If you are starting a business I believe it has to be your passion.
- David Robinson
Notable Quotables
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
- Mark Twain
At first, Uniqlo was a casual chain on the back streets of Hiroshima. Then… we became a national brand in Japan. So, the next step is to become a global brand.
- Tadashi Yanai
Will flash cards invade the disk drive makers’ core markets and supplant magnetic memory? If they do, what will happen to the disk drive makers? Will they stay atop their markets, catching this new technological wave? Or will they be driven out?
- Clayton M. Christensen
In business, if you don’t kick and hug, you don’t love.
- Clay Clark
When one person yells the other should listen. When two people yell, there’s no communication.
- Dale Carnegie
The word cellulite, for example, first appeared in the April 15, 1968, issue of Vogue magazine, and this invented disease soon had a believer base worldwide: Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles.… In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a problem” where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women’s natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma… . The number of diet- related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972.
- Timothy Ferriss
There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.
- Bill Gates
American democracy is spoiled by people buying everything in sight and then selling and buying everything in sight, including our politicians.
- Russell Simmons
People need to buy homes.
- Cheng Yu-tung
It also makes clear that it is her meeting and will take as much or as little time as she needs. During the meeting, since it’s the employee’s meeting, the manager should do 10 percent of the talking and 90 percent of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most one-on-ones.
- Ben Horowitz
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
- Jeff Bezos
Science investigates religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power religion gives man wisdom which is control.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
A waitress goes up to Winston Churchill and says, ‘Sir, your drunk.’ To which he replies, ‘I may be drunk, miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
- Winston Churchill
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
- Timothy Ferriss
There are a great many wetless” bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim in them. To plunge is the only way.
- Dale Carnegie
When completed the new facility will have the capacity to accommodate approximately 3,000 staff.
- John Chambers
Hedgehog Concept—disciplined action, following from disciplined people who exercise disciplined thought.
- James C. Collins
Our mail product, Hotmail, is the market leader globally.
- Steve Ballmer
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
- David Novak
One of the statistics that always amazes me is the approval of the Chinese government, not elected, is over 80 percent. The approval of the U.S. government, fully elected, is 19 percent. Well, we elected these people and they didn’t elect those people. Isn’t it supposed to be different? Aren’t we supposed to like the people that we elected?
- Bill Gates
Disneyland is a show.
- Walt Disney
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
- Oprah Winfrey
How can I create something that critics will criticize?
- Seth Godin
We think a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade. We don’t decide for you.
- Larry Ellison
Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.
- Marilyn vos Savant
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
I’ve come too far to stop now. I may be knocked down, but I’m not knocked out. I’m going to get back up again. I know I’m a victor, not a victim.
- Joel Olsteen
Speak the truth. Transparency breeds legitimacy.
- John C. Maxwell
The interesting products out on the Internet today are not building new technologies. They’re combining technologies. Instagram, for instance: Photos plus geolocation plus filters. Foursquare: restaurant reviews plus check-ins plus geo.
- Jack Dorsey
Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?
- Michael Bloomberg
I believe that one of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.
- Oprah Winfrey
A lot of stuff I do out of pure obsessiveness.
- Jerry Seinfeld
In a litigation-happy society, clear agreements often prevent small disagreements from becoming big ones.
- Harvey Mackay
I first thought maybe I’d do a banjo presentation record, where I’d play a couple of songs and get a bunch of other players to do the rest. Then I realized I had enough of my own songs to do an album of them.
- Steve Martin
Opening new stores outside of Japan is important, but training our employees is even more important.
- Tadashi Yanai
Maybe I was accepted to Harvard only because of my tennis skills, since I definitively had no great academic achievements. I was 17 and only thought about surfing and playing tennis. I had almost never left Rio de Janeiro and had never been to the United States.
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human body, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.
- Thomas Edison
confusion is the main cause of worry.
- Dale Carnegie
The challenge is this: training creative, independent, and innovative artists is new to us.
- Seth Godin
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
America, for me, is the country where, if you have something great to offer, you’ll be valued highly.
- Tadashi Yanai
Sales were limited by how many shoes we had, shoes were limited by how many dollars we had to order them.
- Phil Knight
Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.
- Napoleon Hill
…Treasure what it means to do a day’s work. It’s our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it’s certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day’s work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you’ll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.
- Seth Godin
The people currently in charge have forgotten the first principle of an open society, namely that we may be wrong and that there has to be free discussion. That it’s possible to be opposed to the policies without being unpatriotic.
- George Soros
With sustained recovery of the local economy, marked improvement in consumer spending and increasing tourist arrivals from Mainland China, these led to the expansion of certain local retail trades including cosmetics, audio-visual products and jewellery which in turn boosted the demand for retail shop spaces.
- Lee Shau Kee
Arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.
- Peter Thiel
I wanted to be a tailor to craft products.
- Jack Dorsey
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Money doesn’t make people happy. People make people happy.
- Stephen Wynn
Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.
- Peter Drucker
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
The little things in life frequently make the difference in success and failure.
- Zig Ziglar
I’m killing two birds at once, so to speak. Animal-based food kills people. This way, by going vegan… we get healthy and save animals. I’m being selfish, too, because if I can get my employees healthier, we cut down on sick days and gain more productivity.
- Stephen Wynn
Structure a deal and create a plan around it.
- Jack Nadel
[In January 2011] There are so many features Twitter could build. There’s so many features that Square can build. But there is only one or two going to bring us to the next level.
- Jack Dorsey
Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.
- George Washington Carver
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
Although office rental in Hong Kong recorded a general downward adjustment and the slowdown in the economy in the past financial year brought along its negative impacts on the local retailing and food sectors, the major retail shopping properties owned by the Group were able to maintain an overall occupancy rate of 93% whilst rental levels generally remained steady.
- Lee Shau Kee
With every obstacle that has happened to me in my life, my brain immediately says, ‘Where is the hidden blessing?’ In starting a business and growing a business, every day is learning how to manage obstacles.
- Sara Blakely
Living in the moment brings you a sense of reverence for all of life’s blessings.
- Oprah Winfrey
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
I don’t think that a same-sex marriage is the way God intended it to be.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Winning is better than losing, but everybody loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting.
- Peter Thiel
I’m a storyteller. I love to tell stories about brands. I love to tell stories, period. I like painting pictures through the words, and that’s what I do.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.
- Alexander Graham Bell
You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.
- Bill Cosby
It seems like when I was growing up there was more compromise, wanting to work with each other, and I think all of them – all of the lawmakers – have hearts to do what’s right, and they all are passionate about it.
- Joel Olsteen
I think that the first thing is you should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don’t know what the future is going to hold.
- Ray Dalio
We’re talking about changing every aspect of our lives.
- John Chambers
I made a conscious decision not to tell anyone in my life. Now I tell people–don’t tell anyone your idea until you have invested enough of yourself in it that you are not going to turn back. When a person has an idea at that conception moment, it is the most vulnerable–one negative comment could knock you off course.
- Sara Blakely
In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.
- Bill Gates
If you want to reach the top, don’t run over others. Likely, the only way you’ll reach the top is to be carried there by others.
- John C. Maxwell
That which becomes acceptable becomes inevitable.
- Michael Levine
If people like you they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you they’ll do business with you.
- Zig Ziglar
A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast. Good news travels slow.
- Ben Horowitz
I had learned that for any big idea you had to sell, sell, sell to move the needle at all.
- Jack Welch
Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.
- Napoleon Hill
If you don’t believe in your product, or if you’re not consistent and regular in the way you promote it, the odds of succeeding go way down. The primary function of the marketing plan is to ensure that you have the resources and the where withal to do what it takes to make your product work.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
You can win more friends with your ears than with your mouth. People who feel like they’re being listened to feel accepted and appreciated. They feel like they’re being taken seriously and what they say really matters.
- Harvey Mackay
Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map—these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock, use a computer, or work with others all day long.
- Seth Godin
What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?
- Sam Walton
Pick the best people, face the reality (the way it is), speak with candor to everything, never lose sight of the relationship with the constituency.
- Jack Welch
The main thing that’s missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics.
- Bill Gates
Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense.
- Larry Page
We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
- Peter Drucker
Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
- Dale Carnegie
What I know for sure is that what you give comes back to you.
- Oprah Winfrey
Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you.
- Michael Gerber
After you become a millionaire, you can give all of your money away because what’s important is not the million dollars; what’s important is the person you have become in the process of becoming a millionaire.
- Jim Rohn
Even though I’m a hype man myself, I like the practicality of it all. People who understand how to turn a profit. At the end of the day, this is still business so I’m looking for real practical knowledge of how to actually make money, not necessarily raise it.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.
- Jeff Bezos
I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was… an arctic wilderness.
- Steve Martin
Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.
- Seth Godin
Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.
- Walt Disney
Getting fired, despite sometimes coming as a surprise and leaving you scrambling to recover, is often a godsend. Most people aren’t lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30-40 years of tolerating the mediocre.
- Timothy Ferriss
Ethical decisions ensure that everyone’s best interests are protected. When in doubt, don’t.
- Harvey Mackay
You create your own universe as you go along.
- Winston Churchill
