Notable Quotables

I now eat four Brazil nuts and one tablespoon of almond butter first thing upon waking.

- Timothy Ferriss

Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

- Thomas Edison

When you throw dirt at people, you’re not doing a thing but losing ground.

- Zig Ziglar

Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

There’s 20 companies that I have investments in – some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.

- Bill Gates

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

The tragedy is that society (your school, your boss, your government, your family) keeps drumming the genius part out. The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability.

- Seth Godin

Thee may be some concern about rising inflation, shortage of labour and increased trade protectionism but the economy is generally in good shape.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I remember thinking quite logically that I didn’t want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.

- Bill Gates

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

- Thomas Edison

In 2008, Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But people didn’t know they needed such a thing—cloud computing hadn’t caught on yet. That summer, Blake was hired as Box’s third salesperson to help change that. Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company. In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.

- Peter Thiel

The Roman world, like an aged man, wished to dwell in peace and tranquillity and to enjoy in philosophic detachment the good gifts which life has to bestow upon the more fortunate classes. But new ideas disturbed the internal conservatism, and outside the carefully guarded frontiers vast masses of hungry, savage men surged and schemed. The essence of the Roman peace was toleration of all religions and the acceptance of a universal system of government. Every generation after the middle of the second century saw an increasing weakening of the system and a gathering movement towards a uniform religion. Christianity asked again all the questions which the Roman world deemed answered for ever, and some that it had never thought of.

- Winston Churchill

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.

- Henry Ford

If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.

- Zig Ziglar

Find a job that you will be happy with and work hard at.

- Lee Shau Kee

The buyer needs to talk at least 70% of the time.

- Clay Clark

My financial service business is the absolute best thing I have done to empower the poor. I run many charities and fight many political causes, but my financial service company is the greatest gift I’ve given.

- Russell Simmons

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.

- Joel Olsteen

Most salespeople won’t stop talking long enough to let the Buyer make a decision.

- Jerry Vass

I’m not an actor who appears on the stage and gives people advice on how to live or what to do and entertains them. It is not my specialty.

- Vagit Alekperov

I think we are not serious about attacking the long-term debt problem, and that’s one of the things that he’s going to have to find a way to get on the agenda.

- Michael Bloomberg

The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great. Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must not look too good nor talk too wise.

- Dale Carnegie

The polar opposite business cliché warns that “the best product doesn’t always win.

- Peter Thiel

In short, I conceive that a great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.

- Dale Carnegie

Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.

- Bill Gates

It’s not about size, it’s about your ability to make a difference. At that small size, collaboration is all the more important.

- John Chambers

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

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

- Peter Thiel

I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.’ Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.

- Larry Ellison

I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

- Timothy Ferriss

If my job would have been to sell someone something they didn’t need, I would not have been very good at it.

- Pat McGovern

That’s your opportunity–to approach your work in a way that generates unique learning and interactions that are worth sharing.

- Seth Godin

If you want your life to be more rewarding, you have to change the way you think.

- Oprah Winfrey

You can make positive deposits in your own economy every day by reading and listening to powerful, positive, life-changing content and by associating with encouraging and hope-building people.

- Zig Ziglar

I got into retailing because I wanted a real job.

- Sam Walton

Every leader’s potential is determined by the people closest to him. No matter what I did with that staff, they would never be able to take the organization to the place we needed to go.

- Napoleon Hill

Selling and delivering a product is at least as important as the product itself.

- Peter Thiel

There is no shoe school, so where do you recruit people for a company that develops and markets running shoes? The running track… We and the consumer were one and the same.

- Phil Knight

If there is any one secret of success,’ said Henry Ford, ‘it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

- Dale Carnegie

There are two paths people can take. They can either play now and pay later, or pay now and play later. Regardless of the choice, one thing is certain. Life will demand a payment.

- John C. Maxwell

But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.

- Jeff Bezos

There are many different kinds of PCs. You have fixed, virtual, tablets, notebooks, ultrabooks, desktops, workstations. What you find in commercial PCs, business PCs, is that there’s a really long tail of usage on client devices.

- Michael Dell

Become meaningful in your interactions and the path to success in any endeavor is simpler and far more sustainable.

- Dale Carnegie

You don’t ever want to sell, you want customers to sell.

- Clay Clark

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

- Elon Musk

It’s clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them.

- Seth Godin

Failing forward” is the ability to get back up after you’ve been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction.

- John C. Maxwell

To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That’s what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games – nothing like saving the world.

- Elon Musk

My wife thinks she’s better than me at puzzles. I haven’t given in on that one yet.

- Bill Gates

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

Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who’s going to build.

- Larry Ellison

We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

What we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

- Brian Tracy

Facebook is really about communicating and telling stories… We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that’s out there.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.

- Seth Godin

Our approach as a Group is based on strong economic, social and environmental principles. We strive to create high quality, visually stimulating innovative new homes and commercial developments that enhance, as well as integrate with, their surrounding natural and built environments.

- Lee Shau Kee

es it’s thinner, but I wanted storage. I don’t have broadband at home, and you can’t get great broadband connection in hotels, so I carry all my personal media in the iPad. So I was hoping Apple has a 256GB iPad. I was hoping for more storage so I could put every episode of Big Bang Theory on my iPad. So I emailed my wife and said ‘nope, I don’t want one of those.

- Steve Wozniak

And here is the prime condition of success, the great secret. Concentrate your energy, thoughts and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged in. Having begun in one line, resolve to fight it out on that line; to lead in it. Adopt every improvement, have the best machinery and know the most about it.

- Andrew Carnegie

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.

- Elon Musk

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

To achieve stable growth, an enterprise must live up to its conviction.

- Cheng Yu-tung

If you go out looking for friends, you’re going to find they are very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.

- Zig Ziglar

We can never learn too much of His will towards us, too much of His messages and His advice. The Bible is His word and its study gives at once the foundation for our faith and an inspiration to battle onward in the fight against the tempter.

- John D. Rockefeller

If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.

- Anthony Robbins

If you’re using first-class land for biofuels, then you’re competing with the growing of food. And so you’re actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

- Bill Gates

Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.

- Ray Dalio

Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.

- Peter Drucker

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It’s the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

- Elon Musk

When state funding for Irvine public schools began to diminish some time ago, my Irvine Company colleagues helped me to provide private funding support for continuation of basic science, art and music programs that had been eliminated by lack of state funding.

- Donald Bren

My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.

- Joel Olsteen

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

- Peter Drucker

The expensive act of planning on late When you’re late, there’s not a lot of room for choice or decision or initiative. When you’re late, the path is well lit, and the choices are clear. Run! Run down the path you’ve run down before. Late is a tool for people unable to find the guts to stand for their acts. Late gives us cover; it permits us to trample forward, without creativity or panache. “Can’t you see I’m late!” we shout, as we do what we have to do, without even pausing to think about what we could do instead. Late might be useful, except that late is incredibly expensive. This strategy, the one we choose so we can avoid the fear of choice, costs us in so many ways. It degrades quality, misses airplanes, charges overtime, and shuts down those around us. It’s also exhausting. The alternative to planning on late is to initiate before it’s required, to ship before deadline, to put the idea out there before the crisis hits. This act of bravery actually gives you influence, leverage, and control in a way that planning on late never can.

- Seth Godin

The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.

- Rupert Murdoch

A good practice is to have the employee send you the agenda in advance. This will give her a chance to cancel the meeting if nothing is pressing.

- Ben Horowitz

You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.

- Zig Ziglar

When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: Try to bear lightly what needs must be. Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity.

- Dale Carnegie

We create stress for ourselves because you feel like you have to do it. You have to. I don’t feel that anymore.

- Oprah Winfrey

I’m personally a moderate and a registered independent, so I’m not strongly Democratic or strongly Republican.

- Elon Musk

The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.

- Oprah Winfrey

Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.

- Bill Gates

You can’t spend as much money as I have, even if you try. I’ve been trying.

- Larry Ellison

Small businesses don’t exist without the nucleus.

- Bryan Smith

Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. To know all is to forgive all.

- Dale Carnegie

People with the right kind of ambition would not likely use the word play to describe their effort to work as a team to build something substantial. Finally, people who use the “me” prism find it natural and obvious to speak in terms of “building out my résumé” while people who use the “team” prism find such phrases to be somewhat uncomfortable and awkward, because they clearly indicate an individual goal that is separate from the team goal.

- Ben Horowitz

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