There is never a bad time to start a business – unless you want to start a mediocre one.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Notable Quotables
I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.
- John D. Rockefeller
You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.
- Napoleon Hill
To change somebody’s behavior, change the level of respect she receives by giving her a fine reputation to live up to. Act as though the trait you are trying to influence is already one of the person’s outstanding characteristics.
- Dale Carnegie
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
- Samuel Beckett
Today, not starting is far, far worse than being wrong. If you start, you’ve got a shot at evolving and adjusting to turn your wrong into a right. But if you don’t start, you never get a chance.
- Seth Godin
Sooner or later, you will see a China-based company that really has a global impact, and I think Baidu has a chance to become one of those companies. We should be able to compete on a global basis.
- Robin Li
Worry is the most significant factor that relates to the root of negative thinking.
- Zig Ziglar
What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don’t actually improve their lives.
- Jeff Bezos
If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.
- Henry Ford
The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.
- Peter Thiel
The saving of money is solely a matter of habit. It is literally true that man, through the Law of Habit, shapes his own personality. Through repetition, any act indulged in a few times becomes a habit, and the mind appears to be nothing more than a mass of motivating forces growing out of our daily habits. When once fixed in the mind a habit voluntarily impels one to action.
- Napoleon Hill
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
- Winston Churchill
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
Too often, sales reps simply regurgitate their presentations and expect to land the sale. It doesn’t work.
- Harvey Mackay
It’s not always easy to get over some of those bumps in the road, those disillusionments and disappointments. It’s going to take a strong will. Sometimes, it may take courage. Sometimes nothing but faith in God and say, I refuse to be trapped in the past. I’m not going to let the past destroy my future. I’m pressing on. I’m straining forward, knowing that God has great things in store for me.
- Joel Olsteen
There will be no government that will be against business, so you can go ahead and invest.
- Aliko Dangote
Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
- Elon Musk
When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened
- Winston Churchill
The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline–a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.
- James C. Collins
Knowledge will not attract money, unless it is organized, and intelligently directed through practical plans of action…Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when and if it is organized into definite plans of action, and directed to a definite end.
- Napoleon Hill
I have a nice office. I have a nice house… So I’m not denying myself some great things. I just don’t happen to have expensive hobbies.
- Bill Gates
Three out of four of us who are self-employed consider ourselves to be entrepreneurs. Most of the others are self-employed professionals, such as doctors and accountants.
- Thomas J Stanley
When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.
- Warren Buffett
No one ever wants to see his or her name linked to anything bad. Conscience is like a baby. It has to go to sleep before you can.
- Harvey Mackay
Take one cup of love, two cups of loyalty, three cups of forgiveness, four quarts of faith and one barrel of laughter. Take love and loyalty and mix them thoroughly with faith; blend with tenderness, kindness and understanding. Add friendship and hope. Sprinkle abundantly with laughter. Bake it with sunshine. Wrap it regularly with lots of hugs. Serve generous helpings daily.
- Zig Ziglar
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
- Albert Einstein
Increasingly, the Chinese will own a lot more of the world because they will be converting their dollar reserves and U.S. government bonds into real assets.
- George Soros
We’ve got to lift our game tremendously. We’ll sell our business news and information in print, we’ll sell it to anyone who’s got a cable system, and we’ll sell it on the Web.
- Rupert Murdoch
Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.
- Thomas Edison
When you’re in comedy, people always come up and say, ‘Oh, it must be so hard.’ It really isn’t hard unless you’re not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Disruptive companies often pick fights they can’t win.
- Peter Thiel
We base our investment strategies on quality, trust, synergy and initiative.
- Cheng Yu-tung
It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage.
- Ben Horowitz
The lizard isn’t listening and the lizard doesn’t care.
- Seth Godin
FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON THE NUMBERS In the second example, I managed the team to a set of numbers that did not fully capture what I wanted. I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time—in that order. Unfortunately, the metrics that I set did not capture those priorities. At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them at every staff meeting, my people focused intensely on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result. Interestingly, I see this same problem play out in many consumer Internet startups. I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product. It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.
- Ben Horowitz
If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.
- Dale Carnegie
My children – in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.
- Steve Ballmer
Weed out the bad fits right away
- Tony Hsieh
Good policies without the right people will achieve nothing.
- Aliko Dangote
In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
- Peter Thiel
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
- Henry Ford
I like to look for patterns in science and life. It’s what I do.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Stop selling. Start helping.
- Zig Ziglar
The things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.
- Ben Horowitz
I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.
- John D. Rockefeller
Very important people have told me that they prefer good listeners to good talkers, but the ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good trait.
- Dale Carnegie
It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.
- Winston Churchill
My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.
- Winston Churchill
More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.
- Peter Thiel
If you’re in business, first and foremost, you have to be nice. Show your customers that you care.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I’d always try to remind managers at every level that they had to share my passion for developing people.
- Jack Welch
Strange as it sounds, great leaders gain authority by giving it away.
- Napoleon Hill
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
- Winston Churchill
Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.
- Steve Jobs
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
Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
- Winston Churchill
Not every Apple product makes a big enough difference to me to get instantly, although many do.
- Steve Wozniak
If I have one skill as a manager, I can make things extremely clear.
- Ben Horowitz
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
Like technical debt, management debt comes in too many different forms to elaborate entirely, but a few salient examples will help explain the concept. Here are three of the more popular types among startups: 1. Putting two in the box 2. Overcompensating a key employee, because she gets another job offer 3. No performance management or employee feedback process
- Ben Horowitz
The fight against AIDS in China is already well underway. The Chinese government and other funders are providing major support, and they’ll continue to bear primary responsibility for delivering prevention and treatment.
- Bill Gates
Clearly, as a CEO, you have other functions that are managed by other people.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
We all need a check up from the neck up to avoid stinkin’ thinkin’ which ultimately leads to hardening of the attitude.
- Zig Ziglar
There are not many companies in China that dare to say in public, ‘We don’t offer bribes’, or companies that operate only by market rules.
- Wang Jianlin
This shows you are never too old to get surprised.
- Jack Welch
By June this year, the [Henderson] Group had sold approximately 9,500 residential units totally around HK$21 billion in aggregate value.
- Lee Shau Kee
A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do.
- Seth Godin
If we are growing we are always going to be outside our comfort zone.
- John C. Maxwell
We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.
- Winston Churchill
First, 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.
- Professor Harry A. Overstreet
I’m a voracious reader.
- Howard Schultz
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities – but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.
- Winston Churchill
I didn’t try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.
- Joel Olsteen
The best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.
- Peter Drucker
CNN is pretty consistently on the left, if you look at their choice of stories, what they play up. It’s not what they say. It’s what they highlight.
- Rupert Murdoch
Do all you can to make your dreams come true.
- Joel Olsteen
I give away something up to $500 million a year throughout the world promoting Open Society. My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It’s their work that I’m supporting. So it’s not me doing it.
- George Soros
Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose…
- Thomas Edison
Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.
- Steve Jobs
At 25, I was in the audience of my first professional speaker, Bob Bales. His presentation got my attention. I had never seen anyone having so much fun ‘at work’ and getting paid for it!
- Zig Ziglar
I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the apostles, but a good deal about their acts.
- Og Mandino
‘I don’t know’ has become ‘I don’t know yet’.
- Bill Gates
Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.
- Jerry Seinfeld
[On becoming in 1969 a full-time employee of his five year old company] There were nervous moments. Every time I brought a fresh letter of credit home and it said, ‘Mr. And Mrs. Knight guarantee liabilities to the tune of $300,000,’ Penny’d say, ‘We don’t have $300,000.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t care. Just sign the thing.’
- Phil Knight
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
One of the things that school is for is to teach our children to understand and relish the idea of intellectualism, to develop into something more than a purpose-driven tool for the industrial state.
- Seth Godin
Most of us don’t invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.
- Sam Walton
As a rule, theory does not precede practice. Its role is to structure and codify already proven practice. Its role is to convert the isolated and “atypical” from exception to “rule” and “system,” and therefore into something that can be learned and taught and, above all, into something that can be generally applied.
- Peter Drucker
If you give people tools, [and they use] their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.
- Bill Gates
Would you believe that in 2011 and 2012, Nigeria paid $30 billion in subsidy, money which would have been used to build at least 20 refineries?
- Aliko Dangote
Napoleon was criticized for giving toys” to war-hardened veterans, and Napoleon replied, Men are ruled by toys.
- Dale Carnegie
India has the potential to be our biggest market in Asia, bigger than China, in as much as two to five years.
- John Chambers
It has been almost a decade since the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. Hong Kong has gone through both good times and bad times. During the past decade, Hong Kong has undoubtedly played an increasingly important role in the economic development of China.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Everything popular is wrong.
- Oscar Wilde
The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.
- John C. Maxwell
Goals enable you to do more for yourself and others, too.
- Zig Ziglar
Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.
- Bill Gates
There’s pros and cons of a big church. Cons is I don’t get to know everybody, I don’t get to go to their ballgame, I don’t get to marry everybody, but the pros are you get all this community, 800 ushers come in to serve, getting there at 7 in the morning on their day off and coming in on Saturday to make all those wafers.
- Joel Olsteen
