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
Notable Quotables
Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that… you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.
- Elon Musk
I wouldn’t ever say if you’re having tough times then there must be something wrong with you or your attitude. Life’s a fight. It’s a good fight of faith. I encourage people to stay up, stay hopeful, stay faith-filled.
- Joel Olsteen
You either trust someone day one until they prove you wrong, or you say, ‘I don’t trust you until you show me I can trust you.’ I’m the latter.
- Charles Ergen
By altering our attitudes we can alter our lives.
- Zig Ziglar
We need to and must protect privacy. But I think that people will be willing and even eager to share medical information about themselves for the greater good of mankind.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
If you’re going to have to swallow a frog, you don’t want to have to look at that sucker too long!
- Zig Ziglar
More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.
- Napoleon Hill
I don’t use my brain about the creative thing. From a business standpoint, I instinctively do things: when I get something right, it’s never because I use my brain
- Russell Simmons
You cannot let where you are today cause you to get stuck. I’m going to be my best right now. That’s what faith is all about.
- Joel Olsteen
If it’s set up in such a way that it breaks the conditionality required by the (International Monetary Fund), I think that would be a step backward.
- John Chambers
You cannot get into business for the fashion of it.
- Azim Premji
Getting fired, despite sometimes coming as a surprise and leaving you scrambling to recover, is often a godsend. Most people aren’t lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30-40 years of tolerating the mediocre.
- Timothy Ferriss
As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. I got into this habit by attempting to contact celebrities and famous businesspeople for advice.
- Timothy Ferriss
A knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization. It is meant for every one of the men I call executives.
- Peter Drucker
The difference between blues, jazz, rock n’ roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It’s scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.
- Russell Simmons
I think a big test we all face in life on a regular basis is that discouragement test. Life’s not always fair, but I believe if you keep doing the right thing, God will get you to where you are.
- Joel Olsteen
Quit worrying about how everything is going to turn out. Live one day at a time; better yet, make the most of this moment. It’s good to have a big – picture outlook, to set goals, to establish budgets and make plans, but if you’re always living in the future, you’re never really enjoying the present in the way God wants you to.
- Joel Olsteen
On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre. You’re free to contribute.
- Seth Godin
We’ll see how that evolves. Obviously, it doesn’t mean we’ll just be willing to do anything that’s requested of us.
- Sergey Brin
The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over.
- Peter Thiel
We didn’t really know what was happening.
- John Chambers
Delay taking a salary until your business is generating cash flow from sales…by delaying taking a salary, you can reinvest sales to help grow your business.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The Pitch is your mechanism for persuasion. Persuasion is the goal. You’re trying to convince them of someone or something, and they might initially be resistant. This isn’t a nice casual conversation; it’s the Guerrilla P.R. version of a first strike.
- Michael Levine
I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It’s hard to memorize objectives, but it’s easy to remember a story.
- Ben Horowitz
The world is changing… I don’t, as a consumer, want advertising that’s not relevant. If we’re going to take a side, let’s take the side of the consumer.
- Charles Ergen
You don’t have to start from scratch to do something interesting. You don’t have to start from scratch to have a massive impact on the world. You have to have a good idea. You have to convince other people of those good ideas. And you have to push as quickly as possible.
- Jack Dorsey
According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.
- Bill Gates
If what others say doesn’t match what God has put in your heart, let it go in one ear and out the other.
- Joel Olsteen
In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.
- Peter Thiel
If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.
- John D. Rockefeller
We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.
- Jerry Seinfeld
We have the brand, and we have the fulfillment capability. Now we had to get the Net, and that’s the easiest part of the game,
- Jack Welch
2006, I started ‘WineLibrary TV.’ To build ‘WineLibrary TV,’ I started using Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter in 2008.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
We were comfortable with first-quarter results.
- John Chambers
Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.
- Dave Barry
Substantial growth in GDP, rising wages, improved employment prospects and favourable bank mortgage terms have all resulted in a buoyant property market.
- Lee Shau Kee
The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.
- Bill Gates
You can also make a 10x improvement through superior integrated design.
- Peter Thiel
Most salespeople won’t stop talking long enough to let the Buyer make a decision.
- Jerry Vass
Tell them to grab on to the career that engages their brain and heart and soul and gives them meaning. Tell them that eventually, the money will come, and if it doesn’t, in time, they will find themselves rich with something money can’t buy. And that, obviously, would be happiness.
- Jack Welch
If you think you are leading and turn around to see no one following, then you are just taking a walk.
- Benjamin Hooks
I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.
- Winston Churchill
I have never found a ship I wanted to go down with
- Jack Nadel
The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Nobody kicks a dead dog.
- Dale Carnegie
By the end of the war (the civil war) John D. Rockefeller had established the foundations of his personal and professional life and was set to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities beckoning him in postwar America. From this point forward, there would be no zigzags, or squandered energy, only a single-minded focus on objectives that would make him both the wonder and terror of American business.
- Ron Chernow
About half of our wives do not work outside the home. The number-one occupation for those wives who do work is teacher.
- Thomas J Stanley
Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.
- Jack Ma
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
- Winston Churchill
Two metrics set the limits for effective distribution. The total net profit that you earn on average over the course of your relationship with a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV) must exceed the amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale—and the more it makes sense to spend it.
- Peter Thiel
But each country has to advance and move at its own speed.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
If a person makes a statement that you think is wrong—yes, even that you know is wrong—isn’t it better to begin by saying: Well, now, look. I thought otherwise, but I may be wrong. I frequently am. And if I am wrong, I want to be put right. Let’s examine the facts.” There’s magic, positive magic, in such phrases as: I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let’s examine the facts.
- Dale Carnegie
The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.
- Warren Buffett
I don’t go down the road of condemning.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Possession of Power That Was Not Acquired Through Self Effort.
- Napoleon Hill
My new favorite word is ‘awkward.’…The reason we need to be in search of awkward is that awkward is the barrier between us and excellence, between where we are and the remarkable. If it were easy, everyone would have done it already, and it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
- Seth Godin
The funny thing is people won’t let me pay for things. I’ll be in a restaurant and the manager will say, ‘Oh nom it’s on the house.’
- Richard Branson
I readily absorb ideas from every source, frequently starting where the last person left off.
- Thomas Edison
We provide food that customers love, day after day after day. People just want more of it.
- Ray Kroc
This is not a book for the wild-haired crazies your company keeps in a corner. It is a book for you, your boss, and your employees, because the best future available to us is a future where you contriubute your true self and your best work. Are you up for that?
- Seth Godin
War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.
- Winston Churchill
Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.
- Steve Jobs
Soon will I rest, yes, forever sleep. Earned it I have. Twilight is upon me, soon night must fall.
- Yoda
Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually.
- George Soros
You can take from every experience what it has to offer you. And you cannot be defeated if you just keep taking one breath followed by another.
- Oprah Winfrey
Although my spelling is still sometimes poor, I have managed to overcome the worst of my difficulties through training myself to concentrate.
- Richard Branson
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
- Charles Darwin
Proposition 19 already is a winner no matter what happens on election day. The mere fact of its being on the ballot has elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy in ways I could not have imagined a year ago.
- George Soros
You can’t buy a good reputation, you must earn it.
- Harvey Mackay
The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.
- Timothy Ferriss
Contrary to popular belief, I don’t spend a whole lot of time following soccer. But as I have traveled around the world to better understand global development and health, I’ve learned that soccer is truly universal. No matter where I go, that’s what kids are playing. That’s what people are talking about.
- Bill Gates
My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.
- Peter Thiel
We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.
- Henry Ford
I think it’s too early to tell.
- John Chambers
When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good, you will not, hmmmm?
- Yoda
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
- Albert Einstein
Leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.
- Ben Horowitz
Occasionally a man stumbles over the truth. Most dust themselves off and continue walking as though nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill
As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t.
- Ben Horowitz
You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.
- Harry Truman
The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.
- Seth Godin
Be reactionary. React to what the market wants. And the market wants one-on-one real time engagement. Now that we have the tools to engage, I’m going to continue fighting for the end user.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
- Henry Kissinger
I was myself so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended.
- Winston Churchill
Tip #1 – Self-motivation is the key to success and will achieve powerful results.
- Jack Nadel
[In February 2011] We’ve not done a lot of marketing whatsoever. A lot of it has just been word of mouth.
- Jack Dorsey
In the end, you’re measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish.
- Donald Trump
We’ve grown from 18% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry to 23% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry over the last five years. Profits are up over 70%, where the industry profit is up about 35%. Pretty good.
- Steve Ballmer
You’ve got to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have what it takes. God created you to excel, and He’s given you ability, insight, talent, wisdom, and His supernatural power to do so.
- Joel Olsteen
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
- Winston Churchill
Sometimes God will deliver you from the fire, and other times God will make you fireproof.
- Joel Olsteen
An organization’s capabilities reside in two places. The first is in its processes—the methods by which people have learned to transform inputs of labor, energy, materials, information, cash, and technology into outputs of higher value. The second is in the organization’s values, which are the criteria that managers and employees in the organization use when making prioritization decisions. People are quite flexible, in that they can be trained to succeed at quite different things. An employee of IBM, for example, can quite readily change the way he or she works, in order to work successfully in a small start-up company. But processes and values are not flexible. A process that is effective at managing the design of a minicomputer, for example, would be ineffective at managing the design of a desktop personal computer. Similarly, values that cause employees to prioritize projects to develop high-margin products, cannot simultaneously accord priority to low-margin products. The very processes and values that constitute an organization’s capabilities in one context, define its disabilities in another context.
- Clayton M. Christensen
If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.
- Peter Thiel
The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.
- Henry Ford
My son is trying to be a sports writer, and my daughter is a college student. She wants to be a comedy writer, and she’s at film school. I discouraged both of them early on from getting involved in Starbucks. I didn’t think it would be fair; plus, they didn’t have any interest anyway.
- Howard Schultz
Our business is about technology, yes. But it’s also about operations and customer relationships.
- Michael Dell
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
Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
- Winston Churchill
