You only have to succeed the last time.
- Phil Knight
Notable Quotables
It’s not always easy to get over some of those bumps in the road, those disillusionments and disappointments. It’s going to take a strong will. Sometimes, it may take courage. Sometimes nothing but faith in God and say, I refuse to be trapped in the past. I’m not going to let the past destroy my future. I’m pressing on. I’m straining forward, knowing that God has great things in store for me.
- Joel Olsteen
A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt, long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.
- Winston Churchill
Every time you resist temptation you are winning for your children.
- Joel Olsteen
Just because you don’t announce your plan doesn’t mean you don’t have one.
- Herb Kelleher
Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
- Dale Carnegie
The idea flow from the human spirit is absolutely unlimited. All you have to do is tap into that well. I don’t like to use the word efficiency. It’s creativity. It’s a belief that every person counts.
- Jack Welch
This is the city of dreamers and time and again it’s the place where the greatest dream of all, the American dream, has been tested and has triumphed.
- Michael Bloomberg
Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.
- Brene Brown
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
Do extremely difficult work.That seems obvious, right? If you do something that’s valued but scarce because it’s difficult, you’re more likely to be in demand and to be compensated fairly for what you do.The implication is stunning, though: When designing a project or developing a skill, seek out the most difficult parts to master and contribute. If it’s easy, it’s not for you.
- Seth Godin
I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.
- Tony Robbins
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
When I was little, I wanted to be an astronomer, but that didn’t happen.
- Ma Huateng
When life gives you lemons make lemonade!!
- Dale Carnegie
I think there’s a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
- Ben Horowitz
A lack of realism in the vision today costs credibility tomorrow.
- John C. Maxwell
A long while ago, a great warrior faced a situation which made it necessary for him to make a decision which insured his success on the battlefield. He was about to send his armies against a powerful foe, whose men outnumbered his own. He loaded his soldiers into boats, sailed to the enemy’s country, unloaded soldiers and equipment, then gave the order to burn the ships that had carried them. Addressing his men before the first battle, he said, ‘You see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores alive unless we win! We now have no choice—we win, or we perish!’ They won. Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat. Only by so doing can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win, essential to success.
- Napoleon Hill
There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.
- Elon Musk
The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.
- John C. Maxwell
There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.
- Bill Gates
Power should be reserved for weightlifting and boats, and leadership really involves responsibility.
- Herb Kelleher
It’s easier to add things on to a PC than it’s ever been before. It’s one click, and boom, it comes down.
- Bill Gates
Remember: There is a direct correlation between an increased sphere of comfort and getting what you want.
- Timothy Ferriss
You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do. Once you decide, you should immediately execute the reorg: Don’t leave time for leaks and lobbying.
- Ben Horowitz
By getting your customers to agree with you in small steps along the way, you have a better chance of reaching agreement when it’s time to do business.
- Harvey Mackay
KNOWLEDGE will not attract money, unless it is organized, and intelligently directed, through practical PLANS OF ACTION, to the DEFINITE END of ac- cumulation of money. Lack of understanding of this fact has been the source of confusion to millions of people who falsely believe that knowledge is power. It is nothing of the sort! Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when, and if, it is organized into definite plans of action, and directed to a definite end.
- Napoleon Hill
The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it’s enormously useful in life.
- Larry Ellison
Kickstarter isn’t a profit center, it’s an organizer and an instigator.
- Seth Godin
Definiteness of purpose is the starting point from which one must begin. He recognized, too that definiteness of purpose of takes on animation, life, and power when backed by a burning desire to translate that purpose into its material equivalent. – Napoleon Hill (on leadership and vision)
- Napoleon Hill
It is no ordindary desire that survives disappointment, discouragement, temporary defeat, criticism, and the constant reminding of waste of time. It is a burning desire an obsession! – Napoleon Hill (on leadership)
- Napoleon Hill
America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.
- Elon Musk
China is a government-oriented economy. No one can say he can run his business entirely without government connections. Anybody who says that he or she can do things alone… is a hypocrite.
- Wang Jianlin
Education is the ability to meet life’s situations.
- Dr. John G. Hibben
I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.
- John D. Rockefeller
It is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing what it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot . .
- Zig Ziglar
The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.
- Timothy Ferriss
America gets its opinions from advertising.
- Phil Knight
Money doesn’t change you, it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.
- Timothy Ferriss
Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed and quality of those decisions.
- Ben Horowitz
The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.
- Anthony Robbins
India has the potential to be our biggest market in Asia, bigger than China, in as much as two to five years.
- John Chambers
Always remember that your present situation is not your final destination. The best is yet to come.
- Zig Ziglar
The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.
- Peter Thiel
All of the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind.
- Winston Churchill
The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: ‘Does your teacher use class time well?’ and, ‘When you’re confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?
- Bill Gates
If God says I’m highly favored, then I will not talk myself out of it. I believe I’m highly favored. If God says the impossible can happen, then I believe the impossible will happen.
- Joel Olsteen
When commercializing disruptive technologies, they found or developed new markets that valued the attributes of the disruptive products, rather than search for a technological breakthrough so that the disruptive product could compete as a sustaining technology in mainstream markets.
- Clayton M. Christensen
You have to get all agreements in writing.
- Jack Nadel
Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.
- Donald Trump
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 Italians live well. They have problems, like all countries, but they are well-dressed, the women are pretty.
- Francois Pinault
Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.
- Colin Powell
This morning did you wake up to an alarm clock, or an “opportunity” clock?
- Zig Ziglar
Teaching Fire a LessonFire is hot. That’s what it does. If you get burned by fire, you can be annoyed at yourself, but being angry at fire doesn’t do you much good. And trying to teach the fire a lesson so it won’t be hot next time is certainly not time well spent.Our inclination is to give fire a pass, because it’s not human. But human beings are similar, in that they’re not going to change any time soon either.
- Seth Godin
I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. I do not read management or economics.
- Peter Drucker
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
- Og Mandino
Mr Churchill, to what do you attribute your success in life? Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down
- Winston Churchill
There is no education like adversity.
- Benjamin Disraeli
I am pleased with the strides we’ve made in our global equipment business where revenues grew 41 percent this past quarter and 37 percent year-to-date, … The strong dollar continues to negatively impact our European results constant dollar revenues in Europe were up 23 percent in the second quarter.
- Phil Knight
It is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days, first to show how easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous…
- Winston Churchill
I was uncomfortable with the timing, … We were getting millions less from the federal government for Medicaid and having to search for funds to restore some of those cuts and I just did not think it was right to put a pay raise on the board that would cost tens of millions of dollars.
- Michael Gerber
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
We were trading things before we were using language to communicate.
- Jack Dorsey
I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.
- John D. Rockefeller
The Chinese government still would like to see U.S. Internet companies explore the Chinese market, providing they are willing to abide by Chinese law. I think companies like Facebook should think about the Chinese market.
- Robin Li
Actresses are kind of a little crazy.
- Russell Simmons
My biggest wish is for government, the private sector and all of us to work together to make the Philippines the best tourism destination in Southeast Asia.
- Henry Sy
In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
- Ben Horowitz
Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.
- Dale Carnegie
Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.
- Ben Horowitz
A magnificent blueprint, a loyal team and a well-coordinated organization… the same applies from ruling a country to maintaining a family.
- Cheng Yu-tung
To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That’s what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games – nothing like saving the world.
- Elon Musk
In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.
- Peter Thiel
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
- John Wooden
View your future wealth as current debt.
- Clay Clark
Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
- Steve Jobs
When you import goods, you import poverty and you export jobs to other parts of the globe where such goods are produced.
- Aliko Dangote
Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.
- Dale Carnegie
My commitment is to Los Angeles, so whatever helps this continue to be a great city, that’s what I would be focused to do, and the Dodgers are certainly iconic to Los Angeles.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
We think of Starbucks not as a coffee company but a media company.
- Howard Schultz
I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.
- Donald Trump
The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out.
- Peter Thiel
You walk into a retail store, whatever it is, and if there’s a sense of entertainment and excitement and electricity, you wanna be there.
- Howard Schultz
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly–until you can learn to do it well.
- Zig Ziglar
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
My wife thinks she’s better than me at puzzles. I haven’t given in on that one yet.
- Bill Gates
Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present, good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.
- Peter Thiel
Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
- Peter Thiel
I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
- Steve Martin
I think long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia.
- Elon Musk
Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it’s my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.
- Jerry Seinfeld
One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace, good people don’t go into government.
- Donald Trump
If you want to build a dynasty, you need to always be focused on getting better and beating last year’s performance in everything you do. You want to eliminate peaks and valleys, what we call boom, splat, and go for a good steady incline.
- David Novak
If you pay people peanuts, you will get monkeys.
- Andy Pearson
We would be interested in anything used by neurologists, such as treatments for epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and pain medication.
- David Pyott
[On a small business class taught at university by Frank Shallenberger] Shallenberger started by defining the type of person who was an entrepreneur, and I realized he was talking to me.
- Phil Knight
A company only has so much money. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest… Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.
- Jack Welch
Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared, but only men of character are trusted.
- Zig Ziglar
