Notable Quotables

A good startup should have the potential for great scale built into its first design.

- Peter Thiel

Never allow anyone to get between you and your customers and suppliers.

- Jack Welch

India has the potential to be our biggest market in Asia, bigger than China, in as much as two to five years.

- John Chambers

Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy, profit from folly rather than participate in it.

- Warren Buffett

Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world.

- Joel Olsteen

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

- Steve Jobs

To be Jedi is to face the truth, and choose. Give off light, or darkness, Padawan. Be a candle, or the night.

- Yoda

Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. So start each day by thinking of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your future will depend very largely on the thoughts you think today. So think thoughts of hope and confidence and love and success.

- Dale Carnegie

If you neglect to recharge a battery, it dies. And if you run full speed ahead without stopping for water, you lose momentum to finish the race.

- Oprah Winfrey

It’s our obligation to use the law to the furthest possible means to protect our users’ privacy. It’s just a legal and ethical principle.

- Sergey Brin

We’re really going after truly creating sustainability of a disease-free state, creating a complete system for managing cancer patients for life, so that you can manage from onset of disease all the way through.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

- Robert Frost

If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.

- Peter Thiel

China’s open-door policy, the favourable local exchange rates, the growing affluence and changing lifestyles in South Asian countries and burgeoning economic activities in the Asia-Pacific Rim are all conducive factors to the continuing tourism boom.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The industrial age is ending, and a new one is beginning. It produces art instead of stuff and it rewards gracefulness.

- Seth Godin

I DECLARE I am special and extraordinary. I am not average! I have been custom-made. I am one of a kind. Of all the things God created, what He is the most proud of is me. I am His masterpiece, his most prized possession. I will keep my head held high, knowing I am a child of the most high God, made in his very image. This is my declaration.

- Joel Olsteen

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I think it’s a problem that we don’t have more companies like Facebook. It shouldn’t be the only company that’s doing this well.

- Peter Thiel

There is no accountability today… no willingness to focus on big ideas.

- Michael Bloomberg

The timing of your decision is just as important as the decision you make.

- John C. Maxwell

The knowledge worker is not poverty-prone. He is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair.

- Peter Drucker

The choice is between two ways of life: between individual liberty and State domination, between concentration of ownership in the hands of the State and the extension of ownership over the widest number of individuals, between the dead hand of monopoly and the stimulus of competition, between a policy of increasing restraint and a policy of liberating energy and ingenuity, between a policy of levelling down and a policy of opportunity for all to rise upwards from a basic standard.

- Winston Churchill

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

- Napoleon Hill

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

To win without risk is to triumph without glory.

- Confucius

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

- Winston Churchill

Windows 8 is key to the future, the Surface computer.

- Bill Gates

In any new business, someone has to have a vision. You are as good as the people around you. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Identify your core community and go from there. Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to. In my experience it often takes as long as five years to make a business work. Partners can fail you. Staff may not execute properly. You could be too far ahead of the market. SO you have to be willing to hand in there and make it happen. From the founding of Phat Farm in 1992 until 1997, I lost money. By my account, I experienced $10 million in losses. But today Phat Farm is visible, it is imitated and it generates hundreds of millions of dollars. It took time, but good ideas often do need time to take off. Being an entrepreneur requires instinct, fortitude and the ability to accept that the world does not run on your schedule. Sometimes you just have to believe.

- Russell Simmons

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

Try to look at your weakness and convert it into your strength. That’s success.

- Zig Ziglar

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.

- John C. Maxwell

If we don’t allow ourselves to make mistakes, we will never invest in things that are radical.

- Jeff Clavier

the average person is more interested in his or her own name than in all the other names on earth put together.

- Dale Carnegie

Every twenty-four hours God has a fresh new supply of grace, of favor, of wisdom, of forgiveness.

- Joel Olsteen

Here’s a statistician joke for your next hot date: Person A: What happens when Bill Gates walks into a bar of 55 people? Person B: I don’t know. What? Person A: The average net worth jumps to more than a billion dollars!

- Timothy Ferriss

If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.

- Seth Godin

We are in control of the one asset that we all give the most f#%ks about, and that is time.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The unsuccessful person is burdened by learning, and prefers to walk down familiar paths. Their distaste for learning stunts their growth and limits their influence.

- John C. Maxwell

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

- Winston Churchill

People have been indoctrinated so completely by their jobs that they don’t want to know how something works, they’re willing to accept that perhaps the laws of nature don’t work as they expect, and by the way, can I have the remote?

- Seth Godin

I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

- Timothy Ferriss

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 first ten minutes of sorting through clothing was like choosing which child of mine should live or die.

- Timothy Ferriss

The future of your organization depends on motivated human beings selflessly contributing unasked-for gifts of emotional labor.

- Seth Godin

A plan is always successful if the plan is good.

- Zig Ziglar

You have to learn to follow your heart. You can’t let other people pressure you into being something that you’re not. If you want God’s favor in your life, you must be the person He made you to be, not the person your boss wants you to be, not even the person your parents or your husband wants you to be. You can’t let outside expectations keep you from following your own heart.

- Joel Olsteen

My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had — everyday I’m learning something new.

- Richard Branson

Pay attention to those employees who respectfully ask why. They are demonstrating an interest in their jobs and exhibiting a curiosity that could eventually translate into leadership ability.

- Harvey Mackay

I never thought much about success early on. I only thought about being a comedian – or just being in show business, is really more accurate.

- Steve Martin

An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.

- Ben Horowitz

I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.

- Elon Musk

Going the extra mile is the action of rendering more and better service than that for which you are presently paid. When you go the extra mile, the Law of Compensation comes into play.

- Napoleon Hill

A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate

- Seth Godin

A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun.

- Peter Thiel

I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. I actually wanted to be Bruce Lee.

- Jack Dorsey

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

- Winston Churchill

Competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking.

- Peter Thiel

You can’t worry about the mistakes, because you’re going to make a lot of them. You’ve got to be thinking about your next move.

- Ben Horowitz

The employees who share innovative ideas may also be the folks who have some hidden talents that would help incorporate their suggestions.

- Harvey Mackay

Well, I am a Republican, and I would run as a Republican. And I have a lot of confidence in the Republican Party. I don’t have a lot of confidence in the president. I think what’s happening to this country is unbelievably bad. We’re no longer a respected country.

- Donald Trump

I think when companies are struggling, they don’t want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren’t interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it’s like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That’s slanted the whole thing quite a bit.

- Ben Horowitz

One of the first things you learn when you run an engineering organization is that a good quality assurance organization cannot build a high-quality product, but it can tell you when the development team builds a low quality product. Similarly, a high quality human resources organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done.

- Ben Horowitz

If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.

- Dale Carnegie

So long as I can stay mentally alert – inquiring, curious – I want to keep going. I love my wife and my children, but I don’t want to sit around at home with them. We go on safaris and things like that. I can do that for a couple of weeks a year. I’m just not ready to stop, to die.

- Rupert Murdoch

I’m not a public official. I’m a businessman, I’m a builder, I’m a planner.

- Donald Bren

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.

- Peter Drucker

It’s pretty chilly by southern California standards.

- Ed Clark

Most salespeople won’t stop talking long enough to let the Buyer make a decision.

- Jerry Vass

The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things.

- Ben Horowitz

Drucker said: ‘If you weren’t already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?’ … Simple, right? But incredibly powerful.

- Jack Welch

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

- Elon Musk

The most obvious market segment in email-based payments was the millions of emigrants still using Western Union to wire money to their families back home. Our product made that effortless, but the transactions were too infrequent.

- Peter Thiel

If my mother hadn’t been the most patient person in the world, I might never have gone to school.

- Ben Horowitz

In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it’s disruptive and it’s a problem.

- Ray Dalio

I think like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Failure is a great teacher. At the same time, you must remember, success will never last… Whether it’s tech or fashion, it must be for the customer.

- Tadashi Yanai

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

- John D. Rockefeller

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

I think what we’re lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.

- Howard Schultz

Success in dealing with people depends on a sympathetic grasp of the other person’s viewpoint.

- Dale Carnegie

In his rigidgly compartmentalized life, each hour was tightly budgeted, whether for business, religion, family or exercise. Perhaps those daily rituals helped him deal with the underlying tensions that might otherwise have become ungovernable, for although he tried to project to an air of unhurried calm, he was under terrific strain the surface, was constantly on edge. In one of his few admissions of weakness he recalled, for years on end I never had a solid night’s sleep, worrying about how it was to come out…I tossed about in bed night after night worrying over the outcome…All the fortune that I have made has not served to compensate for the anxiety of that period.

- Ron Chernow

Buda dijo: El odio nunca es vencido por el odio sino por el amor, y un malentendido no termina nunca gracias una discusión sino gracias al tacto, la diplomacia, la conciliación, y un sincero deseo de apreciar el punto de vista de los demás.

- Dale Carnegie

The jack-of-all-trades seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.

- Napoleon Hill

To integrate the new information into your existing network, you need to do three things: prioritize, organize and follow up on your contacts. You will follow your own inclinations, preferences and criteria for accomplishing each of these tasks, but the end result of your efforts should always be to strengthen, extend and enhance the effectiveness of your network of contacts.

- Ivan Misner

I do think – as self-serving as it sounds – that I was the right person, given the very, very strong headwind we had from the economy and our own issues, to come back and rewrite the future of the company.

- Howard Schultz

I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police…No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.

- Winston Churchill

Remarkable visions and genuine insights are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths – whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it’s over. If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it’s unlikely to be worth the journey. Persist.

- Seth Godin

In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle.

- Peter Thiel

GE’s businesses turned in a terrific first quarter. Our products and services are being well received in unusually robust global markets.

- Jack Welch

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