Notable Quotables

Just because something didn’t work out your way, or somebody disappointed you, that does not change who you are.

- Joel Olsteen

There’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap.

- Ben Horowitz

If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.

- Elon Musk

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

- Napoleon Hill

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

I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.

- Howard Schultz

It turns out that all Netflix streaming peak on Saturday night can fit inside a single fiber optic, which is the size of one human hair.

- Reed Hastings

In every organization everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear.

- Seth Godin

I want the entire smartphone, the entire Internet, on my wrist.

- Steve Wozniak

I usually describe myself as an engineer. That’s basically what I’ve been doing since I was a kid.

- Elon Musk

The internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all. Instead what it’s allowed is silos of interest.

- Seth Godin

It is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing what it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot . .

- Zig Ziglar

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

- Elon Musk

No matter what’s happening, choose to be happy. Don’t focus on what’s wrong. Find something positive in your life. Thank God for the small things.

- Joel Olsteen

If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.

- Larry Page

In the years to come, that lure of partnership helped us attract a lot of good managers, but I don’t believe that we ever had one who bought more stock than Willard. And of course he feels pretty good about it today. – Sam Walton (on human resources, hiring, early history of Wal-Mart)

- Sam Walton

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

Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.

- Dale Carnegie

You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we’ve come up with doing that is through companies.

- Larry Page

Don’t criticize them, they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.

- Dale Carnegie

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

- Mark Zuckerberg

My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. It was just, over the years it continued to grow.

- Joel Olsteen

The main cause of depression is traceable directly to the world-wide habit of trying to REAP without sowing.

- Napoleon Hill

Judgment of the people in the situation is not helpful. How can you help them is the question.

- Russell Simmons

I think sometimes the critics want me to beat people down, and that’s not in me. I want to lift people up.

- Joel Olsteen

In order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done.

- Peter Thiel

When I was at Kingsoft, I was under pressure and worked hard, but the results were not satisfactory.

- Lei Jun

What I know for sure is that if you want success, you can’t make success your goal. The key is not to worry about being successful, but to instead work toward being significant, and the success will naturally follow.”

- Oprah Winfrey

Some things you can only learn in the struggle. When it’s easy, when everything is going your way, that doesn’t take any faith.

- Joel Olsteen

God wants you to have a good life, a life filled with love, joy, peace, and fulfillment. That doesn’t mean it will always be easy, but it does mean that it will always be good.

- Joel Olsteen

You’ve got to be before you can do and do before you can have.

- Zig Ziglar

I went online with winelibrary.com in July of 1997. That was my first professional online play

- Gary Vaynerchuk

[In February 2011 on Square.] Starting a startup after twitter is so much easier than before.

- Jack Dorsey

One of the great things about Lanai is that the weather is always fabulous. Always 82 degrees and sunny. The problem is that, like California now, Lanai needs more water.

- Larry Ellison

I kept saying, Sam, we’re making a good living. Why go out why expand so much more? The stores are getting farther and farther away. After the seventeenth store, though, I realized there wasn’t going to any stopping it.

- Helen Walton

I really good at simplifying things. I think that’s my main strength. Taking something that’s fairly complex down to it’s essence. That’s what I love doing. That’s what I love thinking about.

- Jack Dorsey

The only career worth pursuing is the one that turns your crank.

- Jack Welch

Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor. At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, ‘Goodbye, Daddy!’ and I frowned, and said in reply, ‘Hold your shoulders back!’ Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive – and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father! Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. ‘What is it you want?’ I snapped. You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs. Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding – this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years. And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed! It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: ‘He is nothing but a boy – a little boy!’ I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much. 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

Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.

- Elon Musk

The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them.

- Zig Ziglar

A company only has so much money. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest… Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.

- Jack Welch

I know Bo Xilai well. But our relationship was based on our work, we didn’t have a personal relationship.

- Wang Jianlin

My drive into high tech doesn’t involve a lot of people – just me and a very small team.

- Raymond Kwok

It’s a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

- Steve Martin

One piece of advice that always stuck in my mind is that people should be respected and trusted as people, not because of their position or title.

- Herb Kelleher

Make your team feel respected, empowered and genuinely excited about the company’s mission.

- Tim Westergren

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

- Warren Buffett

The Internet economy continues to create unprecedented growth opportunities for people, companies and countries on a global basis.

- John Chambers

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!

- Michael Gerber

Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up.

- Sam Walton

I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them.

- Sam Walton

At least three time per day at scheduled times, he had to ask himself the following question: Am I being productive or just active? Charney captured the essence of this with less-abstract wording: Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important? He eliminated all of the activities he used as crutches and began to focus on demonstrating results instead of showing dedication. Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise. Be ruthless and cut the fat.

- Timothy Ferriss

Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.

- Peter Thiel

Starting a company is a very tough thing. There’s a friend of mine, Bill Lee, whose phrase is ‘starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.’ So you should certainly expect that it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be harder than getting a job somewhere by a pretty good margin and the odds of you losing the money that you invested or your friends invested is pretty high. I mean, those are just the basic facts. So if you don’t mind things being really hard and high risk, then starting a company is a good idea. Otherwise, it’s probably unwise. It will certainly stress you out. So I think you have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.

- Elon Musk

I believe that when you think of the negative, and you get up discouraged – ‘There’s nothing good in my future’ – I really believe it almost ties the hands of God. God works where there’s an attitude of faith. I believe faith is all about hope.

- Joel Olsteen

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

Desire is the ingredient that changes the hot water of mediocrity to the steam of outstanding success.

- Zig Ziglar

In business, if you don’t kick and hug, you don’t love.

- Clay Clark

Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy. The other side of it is that you can’t cut enough costs to save your way to prosperity.

- Howard Schultz

I realized about 10 years ago that my wealth has to go back to society. A fortune, the size of which is hard to imagine, is best not passed on to one’s children. It’s not constructive for them.

- Bill Gates

The McDonald brothers were simply not on my wavelength at all. I was obsessed with the idea of making McDonald’s the biggest and the best. They were content with what they had, they didn’t want to be bothered with more risks and more demands.

- Ray Kroc

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn’t cool.

- Bill Gates

You don’t even really need a place. But you feel like you’re doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations: communications, teamwork, self-development, and development of others.

- Peter Drucker

This shows you are never too old to get surprised.

- Jack Welch

This is the day of dramatization. Merely stating a truth isn’t enough. The truth has to be made vivid, interesting, dramatic. You have to use showmanship. The movies do it. Television does it. And you will have to do it if you want attention.

- Dale Carnegie

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.

- Thomas J Watson

Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.

- Reed Hastings

Being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits.

- Peter Thiel

Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have.

- John C. Maxwell

Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a particularly visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore.

- Peter Thiel

I DECLARE I have the grace I need for today. I am full of power, strength, and determination. Nothing I face will be too much for me. I will overcome every obstacle, outlast every challenge, and come through every difficulty better off than I was before. This is my declaration.

- Joel Olsteen

The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.

- Oprah Winfrey

We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves and are generous enough and honest enough to engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen.

- Seth Godin

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

- Henry Ford

Speed is of the essence in responding to a crisis situation, and our focus is squarely on mobilizing resources to help in the relief and rebuilding efforts, while also helping customers and employees recover.

- John Chambers

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.

- Thomas Edison

Although DJ Clay may never sleep, all of his dreams come true!

- Blake Fraley

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

- Bill Gates

When I was a kid a long time ago, when the sun rose, I was outside on my bike. If my parents were lucky – poor parents! – I would be home before it got dark.

- Larry Ellison

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this – you haven’t.

- Thomas Edison

Nobody enjoys the ‘little show about nothing’ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.

- Timothy Ferriss

Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.

- Bill Gates

Henceforth, I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a mighty oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today. I will be likened to the raindrop, which washes away the mountain; the ant who devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking. I will persist until I succeed.

- Og Mandino

Remain close to government and away from politics. It means deal more with the authorities. And less with individuals.

- Wang Jianlin

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