, Sam, we’re making a good living. Why go out why expand so much more? The stores are getting farther and farther away. After the seventeenth store, though, I realized there wasn’t going to any stopping it.
- Helen Walton
Notable Quotables
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
The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth.
- Stephen Wynn
I’m afraid Japanese people tend to collective hysteria.
- Tadashi Yanai
You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.
- Richard Branson
There’s nothing – I’ve bought everything I want. I don’t like yachts or anything; you know, I’m not a yacht person, and I’ve got pretty much the nicest plane I’d want to have.
- Elon Musk
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
I remember clearly when the financial plan – If i may call it so – of my life was formed. It was out in Ohio, under the ministration of a dear old minister who preached, Get money; get it honestly, and then give it away wisely. I wrote that down in a little book.
- Ron Chernow
The Cul-de-Sac ( French for “dead end” ) … is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing much changes.
- Seth Godin
I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
- Winston Churchill
A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he was born with.
- Alexander Graham Bell
Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.
- Dale Carnegie
Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.
- Seth Godin
However old or young, have a mindset that enables us to capture all the opportunities that changes in the world are bringing to us.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.
- Jack Ma
The top salesperson in the organization probably missed more sales than 90% of the sales people on the team, but they also made more calls than the others made.
- Zig Ziglar
A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.
- John D. Rockefeller
Wealth won’t give you satisfaction, creating a good product that’s well received by users is what matters most.
- Ma Huateng
Whether you’re 9 or 90, stop trying to fix the things you’re bad at, and focus on the things you’re good at.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.
- Larry Ellison
In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.
- Elon Musk
Let your motto then always be ‘Excelsior’, for by living up to it there is no such word as fail.
- P.T. Barnum
Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.
- Bill Gates
You won’t get anything unless you have the vision to imagine it.
- John Lennon
Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
- Winston Churchill
The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.
- George Soros
FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON THE NUMBERS In the second example, I managed the team to a set of numbers that did not fully capture what I wanted. I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time—in that order. Unfortunately, the metrics that I set did not capture those priorities. At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them at every staff meeting, my people focused intensely on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result. Interestingly, I see this same problem play out in many consumer Internet startups. I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product. It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.
- Ben Horowitz
Cuando dos socios siempre están de acuerdo, uno de ellos no es necesario.
- Dale Carnegie
[Retail] seemed more interesting than what I was doing.
- Michael Balmuth
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
- Winston Churchill
If I hadn’t given my money away, I’d have had more than anyone else on the planet.
- Bill Gates
“Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.”
- Sam Walton
Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. To know all is to forgive all.
- Dale Carnegie
We found that for leaders to make something great, their ambition has to be for the greatness of the work and the company, rather than for themselves.
- James C. Collins
You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow, too.
- Sam Rayburn
If you say too much or mix in multiple pitches, you diffuse your goal. You must give the media a pitch they can hit.
- Michael Levine
Even if we are right and the other person is definitely wrong, we only destroy ego by causing someone to lose face. 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
And you know, I’ve had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.
- Richard Branson
You were designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness.
- Zig Ziglar
The only question with wealth is, what do you do with it?
- John D. Rockefeller
Today’s stock price is X, tommorrow’s is up to you.
- Sam Walton
Winners expect to win, they expect victory, and they expect success!
- Zig Ziglar
I already told you that it is 100% outside buyers.
- Lee Shau Kee
Control has to be by feedback from the work done. The work itself has to provide the information. If it has to be checked all the time, there is no control.
- Peter Drucker
Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.
- Elon Musk
What is closest to my heart is our education program.
- Henry Sy
Initiative = Happiness
- Seth Godin
Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
Working to fulfill someone else’s needs or dreams almost always catches up with you.
- Jack Welch
Life’s too short to spend it trying to keep others happy. You can’t please everyone. To fulfill your destiny, stay true to your heart.
- Joel Olsteen
The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
- Winston Churchill
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
My two primary areas of focus have been open-space conservation and education, and I expect those to remain my priorities in the future. The Irvine open space and parklands provide serenity and balance to our unique Orange County lifestyle.
- Donald Bren
We do benefit from the fact that once we say we’re going to do it, people believe we can do it, because we have the resources. Google helps in that way: There aren’t many funding mechanisms like that.
- Larry Page
This proves our strategy is working in terms of the convergence of voice, video and data.
- John Chambers
In some ways, running a successful business is a bit like coaching a football team. The fundamentals of football are blocking and tackling. The fundamentals of a business are it’s governing policies andprocesses. To carry out the metaphor, touchdowns are profits. The best business idea in the world cannot survive bad execution. So when you sit down to develop your workflow, internal policies, and business structure, be merciless, probe for weaknesses and assume that the worst will happen. – Jack Nadel (Author&Entrepreneur)
- Jack Nadel
Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.
- Seth Godin
A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate
- Seth Godin
You can’t win by being more average than average.
- Seth Godin
The most “successful” companies seemed to embrace a sort of anti-business model where they lost money as they grew.
- Peter Thiel
If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.
- Elon Musk
My biggest crisis is that I don’t understand what young people like.
- Ma Huateng
The result of information overload is usually distraction, and it dilutes your focus and takes you off your game.
- Zig Ziglar
Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society, they’re powerful engines for making it better.
- Peter Thiel
“High expectations are the key to everything.”
- Sam Walton
I have a lot of things to prove to myself. One is that I can live my life fearlessly.
- Oprah Winfrey
If I complain about a traffic jam, I have no one to blame but myself.
- Stephen Wynn
Mike suggested that we might want to turn our stockholders’ meetings into an event, and we went along with him.
- Sam Walton
Wal-Mart is an amazing success story. What I particularly admire very much about the late Sam Walton was his policy of valuing his employees. Giving value to employees is very rare in the retail industry. I also admire the strategies Walton used to build up his discount store concept.
- Tadashi Yanai
The greatest of all mistakes is to do nothing because you think you can only do a little.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s not about how to get started, it’s about how to get noticed.
- Steve Case
I’m not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative.
- Steve Ballmer
The way of the warrior: keep death in mind at all times. If a warrior keeps death in mind at all times and lives as though each day might be his last, he will conduct himself properly in all his actions.
- Principle of the Bushido
I put forward a pretty general theory that financial markets are intrinsically unstable. That we really have a false picture when we think about markets tending towards equilibrium.
- George Soros
I think sometimes the critics want me to beat people down, and that’s not in me. I want to lift people up.
- Joel Olsteen
India has over 20 percent of the kids born in the world. And they move around a lot.
- Bill Gates
I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.
- Jack Dorsey
What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
- Napoleon Hill
I’m a reverend and a pastor. A pastor of the church. I go by usually pastor
- Joel Olsteen
It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.
- John C. Maxwell
CNN is pretty consistently on the left, if you look at their choice of stories, what they play up. It’s not what they say. It’s what they highlight.
- Rupert Murdoch
Your network is your net worth.
- Porter Gale
Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.
- Richard Branson
We believe the competitive and economic environment will remain very challenging in the year ahead. Whilst we think we have the opportunity to make improvements to some of our ranges, we are still budgeting on the basis of negative like-for-like retail sales for the year.
- Simon Wolfson
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
Mind you, I got this reduction without saying a word about what I wanted. I talked all the time about what the other person wanted and how he could get it.
- Dale Carnegie
The great news is that God knows everything about you, both good and bad, and He still loves you and values you unconditionally. God does not always approve of our behavior. He is not pleased when we go against his will, and when we do, we always suffer the consequences and have to work with Him to correct our thoughts, words, actions, or attitudes. And while you should work to improve in the areas where you fall short, nothing you do will ever cause God to love you less…or more. His love is a constant you can depend on.
- Joel Olsteen
The main thing that’s missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics.
- Bill Gates
If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.
- Bill Gates
I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category.
- Jeff Bezos
I am more of a creative person. I recognize that about myself, which is why I hired my weaknesses early on. I think if most founders don’t relinquish some control, then we hold back the development of our companies.
- Sara Blakely
But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. 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
At the end of the day, effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible. They give people a clear sense of the direction to profitability and the inspiration to feel they are part of something big and important.
- Jack Welch
The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great. There is an important.
- James C. Collins
Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they’ve succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.
- Ben Horowitz
The people who work within these industries or public services know that there are basic flaws. But they are almost forced to ignore them and to concentrate instead on patching here, improving there, fighting the fire or caulking that crack. They are thus unable to take the innovation seriously, let alone to try to compete with it. They do not, as a rule, even notice it until it has grown so big as to encroach on their industry or service, by which time it has become irreversible. In the meantime, the innovators have the field to themselves.
- Peter Drucker
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
There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.
- Winston Churchill
There are no rules here — we’re trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison
