An Enemy Called Average
- Jim Collins
Notable Quotables
I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family – father, mother, children – is fundamental to our civilisation.
- Rupert Murdoch
When growth is slower-than-expected, stocks go down. When inflation is higher-than-expected, bonds go down. When inflation is lower-than-expected, bonds go up.
- Ray Dalio
The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.
- Marc Benioff
Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
- Peter Thiel
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
I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.
- Joel Olsteen
Do extremely difficult work.That seems obvious, right? If you do something that’s valued but scarce because it’s difficult, you’re more likely to be in demand and to be compensated fairly for what you do.The implication is stunning, though: When designing a project or developing a skill, seek out the most difficult parts to master and contribute. If it’s easy, it’s not for you.
- Seth Godin
Every noteworthy achievement met with some sort of temporary setback before success came.
- Napoleon Hill
You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart.
- Thomas J Watson
What gets measured gets managed.
- Peter Drucker
Anyone working for a big company might be skeptical that a large business, or even a strictly online business, can form the same kind of friendly, loyal relationship with customers as a local retailer. I’m saying it’s already been done because I lived it.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.
- Joel Olsteen
The average occupancy rate of the core investment properties of the group was maintained at a high level of 96%.
- Lee Shau Kee
2006, I started ‘WineLibrary TV.’ To build ‘WineLibrary TV,’ I started using Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter in 2008.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
- Albert Einstein
confusion is the main cause of worry.
- Dale Carnegie
Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.
- Harvey Mackay
Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.
- Dale Carnegie
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
- Viktor E. Frankl
There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.
- Mark Zuckerberg
They didn’t use discussion as a sham process to let people have their say” so that they could buy in” to a predetermined decision. The process was more like a heated scientific debate, with people engaged in a search for the best answers.
- James C. Collins
Get the facts.
- David Novak
One of the first things you learn when you run an engineering organization is that a good quality assurance organization cannot build a high-quality product, but it can tell you when the development team builds a low quality product. Similarly, a high quality human resources organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done.
- Ben Horowitz
What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.
- Steve Martin
Happiness simply cannot be relied upon as a measure of success.
- John C. Maxwell
History is written by the victors.
- Winston Churchill
If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.
- Winston Churchill
What a man’s mind can create, man’s character can control.
- Thomas Edison
Personal initiative is the power that inspires the completion of that which one begins. It is the power that starts all action. No person is free until he learns to do his own thinking and gains the courage to act on his own.
- Napoleon Hill
If all we do with these tools is teach compliance and consumption, that’s all we’re going to get. School can and must do more than train the factory workers of tomorrow.
- Seth Godin
I’m constantly amazed that owners and managers of all businesses don’t train their people to call the person who pays by credit card by name. It definitely makes the customer feel good and will be a factor in bringing them back to your place of business.
- Zig Ziglar
Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.
- Jerry Seinfeld
A great business is seldom if ever built up, except on lines of the strictest integrity. A reputation for cuteness and sharp dealing is fatal in great affairs. Not the letter of the law, but the spirit, must be the rule. The standard of commercial morality is now very high. A mistake made by any one in favor of the firm is corrected as promptly as if the error were in favor of the other party. It is essential to permanent success that a house should obtain a reputation for being governed by what is fair rather that what is merely legal. A rule which is adpoted and adhered to has given greater returns than one would believe possible, namely; always give the other party the benefit of the doubt. This course does not apply to the speculative class (the stock market). An entirely different atmosphere pervades that world. Men are only gamblers there. Stock gambling and honorable business are incompatible. In recent years it must be admitted that the old fashioned banker, like Julius S. Morgan of London has become rare.
- Andrew Carnegie
Whenever you have multiple devices including multiple PCs that you want to share information with, it’s always been a bit complicated.
- Bill Gates
There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.
- Bill Gates
In order to become rich, you need to learn to build systems that can work without you. .
- Robert Kiyosaki
We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
- Winston Churchill
The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don’t count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.
- Mukesh Ambani
It’s easier for investors and bosses to spend time and money going after a proven market, even though proven markets are the hardest to break into.
- Seth Godin
I found [retail] to be interesting, challenging, and fun.
- Michael Balmuth
The guerrilla is a cheapskate. She knows that every dollar allocated to marketing is essential, and she doesn’t plan to waste a penny. But she’s not foolish. When necessary, she hires the best designers, media planners, and experts in the business—she realizes that the best is often the cheapest in the end.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
Success is one thing you can’t pay for. You buy it on the installment plan and make payments every day.
- Zig Ziglar
Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization’s history. For some reason that simple truth has evaded everybody.
- Stephen Wynn
Sometimes you may have to trade places with someone who is hurting.
- Joel Olsteen
The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work in a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
- Seth Godin
An idea that can change the course of the company can come from anywhere.
- Jack Dorsey
What we do not see, what most of us never suspect of existing, is the silent but irresistible power which comes to the rescue of those who fight on in the face of discouragement.
- Napoleon Hill
Quoting from Chapter 2 of the Sayings Of Confucius, ‘At 30, I stood firm; at 40, I had no more doubts.’ Time has its role to play in one’s behavior and how one conducts himself in society. With the passage of time, we master our lives better and become more refined and polished, step by step. At the age of 30, one can overcome difficulties. By the age of 40, one has thorough appreciation of and insights into the world and becomes firmly self-assured without being carried away by all those irregularities in life.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
- Bishop Desmond TuTu
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
I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let’s examine the facts.
- Dale Carnegie
I’ve talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 had one thing in common: They all wanted validation…I would tell you that every single person you will ever meet shares that common desire.
- Oprah Winfrey
If you are going to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
You may live or work around a bunch of weeds, but don’t let that stop you from blooming. Realize that your environment does not prevent you from being happy. Some people spend all their time trying to pull up all the weeds. Meanwhile, they miss much of their lives. Don’t worry about things you can’t change. You can’t change the traffic in the morning. You can’t fix everybody at work. You can’t make all your family members serve God. But you shouldn’t let that keep you from being happy. Bloom anyway and focus on the things that you can change. You can change your own attitude. You can choose to be happy right where you are.
- Joel Olsteen
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
- Winston Churchill
You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.
- Walt Disney
Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.
- Peter Thiel
To add value to others, one must first value others.
- John C. Maxwell
Most kids cannot ask questions. They can memorize, but they cannot learn.
- Terry Fischer
Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are commmon and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields – from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us. That means we need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies. And there is such a strategy – though it will seem almost ridiculous in its simplicity, maybe even crazy to those of us who have spent years carefully developing ever more advanced skills and technologies. It is a checklist.
- Atul Gawande
If I prophesy my future I want to prophesy something good. I’m not saying what I feel. I’m not saying what it looks like in the real world. No, I’m saying what God says about me.
- Joel Olsteen
In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.
- Jeff Bezos
Failure is part of discovering the problem you need to be working on. If, as an entrepreneur, you are afraid to fail or to admit the failure of your efforts, then you completely lose any chance at being able to adapt and succeed at finding the problem that needs solving.
- Caterina Fake
They (the competition) need to avoid coming at us head-on, and do their own thing better than we do ours. It doesn’t make any sense to try to underprice Wal-Mart (DJC) on something like toothpaste (DJ Prices). That’s not what the customer is looking to a small store for anyway. Most independents are best off, I think, doing what I prided myself on doing for many years as a storekeeper, getting out on the floor and meeting everyone of the customers. Let them know how much you appreciate them, and ring that cash register yourself. That little personal touch is so important for an independent merchant because no matter how hard Wal-Mart tries to duplicate – and we try awfully hard – we can’t really do it.
- Sam Walton
I have a list of the hardest, most challenging problems that our company needs to solve and I start at the top and work my way down. And I have a list of the coolest most fascinating things that we can invent and I start at the top of the list and I work my way down.
- Travis Kalanick
Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it’s digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules – not just for governments but for private companies.
- Bill Gates
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
- Peter Drucker
I love comedy. That’s what got me into the arts. I don’t even know how to categorize myself anymore.
- Steve Martin
Despite incessant dissappointment, he doggedly pursued a position. Each morning, he left his boardinghouse at eight o’ clock, clothed in a dark suit with a high collar and black tie, to make his rounds of appointed firms. This grimly determined trek went on each day, six days per week for six consecutive weeks, until late in the afternoon. The streets were so hot and hard that he grew footsore from pacing them. His perseverance surely owed something to his desire to end his reliance upon his fickle father. At one point, Bill (his father) suggested that if John didn’t find work he might have to return to the country; the thought of such dependence upon his father made a cold chill run down his spine, Rockefeller later said. Because he approached his job hunt devoid of any doubt or self-pity, he could stare down discouragement. I was working every day at my business –the business of looking for work. I put in my full time at this everyday. He was a confirmed exponent of positive thinking. With almost thirty thousand inhabitants, Cleveland was a boom town that would have thrilled any young man avid for business experience. It had drawn many transplants from New England who had brought along the Puritan mores and Yankee trading culture of their old hometowns. While the streets were largely unpaved and the town lacked a sewage system, Cleveland was expanding rapidly, with immigrants pouring in from Germany and England as well as the Eastern seaboard. The plenty if the Midwest passed through the commercial crossroads of the Western Reserve: coal from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, iron ore from around Lake Superior, salt from Michigan, grain and corn from the plains states. As a port on Lake Erie and the Ohio Canal, Clevelend was a natural hub for transportation networks. When the Cleveland Colombus and Cincinatti Railroad arrived in 1951, it created excellent opportunities for transport by both water and rail, and nobody would more brilliantly exploit these options than John D. Rockefeller. For all the thriving waterfront commerce, the job prospects were momentarily bleak. No one wanted a boy, and very few showed any overwhelming anxiety to talk with me on the subject, said Rockefeller. When he exhausted his list he simply started over from the top and visited several firms two or three times. Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.Then, on the morning of September 26th 1855, he walked into the offices of Hewitt & Tuttle, commission merchants and produce shippers on Mervin Street. He was interviewed by Henry B. Tuttle, the junior partner, who needed help with his books and asked him to return after lunch. Ecstatic, Rockefeller walked with restraint from the office, but when he got downstairs and rounded the corner he skipped down the street in pure joy. Even as an elderly man, he a saw the moment as endowed with high drama: All my future seemed to hinge on that day: and I often tremble when I ask myself the question: What if I had not got the job?In a fever of anxiety, Rockefeller awaited until the noonday meal was over, then returned to the office, where he was interviewed by senior partner Iasacc L. Newton. Owner of a good deal of Cleveland real estate and a mighty capitalist indeed. After scutinizing the boy’s penmanship, he clared we’ll give you a chance. They were evidently in urgent need of an assistant bookkeeper, since they told Rockefeller to hang up his coat and go straight to work without any mention of wages. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for an adolescent to serve an unpaid apprenticeship, and it was three months before John received his first humble retroactive pay. For the rest of his life he would honor September 26th as JOB DAY and celebrate it with more genuine brio than his birthday. One is tempted to say that his real life began on that day, that he was born again in business as he would be in the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. All the latent dynamism that had been dormant during his country youth would now quicken into robust, startling life in the business world. He was finally liberated from Big Bill (his father), the endless flight from town to town, the whole crazy upside-down world of his boyhood.
- Ron Chernow
Let’s think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it’s okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea… well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you’re not gonna get people coming up with ideas.”
- Elon Musk
It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word ‘pessimist’ was not in our vocabulary at that time. It’s a modern ‘invention’ which I believe we should ‘dis-invent.’
- Zig Ziglar
Talent is God-given, be humble. Fame is man-given, be thankful. Conceit is self-given, be careful.
- Harvey Mackay
Sometimes God gives instructions that go against conventional wisdom, such as treating people kindly when they’re hateful. Who really wants to do that? Instructions like that my not always make sense, so that’s why I need to trust and obey the One who inspired them.
- George Foreman
Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I was uncomfortable with the timing, … We were getting millions less from the federal government for Medicaid and having to search for funds to restore some of those cuts and I just did not think it was right to put a pay raise on the board that would cost tens of millions of dollars.
- Michael Gerber
Your story needs to move people’s spirits and build their goodwill, so that when you finally do ask them to buy from you, they feel like you’ve given them so much it would be almost rude to refuse.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
When you have an understanding of how someone else lives, the less likely it is that you conflict with them.
- Jack Dorsey
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
- Winston Churchill
Digital reading will completely take over. It’s lightweight and it’s fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.
- Bill Gates
I sent one e-mail in my life. I sent it to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft, and it ended up in court in Minneapolis, so I am one for one.
- Warren Buffett
I never called my work an ‘art’. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.
- Walt Disney
Put all excuses aside and remember this: YOU are capable.
- Zig Ziglar
As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
- Peter Thiel
There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.
- Bill Gates
Try not to become a man of success, but rather a man of value.
- Albert Einstein
I felt like Samson with a fresh haircut. But that dream of what the company could be sustained me.
- Ray Kroc
Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.
- P.T. Barnum
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
Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.
- Benjamin Franklin
I use the iPhone and iPad every day, and I no longer touch PCs at all.
- Masayoshi Son
Why settle for the ‘get by’ when in the long run the good costs less?
- Zig Ziglar
We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.
- Winston Churchill
The most obvious market segment in email-based payments was the millions of emigrants still using Western Union to wire money to their families back home. Our product made that effortless, but the transactions were too infrequent.
- Peter Thiel
The jack-of-all-trades seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.
- Napoleon Hill
This is an addictive pastime. You take no real risk, touch the world, and it responds. Repeat.
- Seth Godin
I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial… I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.
- Winston Churchill
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into smaller manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
- Mark Twain
If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.
- Larry Page
Who am I winning for? Am I winning for Oracle shareholders or is it simply a matter of personal vanity? I’ll admit to it. Mea culpa. An awful lot of it is personal vanity.
- Larry Ellison
