Yes, I think it’s okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It’s okay to say to them, “You’re not going where I need to go, and there’s no way I’m going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I’m heading off. I’m betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.
- Seth Godin
Notable Quotables
Don’t simply settle for what your parents had. You can go further than that. You can do more, have more, be more.
- Joel Olsteen
Put everything you’ve got into what you’re doing. Be totally focused–nothing should be haphazard.
- Donald Trump
You can make a positive out of the most negative if you work at it hard enough.
- Sam Walton
Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.What makes someone an artist? I don’t think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren’t artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.That’s why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That’s why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He’s an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn’t care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it’s important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does.Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
- Seth Godin
Good habits are as addictive as bad habits, and a lot more rewarding.
- Harvey Mackay
The first three-and-a-half months of calendar year 2001 have been extremely challenging for many of us in high-tech.
- John Chambers
I don’t believe in saturation. We’re thinking and talking worldwide.
- Ray Kroc
In the face of challenging economic and market conditions of the past 12 months, our diversified portfolio of multiple earnings streams has served us well.
- Cheng Yu-tung
And you know, I’ve had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.
- Richard Branson
To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.
- Henry Ford
When you live your life in different ways, it makes people around you become uncomfortable. So deal with it. They don’t know what you are going to do.
- Larry Ellison
In order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done.
- Peter Thiel
Good relations with the Wookiees, I have.
- Yoda
2006, I started ‘WineLibrary TV.’ To build ‘WineLibrary TV,’ I started using Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter in 2008.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If failure is not an option, then neither is success.
- Seth Godin
There’s an energy and excitement when you’re building a company. You have so much tail wind. You’re planting new seeds. But it’s also scary, because there’s no safety net.
- Howard Schultz
That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
- Steve Jobs
Life’s most soothing things are a child’s goodnight and sweet music….
- Thomas Edison
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.
- Jeff Bezos
I would say this for Montserrat? one of its credit weaknesses is that it’s in a zone that depends greatly on external savings.
- John Chambers
India has the potential to be our biggest market in Asia, bigger than China, in as much as two to five years.
- John Chambers
Young people in China and Hong Kong are the future of the motherland.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.
- James C. Collins
I think Steve Jobs is my idol.
- Ma Huateng
If you will focus on meeting other people’s needs, God will always make sure your needs are supplied. God will take care of your problems for you.
- Joel Olsteen
Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, became so diplomatic, so adroit at handling people, that he was made American Ambassador to France. The secret of his success? I will speak ill of no man,” he said, … and speak all the good I know of everybody.
- Dale Carnegie
When we are harassed and reach the limit of our own strength, many of us then turn in desperation to God-There are no atheists in foxholes. But why wait till we are desperate? Why not renew our strength every day? Why wait even until Sunday? For years I have had the habit of dropping into empty churches on weekday afternoons. When I feel that I am too rushed and hurried to spare a few minutes to think about spiritual things, I say to myself: Wait a minute, Dale Carnegie, wait a minute. Why all the feverish hurry and rush, little man? You need to pause and acquire a little perspective. At such times, I frequently drop into the first church that I find open. Although I am a Protestant, I frequently, on weekday afternoons, drop into St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and remind myself that I’ll be dead in another thirty years, but that the great spiritual truths that all churches teach are eternal. I close my eyes and pray. I find that doing this calms my nerves, rests my body, clarifies my perspective, and helps me revalue my values. May I recommend this practice to you?
- Dale Carnegie
Brands mature over time, like a marriage. The bond you feel with your spouse is different than when you first met each other. Excitement and discovery are replaced by comfort and depth.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I was never the smartest guy in the room. From the first person I hired, I was never the smartest guy in the room. And that’s a big deal. And if you’re going to be a leader – if you’re a leader and you’re the smartest guy in the world – in the room, you’ve got real problems.
- Jack Welch
Just because you don’t announce your plan doesn’t mean you don’t have one.
- Herb Kelleher
95% financing arrangement offered by Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation Limited in a period of sustained low interest have added impetus to secondary trading activities in the property market.
- Lee Shau Kee
The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.
- Andrew Carnegie
What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Potential means that you haven’t done it yet.
- David Novak
You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.
- Jack Ma
Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.
- John C. Maxwell
The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
- Winston Churchill
TAKE CARE OF THE PEOPLE, THE PRODUCTS, AND THE PROFITS—IN THAT ORDER.
- Ben Horowitz
It’s a matter of invitations versus context. Twitter is really good at providing context, like, I’m having coffee at Third Rail Coffee.’ Foursquare is about invitations to places. In this respect Foursquare has started to replace Yelp for me.
- Jack Dorsey
First and foremost, there is a difference between being perceived as an expert and being one. In the context of business, the former is what sells product and the latter, relative to your minimal customer base,” is what creates good products and prevents returns.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you let pride stop you, you will hate life.
- Timothy Ferriss
Obama has no solutions. Obama has failed the country and its great citizens, and they don’t like it when somebody such as myself speaks the truth about this – it hurts too much.
- Donald Trump
I’ve got to confess I’m a pragmatic optimist myself.
- Zig Ziglar
If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.
- Harvey Mackay
We cannot start over, but we can begin now, and make a new beginning.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s not going to happen alone.
- Jack Dorsey
Chinese people today have strong demand for culture, but we need effective supply, and China needs innovative cultural products.
- Wang Jianlin
Surround yourself with the right people
- Tony Hsieh
It makes no difference where you go, there you are. And it makes no difference what you have, there’s always more to want. Until you are happy with who you are, you will never be happy because of what you have.
- Zig Ziglar
Certainly there are times in all of our lives when bad things happen, or things don’t turn out as we had hoped. But that’s when we we must a decision that we’re going to be happy inspite of our circumstances.
- Joel Olsteen
Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn’t really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn’t until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.
- Mark Zuckerberg
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
We thought this [downturn] would last for two quarters, … Now we are saying that it will last for at least – at least ? three quarters.
- John Chambers
I’m not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I’m doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.
- George Soros
Every person has a longing to be significant, to make a contribution, to be a part of something noble and purposeful.
- John C. Maxwell
It’s nice to be important, but more important to be nice. You don’t know who your top customers will be five years from now or where you will be in 10 years. You may have a fancy title, but you will always need help from the people around you.
- Harvey Mackay
All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
- Aristotle
Emotional labor is the hard work of making art, producing generosity, and exposing creativity. Working without a map involves both vision and the willingness to do something about what you see. Emotional labor is what you get paid to do, and one of the most difficult types of emotional labor is staring into the abyss of choice and picking a path.
- Seth Godin
Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.
- Bill Gates
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
Gas consumption is growing everywhere.
- Vagit Alekperov
What makes a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers. The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.
- Peter Thiel
When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization.
- Peter Thiel
The challenge is this: training creative, independent, and innovative artists is new to us.
- Seth Godin
The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.
- Thomas Edison
I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I’ve become. If I had, I’d have done it a lot earlier.
- Oprah Winfrey
I think that people will always want music; I think that the form that they will get it in, or distributed to them from, and the price they pay for it is what’s up in question.
- Ronald Perelman
Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.
- Seth Godin
By establishing a reputation as being a person who always renders more service and better service than that for which you are paid, you will benefit by comparison with those around you who do not render such service, and the contrast will be so noticeable that there will be keen competition for your services, no matter what your life-work may be.
- Napoleon Hill
At the start of each new day, remind yourself: I am talented. I am creative. I am greatly favored by God. I am equipped. I am well able. I will see my dreams come to pass.” Declare those statements by faith and before long, you will begin to see them in reality.
- Joel Olsteen
Good advertising should give the reader essential facts about the product or company advertised and should do so engagingly without trickery or hogwash.
- Leo Burnett
The characteristics that make a good advertisement or commercial – it’s memorable, engaging, entertaining, focused, sends a clear message, makes you want to see it again, makes you want to buy the product.
- David Novak
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
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
My job is making money, helping other people make money. I am spending money, trying to make sure more people get rich, because you cannot spend a lot of money, right? So my job is spending money, helping others. This is a headache.
- Jack Ma
While technology is still important, the consumer has to lead innovation.
- Phil Knight
When your art fails, make better art.
- Seth Godin
Maybe you’ve invested a lot of time, effort, money, emotion, and energy in a relationship; you did your best to make it work out. But for some reason, things got off course. And now you feel as though you have been robbed. When we focus on or disappointments, we stop God from ringing fresh new blessing into our lives.
- Joel Olsteen
The trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
We know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition.
- Peter Thiel
Realize that true happiness lies within you. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Reach out. Share. Smile. Hug. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.
- Og Mandino
Each time they Tweet, it sparks interaction.
- Jack Dorsey
The responsibility of the leader is to define reality and create hope.
- David Novak
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater their power to harm us.
- Voltaire
This is a learning in the business life that first of all you need to have commitment, dedication and passion for what you are doing.
- Lakshmi Mittal
At an early age, my mother gave me this feeling that anything is possible, and I believe that.
- Howard Schultz
It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don’t think it’s possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.
- Elon Musk
I don’t like mixing up moralities with mathematics.
- Winston Churchill
In order for the United States to do the right things for the long term, it appears to be helpful for us to have the prospect of humiliation. Sputnik helped us fund good science – really good science: the semiconductor came out of it.
- Bill Gates
How we respond to the opportunities and challenges of the outside world now determines how much the outside world values us.
- Seth Godin
I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
It’s really complex to make something simple…
- Jack Dorsey
I think when I was young, let’s call it high school, and even before that, I just loved comedy, and I loved comedians. I grew up watching Laurel and Hardy. That’s really a long time ago. I loved Jerry Lewis. I just loved comedians.
- Steve Martin
I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.
- Jeff Bezos
It is well documented that I am a lifelong football fan. My love of the British game started with the 1966 World Cup.
- Alisher Usmanov
She came up with what is now the Swoosh for $35 which is a pretty good bargain.
- Phil Knight
You’ve got to take a big jump to make it. You’ve got to have great big balls.
- Forrest Ray
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that
- Martin Luther King Jr.
No man is ever whipped, until he quits in his own mind…A winner never quits and quitter never wins. No follower of this philosphy can reasonably expect accumulate a fortune without experience temporary defeat.
- Napoleon Hill
