Notable Quotables

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.

- Seth Godin

When you find an idea that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue.

- Josh James

The McDonald brothers were simply not on my wavelength at all. I was obsessed with the idea of making McDonald’s the biggest and the best. They were content with what they had, they didn’t want to be bothered with more risks and more demands.

- Ray Kroc

God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us.

- Joel Olsteen

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

- Bill Gates

Do not listen to those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious.

- Og Mandino

I don’t blame you one iota for feeling as you do. If I were you I would undoubtedly feel just as you do.(…) You can say that and be 100 percent sincere, because if you were the other person you, of course, would feel just as he does (…) Suppose you had inherited the same body and temperament and mind (…) Suppose you had had his environment and experiences. You would then be precisely what he was – and where he was. For it is those things -and only those things – that made him what he was. (…) You deserve very little credit for being what you are – and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.

- Dale Carnegie

The pent-up demand for the good life in China is extraordinary.

- Stephen Wynn

The Green Revolution focused on the big three – maize, rice and wheat – and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.

- Bill Gates

He was contradicting everything he’d taught us about not running sick and making it worse. I knew it was just to make me acknowledge that his word was law, no matter how arbitrary. But that didn’t make it any easier to take. I was so mad I ran a personal record.

- Phil Knight

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.

Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.

- Yoda

They were going to get it all right the first time right… Open to change.

- Jack Dorsey

Use your feelings, Obi-Wan, and find him you will.

- Yoda

We won’t change at all, … We feel consolidation will continue. We’re seeing more and more movement to fewer networking vendors.

- John Chambers

Quite or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

- Seth Godin

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

When you become a leader success is all about growing others.

- Jack Welch

The work relationship has to be based on mutual respect. Psychological despotism is basically contemptuous—far more contemptuous than the traditional Theory X. It does not assume that people are lazy and resist work, but it assumes that the manager is healthy while everybody else is sick. It assumes that the manager is strong while everybody else is weak. It assumes that the manager knows while everybody else is ignorant. It assumes that the manager is right, whereas everybody else is stupid. These are the assumptions of foolish arrogance.

- Peter Drucker

A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.

- Jeff Bezos

Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.

- Dale Carnegie

Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.

- Peter Thiel

Online I see people committing ‘social media suicide’ all the time by one of two ways. Firstly by responding to all criticism, meaning you’re never going to find time to complete important milestones of your own, and by responding to things that don’t warrant a response.

- Tim Ferris

I believe God’s keeping the records, and I believe you will be rewarded even in this life. Somehow, someway, God will make it up to you. It may be He protected you from an accident you never knew. You can’t give God something without God giving you more in return, whether it’s peace or joy or satisfaction.

- Joel Olsteen

We need to understand the difference between discipline and punishment. Punishment is what you do to someone, discipline is what you do for someone.

- Zig Ziglar

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.

- Oprah Winfrey

Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum. The second person to install a urinal wasn’t an artist, he was a plumber.

- Seth Godin

Outstanding people have one thing in common: an absolute sense of mission.

- Zig Ziglar

Think of the transformation as a process of buildup followed by breakthrough, broken into three broad stages: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. Within each of these three stages, there are two key concepts, shown in the framework and described below. Wrapping around this entire framework is a concept we came to call the flywheel, which captures the gestalt of the entire process of going from good to great.

- James C. Collins

I predict at least one of the rookie drivers will win a race this year. With this strong of a group, two or three of them will likely win.

- Ed Clark

In business, just the opposite is often true; silence means dissent. Have you ever been in a meeting where you sense there is obvious disagreement, but the disagreement never really gets put on the table? This what I call the Slow No’s.

- David Novak

Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.

- Ben Horowitz

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade – and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.

- George Soros

No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.

- Jack Welch

Paper money will suffer. I’d be in mortar, not paper (money). We are in a time when paper investments are riskier than in the past. There is also a great amount of sovereign risk.

- Lee Shau Kee

It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor.

- Ray Kroc

…[if you] use discrimination in the selection of your Master Mind group, your objective will have been half-way reached, even before you begin to recognize it.

- Napoleon Hill

Dios ve el valor que usted tiene, y sabe en lo que le está convirtiendo. A veces nos miramos a nosotros mismos y pensamos: Tengo muchas imperfecciones. Tengo mal genio. Tengo un problema con mi boca. No soy tan disciplinado”. Vemos el barro, pero Dios ve la hermosa taza. La buena noticia es que usted no es un producto terminado. Dios sigue obrando, y si trabaja usted con Dios y le permite eliminar esas impurezas, Él hará más con su vida de lo que usted nunca soñó.

- Joel Olsteen

The slowdown in futures orders clearly signals that revenue growth in the second half of fiscal 1998 will be below our previous expectations. This is largely a result of the slowdown in the Asia Pacific market, where we now anticipate more moderate revenue growth in fiscal 1998 after increasing 84 percent on a constant dollar basis in fiscal 1997.

- Phil Knight

Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.

- Winston Churchill

There is a time to provide advice and offer an opinion, and there is a time not to. Don’t be too quick to offer unsolicited advice. It certainly will not endear you to people.

- Harvey Mackay

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

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.

- Jeff Bezos

I don’t need you to be funny. I don’t want to be entertained.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Failed plans should not be interpreted as a failed vision. Visions don’t change, they are only refined. Plans rarely stay the same, and are scrapped or adjusted as needed. Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible with your plan.

- John C. Maxwell

Well… I graduated from the business school of Northumberland University in Newcastle.

- Alexei Mordashov

Our business practices are no different than those of our competitors, but we are bigger, and thus more visible, so we get more flack.

- Phil Knight

If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.

- Peter Thiel

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

Starbucks has changed the rules of engagement for the music industry.

- Howard Schultz

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

Your first mistake might be assuming that people are rational.Your second mistake could be assuming that people are eager for change.And the marketer’s third mistake is assuming that once someone knows things the way you know them, they will choose what you chose.

- Seth Godin

People are fond of using the its not what you know, its who you know adage as an excuse for inaction, as if all successful people are born with powerful friends. Nonsense.

- Timothy Ferriss

When I was 17 or 18 I wanted to become a wine expert, and my parents wouldn’t let me drink. So I was devastated. All I could do was read, and I read and I read. And I’d read something like, you know, ‘Subtle hints of cassis.’

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don’t recover because trust is broken. And if you’re not honest at the point where you’re breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.

- Ben Horowitz

When overtaken with the temporay feelings of potential failure, burn all of your bridges of retreat, thus making retreat impossible.

- Napoleon Hill

My biggest concern is that America is drifting towards mediocrity and that people don’t recognize – and by people I’m meaning Washington – don’t recognize the sense of urgency and the fact that I don’t think this is a crisis anymore. I think it’s an emergency.

- Howard Schultz

Before you can be sure of your ability to transmute DESIRE into its equivalent, you will require SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE of the service, merchandise or profession which you intend to offer in return for fortune.

- Napoleon Hill

You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance.

- Peter Thiel

Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.

- P.T. Barnum

I am looking to buy companies that are run by painters. Most great artists have a hard time letting go of their paintings. That’s because the joy is not in the finished work, the joys is in the painting. They are constantly adding a dab of color here, a little more texture there. I’m looking for the boss who is always tweaking his company, constantly trying to make it better. No matter how successful he may have already been, what he still sees is a master-piece-in-progress.

- Warren Buffett

10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970.

- Peter Thiel

Vision is perhaps our greatest strength… it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.

- Li Ka-shing

Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he’s hired to do.

- Malcolm Forbes

In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

- Henry Ford

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

- Steve Jobs

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Becoming a member of the new rich is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.”Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness.”By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.

- Timothy Ferriss

Perhaps your challenge isn’t finding a better project or a better boss. Perhaps you need to get in touch with what it means to feel passionate. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.

- Seth Godin

I’m in a different position than most CEO’s. I’m a founder. I’m not a hired CEO. Now, I can be fired by the board, but most CEO’s are hired by the board.

- Howard Schultz

The bulk of the universities are about teaching kids.

- Bill Gates

Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that

- Martin Luther King Jr.

[On January 30, 1964] With a hearty ichi ban Blue Ribbon Sports got off the ground on Monday with an order for 300 pairs of shoes.

- Phil Knight

Every person has a longing to be significant, to make a contribution, to be a part of something noble and purposeful.

- John C. Maxwell

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

Don’t use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe.

- Joel Olsteen

When people are around us, they should leave better off than they were previously. Rather than feeling discouraged or defeated, people should feel challenged and inspired after spending any time with you and me.

- Joel Olsteen

Help young people. Help small guys. Because small guys will be big. Young people will have the seeds you bury in their minds, and when they grow up, they will change the world.

- Jack Ma

I’m just always looking forwards. I spend very little time, looking backwards.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if you – the probable outcome is failure.

- Elon Musk

The Minden prospect originated this past summer through a large acreage acquisition from a major oil company and Cabot now controls 3,500 acres over the area. We are pleased with our initial results and will remain active in this area throughout 2006. On forty-acre spacing, the prospect has the potential for 80 plus locations.

- Dan Dinges

It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.

- Dale Carnegie

The Law of Crappy People states: For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.

- Ben Horowitz

I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful!

- Bill Gates

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