The connected economy of ideas demands that we contribute initiative. And yet we resist, because our lizard brain, the one that lives in fear, relentlessly exaggerates the cost of being wrong.
- Seth Godin
Notable Quotables
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
- Peter Thiel
I’ll trade glib for common sense any day.
- Stephen Wynn
I’ve always been fascinated by cities and how they work. And I taught myself how to program so I can understand how the city works.
- Jack Dorsey
Action is the real measure of intelligence.
- Napoleon Hill
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
- Steve Jobs
In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.
- Steve Wozniak
There’s never been a doctor who served many patients who, despite their best efforts, did not lose some of them to death. But they understood that was part of life itself.
- Zig Ziglar
Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.
- Reid Hoffman
I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.
- Warren Buffett
You’re asking somebody who has a wife and is really happily married, ‘So, what’s your next wife going to be like?’ And I’m like, ‘What?
- Travis Kalanick
When SAP, and, specifically Hasso Plattner, said they’re going to build this in-memory database and compete with Oracle, I said. God, get me the name of that pharmacist, they must be on drugs.
- Larry Ellison
A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.
- Seth Godin
I am a tightwad. That’s one of the main reasons I completed a long questionnaire for a crispy $1 bill. Why else would I spend two or three hours being personally interviewed by these authors? They paid me $100, $200, or $250. Oh, they made me another offer–to donate in my name the money I earned for my interview to my favorite charity. But I told them, I am my favorite charity.
- Thomas J Stanley
I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.
- Bill Gates
Real leaders don’t care [about receiving credit]. If it’s about your mission, about spreading the faith, about seeing something happen, not only do you not care about credit, you actually want other people to take credit…There’s no record of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi whining about credit. Credit isn’t the point. Change is.
- Seth Godin
These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.
- Winston Churchill
On every occasion, we were able to rely on our unique qualities – resourcefulness, perseverance, diligence and passion for excellence – to rise above our difficulties.
- Cheng Yu-tung
That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity.
- Beryl Markham
Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
- Peter Drucker
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
- Winston Churchill
Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Success is determined by your daily agenda
- John Maxwell
The freedom of the new kind of work (which most of us do, most of the time) is that the tasks are vague and difficult to measure. We can waste an hour surfing the ’Net because no one knows if surfing the ’Net is going to help us make progress or connections. This freedom is great, because it means no one is looking over your shoulder; no one is using a stopwatch on you. This freedom is a pox, because it’s an opening for the resistance. Freedom like this makes it easy to hide, easy to find excuses, easy to do very little.
- Seth Godin
Winning friends begins with friendliness.
- Dale Carnegie
Mr. Ford’s most rapid strides became noticable from the time he became a personal friend of Thomas A. Edison, and you will begin to understand what the influence of one mind upon another can accomplish.
- Napoleon Hill
The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.
- Warren Buffett
Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind.
- Winston Churchill
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 love comedy. That’s what got me into the arts. I don’t even know how to categorize myself anymore.
- Steve Martin
Personally, I just hope that my family keeps getting bigger and bigger. That would make me very happy.
- Lee Shau Kee
No one has a transparent view of the world. In fact, we all carry around a personal worldview—the biases and experiences and expectations that color the way we perceive the world.
- Seth Godin
There’s an entire universe in every single tweet, and it all really depends on the content as far as how it’s going to spread.
- Jack Dorsey
But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1.
- Peter Thiel
When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.
- Ben Horowitz
I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.
- John C. Maxwell
Indecision is the seedling of fear.
- Napoleon Hill
I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same – they give the exact same advice. It’s like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.
- Ben Horowitz
The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand – without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it….
- Thomas Edison
Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new.
- Og Mandino
Backed by our conviction, we remain committed to investing wholeheartedly to improve the people’s living conditions, regardless of all uncertainties.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.
- Donald Trump
I can’t really comment on rumors.
- Larry Page
For those that have fixed exchange-rate regimes, you will need a greater amount of foreign reserves. That’s the case in Belize, it’s the case in the Eastern Caribbean zone and it’s also the case in Barbados. In those cases, the level of reserve coverage is one of credit weakness. Where you have a bit more flexibility in the exchange rate ? for instance, Jamaica ? you would require a smaller amount of international reserves.
- John Chambers
I don’t like accidental success. It’s what Bill Gates calls ‘random,’ a term he uses with the opposite of respect.
- Masayoshi Son
Starbucks has stores in America in many, many communities that are governed by many, many different municipalities. Starbucks cannot dictate to a municipality in Cincinnati or Kansas City or Sacramento how or why or when there should be a recycling program.
- Howard Schultz
When we face with a steady eye the difficulties which lie before us, we may derive new confidence from remembering those we have already overcome.
- Winston Churchill
Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
- Timothy Ferriss
The thing about fashion – it’s like ducks going quack, quack quack. It’s being dictated from above, and it just makes me want to rebel against it.
- Sara Blakely
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 had a TV set and a typewriter and that made me think a computer should be laid out like a typewriter with a video screen.
- Steve Wozniak
I’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.
- Elon Musk
I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.
- Oprah Winfrey
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
People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.
- Andrew Carnegie
My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.
- Richard Branson
If you are going to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.
- Winston Churchill
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
No one drifts to success.
- Napoleon Hill
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
Good relations with the Wookiees, I have.
- Yoda
We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we’re going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water.
- Larry Ellison
You know, in Saudi Arabia, there is a body of 40 people – 34 people exactly, that once the succession comes, they will meet and they will elect a king in there.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
There are no rules here — we’re trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison
Success is never accidental.
- Peter Thiel
The Interros strategy toward various assets generally depends on the stage of their development and level of their maturity.
- Vladimir Potanin
The soul of business is not making money but making people happy.
- Aliko Dangote
Our company has to be a company that enables its people.
- Steve Ballmer
Rich dad said to Mike and me, I am so rich because I’ve made more financial mistakes than most people. Each time I made a mistake, I learned something new. In the business world, that something new is often called experience.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The reality is that I surround myself with very smart, very strong people – including my ex-wives.
- Ronald Perelman
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
- John Wooden
The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.
- Jeff Bezos
Those people blessed with the most talent don’t necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.
- Mary Kay Ash
As knowledge is acquired it must be organized and put into use, for a definate purpose, through practical plans. Knowledge has no value except that which be gained from its application toward some worthy end.
- Napoleon Hill
The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom.
- Timothy Ferriss
Self-disciplined begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don’t control what you think, you can’t control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.
- Napoleon Hill
Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I’d put myself in the latter category. But I’d never call myself a normal designer of anything.
- Steve Wozniak
I’m a catalyst for change. You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.
- Rupert Murdoch
Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.
- Peter Thiel
Do you know of the water and the moon? The river flows endlessly, yet it never disappears. The moon waxes and wanes, yet it never grows bigger or smaller. Therefore, if you look in the eyes of change, everything in this world changes in an instant. But if you look in the eyes of stability, everything in the world, including humanity, is eternal. Dozens of worlds have demonstrated precisely the truth of the changing universe. The changes of the water and the moon happen on their appearances, but never on their physical natures. Therefore, whether changes happen depends on people’s mind and view. Since nothing remains permanent in the world, change is just the eternal fact.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
- Bill Gates
When you find an idea that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue.
- Josh James
Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.
- Peter Thiel
I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy.
- Og Mandino
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean, if a few drops of ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
- Mahatma Gandhi
I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.
- Jack Dorsey
when praise is specific, it comes across as sincere—not something the other person may be saying just to make one feel good.
- Dale Carnegie
I was hooked and I would make reward and recognition one of my primary focuses as a leader
- David Novak
There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking.
- Bill Gates
Nothing happens until something is sold.
- Joe Ricketts
Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic. The best way to approach a potential break is simple: Confide in them honestly but tactfully and explain your concerns. If they bite back, your conclusions have been confirmed. Drop them like any other bad habit. If they promise to change, first spend at least two weeks apart to develop other positive influences in your life and diminish psychological dependency. The next trial period should have a set duration and consist of pass-or-fail criteria. If this approach is too confrontational for you, just politely refuse to interact with them. Be in the middle of something when the call comes, and have a prior commitment when the invitation to hang out comes. Once you see the benefits of decreased time with these people, it will be easier to stop communication altogether.
- Timothy Ferriss
I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we’re not wise enough to see it.
- Oprah Winfrey
Encouragement to others is something everyone can give. Somebody needs what you have to give. It may not be your money, it may be your time. It may be your listening ear. It may be your arms to encourage. It may be your smile to uplift. Who knows?
- Joel Olsteen
The commonsense rules of the real world” are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.
- Timothy Ferriss
The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.
- Bill Gates
The people who work within these industries or public services know that there are basic flaws. But they are almost forced to ignore them and to concentrate instead on patching here, improving there, fighting the fire or caulking that crack. They are thus unable to take the innovation seriously, let alone to try to compete with it. They do not, as a rule, even notice it until it has grown so big as to encroach on their industry or service, by which time it has become irreversible. In the meantime, the innovators have the field to themselves.
- Peter Drucker
Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.
- Andrew Carnegie
