Notable Quotables

I think it’d be crazy not to have the plan encompass the entire reservoir. If we have (the smaller map), we’ve got a bunch of other folks telling us what they want to see happen in our community.

- Jack Taylor

Taking complete ownership of your outcomes by holding no one but yourself responsible for them is the most powerful thing you can do to drive your success.

- Gary Keller

It’s amazing how people will give when you don’t ask. Many of them send money because they believe in the message.

- Joel Olsteen

When you do more than you’re paid for, eventually you’ll be paid for more than you do.

- Zig Ziglar

You know the funny thing, I don’t get along with rich people. I get along with the middle class and the poor people better than I get along with the rich people.

- Donald Trump

Well, we’re about 24 million subscribers today, and that’s up from about 15 million a year ago, so it’s a very high rate of growth, and that’s what’s exciting about the business – more and more people are getting smart TVs, they’re watching Netflix on their iPads.

- Reed Hastings

Movies always are open to being remade because times change so much, and the tempo of movies changes. I think of it like a James Bond. They can have different actors play the same role… I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘We want to remake ‘The Jerk’ with so and so.’ And I say, ‘Fine.’ It just doesn’t bother me. It’s an honor actually.

- Steve Martin

You don’t need a big close, as many sales reps believe. You risk losing your customer when you save all the good stuff for the end. Keep the customer actively involved throughout your presentation, and watch your results improve.

- Harvey Mackay

That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.

- Peter Thiel

I bought a company in the mid-’90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I’ve made lots of dumb decisions. That’s part of the game.

- Warren Buffett

The success of the Overseas Chinese is the result of bad times in China itself. The Chinese who left the mother country had to struggle, and that became a culture of its own, passed on from father to son through each generation. Because we have no social security, the Overseas Chinese habit is to save a lot and make a lot of friends.

- Lee Shau Kee

While technology is still important, the consumer has to lead innovation.

- Phil Knight

This is indicative of how quickly CEO caution can put the foot on the brake.

- John Chambers

This could easily end up one of the driest winters ever, unless things switch around.

- Ed Clark

Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful’.

- Warren Buffett

I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

- Herbert Bayard Swope

When sales people don’t know what to do, they talk. The ordinary salesperson vomits the presentation onto the Buyer’s desktop.

- Jerry Vass

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

- Yoda

The epidemic So many people are frozen in the face of uncertainty and paralyzed at the thought of shipping work that matters that one might think that the fear is hardwired into us. It is. Scientists can identify precisely where your lizard brain lives. This is your prehistoric early brain, the same brain that’s in the lizard or the deer. Filled with fear, intent on reproduction. Steven Pressfield gives the voice of the lizard brain a name: he calls it the resistance. And the resistance is talking to you as you read this, urging you to compromise, to not be an troublemaker, to avoid rash moves. For many of us, the resistance is always chattering away, frequently sabotaging our best opportunities and ruining our best chance to do great work. Naming it helps you befriend it, and befriending it helps you ignore it.

- Seth Godin

Properly run startups place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting and the interview process in order to build their talent base. Too often the investment in people stops there.

- Ben Horowitz

Make failure your teacher, not your undertaker.

- Zig Ziglar

Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.

- Brian Tracy

People who smile tend to manage, teach and sell more effectively, and to raise happier children.

- Dale Carnegie

The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it’s very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.

- Bill Gates

Victory is always possible for the person who refuses to stop fighting.

- Napoleon Hill

I am a former sabre fencer and fenced as part of the Uzbek republic team.

- Alisher Usmanov

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.

- Elon Musk

In order to deal with all the medical cost demands and other challenges in the U.S., as we look to raise that revenue, the rich will have to pay slightly more. That’s quite clear.

- Bill Gates

I produced Run DMC. I produced some early records, lots of records early on.

- Russell Simmons

I said, ‘I’m not asking your permission, I’m just telling you, I need someone to look up to. You’re my new hero.’

- Phil Knight

I have asked thousands of business people to smile at someone every hour of the day for a week and then come to class and talk about the results.

- Dale Carnegie

My revenue was $4 million my first year in business, off of one $20 item.

- Sara Blakely

You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

- Peter Thiel

It’s disappointing, but it’s still a really good book. I’m glad Kenny did it, and I’m glad it’s going to get out. … I still endorse the book. I think everybody should buy it. I think he did a great job on a very complicated topic.

- Phil Knight

Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.

- Jack Welch

Most men go to their graves with their dreams still inside them.

- Zig Ziglar

Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars.

- Rupert Murdoch

Nobody is going to delegate a lot of power to a secretary that they can’t control.

- Michael Bloomberg

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

- Seth Godin

Our investment in more than 100 projects in China’s property, infrastructure and other sectors makes us one of the country’s largest investors.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

- Dale Carnegie

Let your motto then always be ‘Excelsior’, for by living up to it there is no such word as fail.

- P.T. Barnum

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

- Napoleon Hill

It’s almost always harder to raise capital than you thought it would be, and it always takes longer. So plan for that.

- Richard Harroch

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

- Bill Gates

It didn’t matter how bleak the situation or how stultifying their mediocrity, they all maintained unwavering faith that they would not just survive, but prevail as a great company. And yet, at the same time, they became relentlessly disciplined at confronting the most brutal facts of their current reality.

- James C. Collins

To be willing to do new things you don’t think you’ll like requires you to prefer the unknown. Not just to tolerate it, but to prefer it. One way to achieve that is to set out to experience things you’re sure you won’t like. To have conversations that are frightening. Becoming generous beyond measure, just to see what happens. And most of all, setting out to fail. Failing helps you see how far is too far, failing helps remind you that failing isn’t fatal, and most of all, failing opens you up to succeeding.

- Seth Godin

In order to sell a product or a service, a company must establish a relationship with the consumer. It must build trust and rapport. It must understand the customer’s needs, and it must provide a product that delivers the promised benefits.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

The misconception that aid falls straight into the hands of dictators largely stems from the Cold War era.

- Bill Gates

I just think that trusting God means we’re going to have unanswered questions, and God is so much bigger than us, we’re never going to understand them all.

- Joel Olsteen

Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, American companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today.

- Peter Thiel

Look creatively at your resume, work experience, physical habits, and hobbies and compile a list of all the groups, past and present, that you can associate yourself with.

- Timothy Ferriss

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations… They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them ‘operators’ or ‘programmers.’

- Peter Drucker

Keep something in front of you Studies tell us that we move toward what we consistently see. You should keep something in front of you, even if it’s symbolic, to remind you of what you are believing for.

- Joel Olsteen

Ranking among the greatest Christmas movie classics, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ tells a beautiful story about the priceless value of relationships.

- John C. Maxwell

[On stopping working and focussing 100% on his company Nike] I was still teaching accounting, but the next year, I told Penny [married in 1968] if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I’m going to go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000. I said, that ‘s close enough.

- Phil Knight

…The greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.

- Seth Godin

Be there for your kids. Later, when you need them, they’ll be there for you.

- Zig Ziglar

A good deed, said the prophet Mohammed, is one that brings a smile of joy to the face of another.Why will doing a good deed every day produce such astounding efforts on the doer?Because trying to please others will cause us to stop thinking of ourselves: the verything that produces worry and fear and melancholia.

- Dale Carnegie

Well, the odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first attempt. All of us who are attempting to go around the world in balloons are effectively flying in experimental craft because these craft cannot be tested.

- Richard Branson

And I keep saying, whether you like the president or not, everybody has to pull together and help the president because, as the president goes, so goes the country, as the country goes, so goes your job, your ability to feed your family, your government.

- Michael Bloomberg

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.

- Elon Musk

No man ever achieved worthwhile success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.

- Napoleon Hill

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow.

- Evan Esar

To answer power with power, the Jedi way this is not. In this war, a danger there is, of losing who we are.

- Yoda

Momentum is a little fragile, and when people got excited before, they were disappointed, … But this is the most positive guidance we’ve given in eight quarters, going into a seasonally challenging quarter.

- John Chambers

You may have made some mistakes, and you may not be where you want to be, but that has NOTHING to do with your future.

- Zig Ziglar

Value is achieved primarily through frontline employees who are satisfied, loyal, and productive, in part because of the high degree of capability they possess to deliver results to customers

- Service Profit Chain

People don’t believe what you tell them.They rarely believe what you show them.They often believe what their friends tell them.They always believe what they tell themselves.

- Seth Godin

-It is possible to vastly compress most learning. In a surprising number of cases, it is possible to do something in 1-10 months that is assumed to take 1-10 years.-The more you compress things, the more physical limiters become a bottleneck. All learning is physically limited. The brain is dependent on finite quantities of neurotransmitters, memories require REM and non-REM (NREM) sleep for consolidation, etc. The learning graph is not unlike the stress-recovery-hyperadaptation curves of weight training.-The more extreme your ambition, just as in sports, the more you need performance enhancement via unusual schedules, diet, drugs, etc.-Most important: due to the bipolar nature of the learning process, you can forecast setbacks. If you don’t, you increase the likelihood of losing morale and quitting before the inflection point.

- Timothy Ferriss

I don’t know how you can justify leaving any engagement behind in the social Web of 2011.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Courage is on display every day, and only the courageous wring the most out of life.

- Zig Ziglar

I started getting more and more active around immigration reform because this was such a waste of lives, such a waste of potential, such a waste for our country not to have the human capital that we developed – geared toward improving our entire society.

- Laurene Powell Jobs

If you want success, if you want wisdom, if you want to be prosperous and healthy, you’re going to have to do more than meditate and believe; you must boldly declare words of faith and victory over yourself and your family.

- Joel Olsteen

Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind’s eye, and you will be drawn toward it.

- Napoleon Hill

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

- Winston Churchill

Whether you’re talking about the core consumer or the person on the street, the principle is the same: you have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.

- Phil Knight

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

In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.

- John C. Maxwell

You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated.

- James C. Collins

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

The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.

- Walt Disney

For me, the most fun is change or growth. There are definitely elements of both that I like. Launching a business is kind of like a motorboat: You can go very quickly and turn boat.

- Tony Hsieh

To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.

- Thomas Edison

It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

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

- Ben Horowitz

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