I think a newspaper should be provocative, stir ’em up, but you can’t do that on television. It’s just not on.
- Rupert Murdoch
Notable Quotables
Profitability is a shallow goal if it doesn’t have a real purpose, and the purpose has to be share the profits with others.
- Howard Schultz
This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.
- Bill Gates
Every choice you make has an end result.
- Zig Ziglar
The War was decided in the first twenty days of fighting, and all that happened afterwards consisted in battles which, however formidable and devastating, were but desperate and vain appeals against the decision of Fate.
- Winston Churchill
If you are satisfied with the results you are now getting, why change? If you are not satisfied, why not experiment?
- Dale Carnegie
You may not realize initially how many other opportunities are wrapped up inside the first one. After you go through the first door, you’ll then discover more doors automatically opening behind that one. One door leads you to another door, which leads to another door, and so one. It’s like ten other boxes packed inside one box. The initial door that God opens is your access to more opportunities. But you must be willing to walk through the first one to get to the other good things God has for you.
- George Foreman
I grew up in a house where my father encouraged my brother and me to fail. I specifically remember coming home and saying, ‘Dad, Dad, I tried out for this or that and I was horrible,’ and he would high-five me and say, ‘Way to go.’
- Sara Blakely
Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.
- Bill Gates
To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.
- Sam Walton
Long-range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.
- Peter Drucker
I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance…and if you have anxiety about initiating a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure.
- Seth Godin
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
- Helen Keller
I do everything on my phone as a lot of people do.
- Mark Zuckerberg
America is built around this premise that you can do it, and there are an awful lot of people who are unlikely to have done it who did.
- Michael Bloomberg
Companies, exist and evolve over time and in fact they have multiple founding moments.
- Jack Dorsey
[In January 2011] I think the important thing for Twitter is that it works on any technology.
- Jack Dorsey
The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
- George Orwell
The steel business is a local business. We do believe in the U.S. economy and would like to have a strong, balanced presence here.
- Alexei Mordashov
Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world. China is the only country afraid that it won’t.
- Peter Thiel
At its zenith Sears accounted for more than 2 percent of all retail sales in the United States. It pioneered several innovations critical to the success of today’s most admired retailers: for example, supply chain management, store brands, catalogue retailing, and credit card sales. The esteem in which Sears’ management was held shows in this 1964 excerpt from Fortune: “How did Sears do it? In a way, the most arresting aspect of its story is that there was no gimmick. Sears opened no big bag of tricks, shot off no skyrockets. Instead, it looked as though everybody in its organization simply did the right thing, easily and naturally. And their cumulative effect was to create an extraordinary powerhouse of a company.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Apply the blacksmith’s homely principle when you are speaking. If you feel deeply about your subject you will be able to think of little else. Concentration is a process of distraction from less important matters. It is too late to think about the cut of your coat when once you are upon the platform, so centre your interest on what you are about to say—fill your mind with your speech-material and, like the infilling water in the glass, it will drive out your unsubstantial fears.
- Dale Carnegie
IT’S SAID that you can only live life forward and understand it backward.
- Jack Welch
The thought of my mortality – I think about it a lot. I find it motivating. It can be any time that your number’s up.
- Sara Blakely
Don’t grow accustomed to living with less, doing less, and being less to the point that you eventually sit back and accept it.
- Joel Olsteen
My father had a series of blue-collar jobs and never made more than $20,000 a year. When I was seven, he got injured on a job. That was a very important point – because of the injury, he couldn’t walk, and the company he was working for did not pay him. There was no compensation. So there was no money and no food.
- Howard Schultz
Education and the Internet must go hand in hand, … It will serve as one of the great equalizers.
- John Chambers
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.
- Winston Churchill
The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.
- Dale Carnegie
But the three rules I always stuck with were 1) Be on time 2) No profanity and 3) Never criticize a teammate.
- David Novak
Do you know how many companies have wanted me to do an energy drink for them because I named my book ‘Crush It!’? It might be fun one day, but right now I think it would undermine the personal brand I’ve built.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Never forget, the real secret of giving advice is this: Once you’ve given it, don’t concern yourself with whether it is followed or not, and refrain from saying ‘I told you so.’
- Harvey Mackay
Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.
- David Packard
Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Life is not fair – get used to it!
- Bill Gates
If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.
- Elon Musk
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
- Alexander Graham Bell
Everything important to us—the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment—is singular.
- Peter Thiel
My parents were the same in the pulpit as they were at home. I think that’s where a lot of preachers’ kids get off base sometimes. Because they don’t see the same things at both places.
- Joel Olsteen
Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.
- Elon Musk
The guerrilla is obsessed with benefits. Whenever offering a product or service, she focuses on how it will benefit the consumer and builds everything—the product, the delivery, the marketing—around that benefit.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
You can follow your favorite company or organization. You can also mix that in with your family and your social network and talk about all these interests in real time. That’s the value, not the brand ‘Twitter.’ Twitter just provides the venue for it.
- Jack Dorsey
By spring of ’98, each company’s stock had more than quadrupled. Skeptics questioned earnings and revenue multiples higher than those for any non-internet company. It was easy to conclude that the market had gone crazy.
- Peter Thiel
The order for the seats amounted to $90,000. Who do you suppose got the order—James Adamson or one of his competitors? From the time of this story until Mr. Eastman’s death.
- Dale Carnegie
Our business is diversified across many sectors, be it supermarkets or finance. We can invest in many areas.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
Churchill: “Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?” Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course… “Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?”Socialite: “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!” Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price
- Winston Churchill
You can expect what you accept.
- Anonymous
There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.
- Dale Carnegie
People always underestimate Africa. If you want to follow what’s on ground, you would not want to invest in Nigeria; when you look at it from the patriotism point of view, you will ask yourself: how did those great countries become great?
- Aliko Dangote
People who couldn’t fit into this informal and entreprenual environment left or were asked to leave. I cut my losses quickly on bad hires that didn’t perform.
- Jack Welch
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
You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it
- Peter Thiel
Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
- Dale Carnegie
I’ve always been – you know, my personality is motivating and encouraging. And so I’m just being who God made me to be.
- Joel Olsteen
You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
In 2008, people who invested in hedge funds needed capital badly, but many of the funds would not return their money. However, I gave money back to any investor who requested it. It was the bottom of the market and a pretty tough time.
- Carl Icahn
Berkshire’s record would have been terrible if Warren didn’t keep learning.
- Charlie Munger
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
- Winston Churchill
If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will.
- Donald Trump
There is no business in America that would be prevented from taking results into account when making personnel decisions.
- Michael Bloomberg
Expect the unexpected. And whenever possible, be the unexpected. I try to live by that on a daily basis.
- Jack Dorsey
The evidence is inarguable that Australia is becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export-oriented business. Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day. Such statistics make me worry for this country’s future. We are becoming a high-cost and high-risk nation for investment.
- Gina Rinehart
So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.
- Thomas Edison
If you look – look at – I mean, look at what’s going on with your gasoline prices. They’re going to go to $5, $6, $7 and we don’t have anybody in Washington that calls OPEC and says, ‘Fellas, it’s time. It’s over. You’re not going to do it anymore.’
- Donald Trump
The level of analysis that is done when you see laws created, whether it’s the city or state or federal level – it’s much more horse-trading than analysis.
- Michael Bloomberg
A decision without an alternative is a desperate gambler’s throw.
- Peter Drucker
Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.
- Seth Godin
When those in power use shame to bully the weak into compliance, they are stealing from us. They tell us that they will expose our secrets (not good enough, not hardworking enough, not from the right family, made a huge mistake once) and will use the truth to exile us from our tribe. This shame, the shame that lives deep within each of us, is used as a threat. And when those in power use it, they take away part of our humanity.
- Seth Godin
John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there’s something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjugated to the good of the whole.
- Ben Horowitz
I think George Will is somebody that said recently that the Republicans will not lose, as a Republican, that the Republicans will not win the election. I think it was a terrible statement.
- Donald Trump
Strong managers who make tough decisions to cut jobs provide the only true job security in today’s world. Weak managers are the problem. Weak managers destroy jobs.
- Jack Welch
I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.
- Joel Olsteen
Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
- Bill Gates
The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.
- Elon Musk
Strip malls are history.
- Jeff Bezos
I have mentioned before that financial intelligence is a synergy of accounting, investing, marketing and law. Combine those four technical skills and making money with money is easier.
- Robert Kiyosaki
We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference. Some organizations haven’t realized this yet, or haven’t articulated it, but we need artists.
- Seth Godin
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
Keeping score is for games, not friendships.
- John C. Maxwell
Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.
- Timothy Ferriss
A good startup should have the potential for great scale built into its first design.
- Peter Thiel
Here’s how I work: It’s 2013, and most marketers are operating like it’s 2009. I’m always trying to market like it’s 2015, but not like it’s 2020. A lot of my contemporaries who understand where the world is going, go too far out, and aren’t practical. I have always prided myself on being visionary, with a heavy practicality.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Essentially, whoever is successful, whoever is going to do things that make a difference, is going to be talked about.
- Mukesh Ambani
If you find yourself plagued by a recurrent worry, train yourself to think of something else. Your conscious mind can concentrate on only one thought at a time, and driving the negativity away will free you up to move forward again.
- Harvey Mackay
Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.
- Bill Gates
Practice, practice, PRACTICE in speaking before an audience will tend to remove all fear of audiences, just as practice in swimming will lead to confidence and facility in the water. You must learn to speak by speaking.
- Dale Carnegie
FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON THE NUMBERS In the second example, I managed the team to a set of numbers that did not fully capture what I wanted. I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time—in that order. Unfortunately, the metrics that I set did not capture those priorities. At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them at every staff meeting, my people focused intensely on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result. Interestingly, I see this same problem play out in many consumer Internet startups. I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product. It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.
- Ben Horowitz
We were pretty schizophrenic. We were going to take on the world, but we couldn’t make payroll.
- Phil Knight
Creating ideas that spread and connecting the disconnected are the two pillars of our new society, and both of them require the posture of the artist.
- Seth Godin
If I want a better-than-average career, I can’t simply ‘go with the flow’ and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but make no intention-driven actions toward that outcome. If they would just do something most people would find that they get some version of the outcome they’re looking for. That’s been my secret. Stop wishing and start doing.
- Timothy Ferriss
Being a leader gives you charisma. If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that’s where charisma comes from, from the leading.
- Seth Godin
Over-Caution.
- Napoleon Hill
We are interested in any sector with good growth potential.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, ‘The government’s corrupt,’ and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.
- Bill Gates
Think of social media as the Internet. I can’t think of anyone betting against the Internet in 2012.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The Overseas Chinese habit is to save a lot and make a lot of friends.
- Lee Shau Kee
Try to maximize the number of people that can benefit from an individual contribution.
- Lee Shau Kee
I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.
- Sam Walton
