Notable Quotables

The question you should be asking isn’t, What do I want? or What are my goals? but What would excite me?

- Timothy Ferriss

Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.

- Paula Poundstone

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

It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.

- Timothy Ferriss

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

The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.

- Bill Gates

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

- Bill Gates

The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities.

- Peter Thiel

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

- Bill Gates

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

You’ve got to take a big jump to make it. You’ve got to have great big balls.

- Forrest Ray

In boxing, you get hit, it’s painful, then you sit on the stool when the adrenaline is gone and you feel that pain. And then you fight the next round.

- Ben Horowitz

Arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.

- Dale Carnegie

Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans.

- Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles

In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

- Ben Horowitz

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

- Mark Twain

Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution—whether they’re in sales, marketing, or advertising—has a job title that has nothing to do with those things. People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.

- Peter Thiel

People want to watch whatever video they want to watch whenever they want to watch. If you provision your Internet infrastructure adequately, you can do that.

- Bill Gates

Instead of trying to use your technology and expertise to make a better product for your users’ standard behavior, experiment with inviting the users to change their behavior to make the product work dramatically better.

- Seth Godin

Remember that failure is an event, not a person.

- Zig Ziglar

Play like you’re ten points behind in the final quarter. I’ve always heard this defined as operational cadence – creating a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm of doing business that drives the relentless pursuit of results. Whatever I’ve learned about creating a sense of urgency started when I worked for Howard Davis at Tracy Locke. He really knew how to push people. Everything had to be done yesterday. And I was one of the people who go pushed. Howard was a master of intimidation. Everyone knew if you didn’t give him what he wanted, he was going to find another way to get it, and if your weren’t part of the solution then you were part of the problem. The clients loved Howard because they knew he’d kill for them (and none of us wanted to be killed). It wasn’t always comfortable, but it taught me the value of constantly putting pressure on myself and the people who work for me. In corporate America, pressure is a way of life, so rather that resist it or merely accept it, you have to learn to use it as a personal motivator.

- David Novak

The future of the world’s film industry is in China because we have 1.3 billion people.

- Wang Jianlin

Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.

- Peter Thiel

The most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”

- Ben Horowitz

We’re on our way to Greece, in the hands of a confused, foolish government. It’s got to stop. It’s got to stop.

- Stephen Wynn

In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I have lots of sources of information about what’s going on at the company. I think I have a pretty good pulse on where we are and what people are thinking.

- Steve Ballmer

Bill Gates was in his 20s when he started with $50,000 and became the richest man in the world with $90 billion. It’s a good idea that he did not ask too many people for their ideas on what they thought was possible for his life.

- Robert Kiyosaki

A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

- Richard Branson

I look at every business and ask, How long can this last? How can I identify the status quo and change it?

- Sheldon Adelson

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

- Elon Musk

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

- Richard Branson

JANUARY 16 Reach Out by Faith For she said to herself, If only I may touch His garment, I shall be made well.” But Jesus turned around, and when He saw her He said, Be of good cheer, daughter; your faith has made you well.” MATTHEW 9:21–22 NKJV ONE FELLOW WHOSE MARRIAGE was on the verge of dissolution told me, Joel, I’ve been this way for a long time. Nothing good ever happens to me. I don’t see how my marriage can be restored. We’ve always had these problems.” Those wrong attitudes will keep you from receiving the good things God wants to pour out in your life,” I told him. Stop dwelling on negative, destructive thoughts that keep you in a rut. Your life will change when you change your thinking.” God has so much more in store for him, and for you as well. If you want to see God’s far and beyond favor, you have to start believing it, seeing it, and speaking it.

- Joel Olsteen

Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking tartar sauce with you.

- Zig Ziglar

Although I don’t have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way.

- Bill Gates

You can make an internet company with 10 people and it can have billions of users. It doesn’t take much capital and it makes a lot of money — a really, really lot of money — so it’s natural for everyone to focus on those kinds of things.

- Larry Page

My relationship with money is that it’s a tool to be self-sufficient, but it’s not something that is a part of who I am.

- Laurene Powell Jobs

Success is not measured by what you do compared to what others do, it is measured by what you do with the ability God gave you.

- Zig Ziglar

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be;

- Winston Churchill

Anybody can wish for riches, and most people do, but only a few know that a definite plan plus a burning desire for wealth, are the only dependable means of accumulating wealth.

- Napoleon Hill

Insulation prevents you from making the change and finding the understanding you set out to achieve in the first place.

- Seth Godin

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

- Peter Drucker

Rockefeller preferred to own raw land. In 1873, he invested in seventy-nine scenic acres at Forest Hill, a lovely, thickly wooded spot, crisscrossed by steep ravines and gulleys, just four miles east of his Euclid Avenue home.

- Ron Chernow

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream: —There spread a cloud of dust along a plainAnd underneath the cloud, or in it, ragedA furious battle, and men yelled, and swordsShocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s bannerWavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.A craven hung along the battle’s edge,And thought, Had I a sword of keener steel —That blue blade that the king’s son bears, — but thisBlunt thing! — he snapt and flung it from his hand,And lowering crept away and left the field.Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead,And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shoutLifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down,And saved a great cause that heroic day.

- Edward Rowland Sill

We are seeing the beginning of things. Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second.

- Reed Hastings

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

- Henry Ford

Direct your energy toward achieving a goal, and tackle the problems with an emphasis on edging closer to a successful result.

- Harvey Mackay

Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.

- Ben Horowitz

For every sale you miss because you were too enthusiastic, you’ll miss a hundred because you weren’t enthusiastic enough.

- Zig Ziglar

I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

- Mark Zuckerberg

A little boy went out to the backyard to play with a baseball bat and a ball. He said to himself, I am the best hitter in the world.” Then he threw the ball up in the air and took a swing at it, but he missed. Without a moment’s hesitation, he picked up the ball and tossed it in the air again, saying as he swung the bat, I’m the best hitter in all the world.” He swung and missed. Strike two. He tossed the ball up again, concentrating more intensely, even more determined, saying, I am the best hitter in all the world!” He swung the bat with all his might. Whiff! Strike three. The little boy laid down his bat and smiled real big. What do you know?” he said. I’m the best pitcher in all the world!

- Joel Olsteen

Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.

- Peter Thiel

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

- Clay Clark

By getting your customers to agree with you in small steps along the way, you have a better chance of reaching agreement when it’s time to do business.

- Harvey Mackay

It’s not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobiles one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.

- George Washington Carver

The truth is, somebody is always talking about you, so you have to let it go… if it’s not a part of your God-given destiny.

- Joel Olsteen

I believe that the science of chemistry alone almost proves the existence of an intelligent creator.

- Thomas Edison

‘You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‘Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.’

- Joel Olsteen

The good-will of a business which is losing money is not worth much.

- Ron Chernow

You embrace the top 20, deal with the middle 70, and you face into the bottom 10, and you do what’s right for them and for you.

- Jack Welch

I’m trying to change the culture in New York City, that’s hard enough!

- Michael Bloomberg

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle…

- Napoleon Hill

Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power.

- Sergey Brin

I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.

- Steve Martin

America, for me, is the country where, if you have something great to offer, you’ll be valued highly.

- Tadashi Yanai

I was working with stem cells as part of a NASA programme. We realised that the science of stem-cell proliferation was also fundamental to cancer cells when cancer enters the phase of metastasis.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

The greatest decision of all time, as far as any American citizen is concerned was reached in Philadelphia, July 4th 1776, when 56 men signed their names to a document, which they well knew would bring freedom to all Americans, or leave every one of the fifty-six hanging from the gallows. On July 4th 1776 Thomas Jefferson stood before the Assembly and fearlessly read the most momentus Decision ever placed upon paper.

- Napoleon Hill

To lead a meaningful life, one must build trust with others. To enjoy peace, a nation must win the confidence and support of its people. To achieve stable growth, an enterprise must live up to its conviction.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The economy of Hong Kong was considerably stable in 2000. However, as the global economy experienced a slowdown since the beginning of 2001, the confidence of local home purchasers remained low notwithstanding that Hong Kong followed the footsteps of the United States of America in announcing consecutive reductions of interest rates as well as a series of measures implemented by the Government to stabilise local property prices.

- Lee Shau Kee

The Dip creates scarcity, scarcity creates value.

- Seth Godin

We have a very high churn rate, but as soon as we turn on email marketing to our user base, people will come back.” Yes, of course. The reason that people leave our service and don’t come back is that we have not been sending them enough spam. That makes total sense to me, too.

- Ben Horowitz

I’ve been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that’s kind of a religious belief. I mean, it’s at least a moral belief.

- Bill Gates

There is more treasure in books then in all pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

- Walt Disney

Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.

- Sam Walton

I absolutely don’t have $20 billion. But I’d love to, right?

- Jack Ma

I loved couriers. You had this transfer of physical information happening throughout the city and the world. Someone picking up the package, putting it in a bag, going somewhere, taking it out of the bag, giving it to someone else. I thought that was so cool. I wanted to map it, to see that flow on a big screen.

- Jack Dorsey

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.

- Elon Musk

Let us accept the natural order in which we move. Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time. Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows. The glory of light cannot exist without its shadows. Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together. The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making – once.

- Winston Churchill

The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.

- Phil Knight

However, for equity to create commitment rather than conflict, you must allocate it very carefully. Giving everyone equal shares is usually a mistake: every individual has different talents and responsibilities as well as different opportunity costs, so equal amounts will seem arbitrary and unfair from the start. On the other hand, granting different amounts up front is just as sure to seem unfair. Resentment at this stage can kill a company, but there’s no ownership formula to perfectly avoid it.

- Peter Thiel

I just think that trusting God means we’re going to have unanswered questions, and God is so much bigger than us, we’re never going to understand them all.

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Josh James

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

- Peter Drucker

I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.

- Brian Tracy

Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.

- Peter Drucker

In the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we’ve done, and they will say ‘do not despair, do not yield…march straightforward.

- Winston Churchill

Don’t romance Wall Street. You don’t want investors who are only concerned about the quarter, or who are working on their exit strategy from day one. You want shareholders to own you forever. If we have no trading at all, I consider that a tremendous accomplishment.

- Warren Buffett

You can’t build any kind of organization if you’re not going to surround yourself with people who have experience and skill base beyond your own.

- Howard Schultz

Do more than you are being paid to do, and you’ll eventually be paid more for what you do.

- Zig Ziglar

Man’s only limitation within reason lies in his development and use of his imagination

- Napoleon Hill

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