Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.
- P.T. Barnum
Notable Quotables
Be factual. Lying is really, really a bad idea, mostly because they’ll find you out. And then you’ll never get another item in that outlet for as long as they remember you, which will be forever.
- Michael Levine
Pouring espresso is an art, one that requires the barista to care about the quality of the beverage.
- Howard Schultz
I never took classic business classes in college, so I don’t have the background that any of the people running large companies have.
- Howard Schultz
As a freshman, I had to make one hell of an adjustment. I had to go from being a good high school competitor to a locker room with three Olympians in Dellinger, Bailey, and Grelle. Four, if you count Burley coming in my senior year. If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman.
- Phil Knight
The game of life does not proceed like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes they make five, or minus four, and sometimes the blackboard topples over in the middle of the sum and the pedagogue is left with a black eye.
- Winston Churchill
I’ve got to keep breathing. It’ll be my worst business mistake if I don’t.
- Steve Martin
The only definition by which America’s best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.
- Bill Gates
As technology continues to virtualize money, brick ‘n mortar banks have become as superfluous as traditional bookstores.
- Reid Hoffman
With tech companies, whoever’s the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, ‘Is this the end of them?’ And – there’s more – more times people think that’s the case than it really is the case.
- Bill Gates
Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying.
- Peter Thiel
Thank you is probably the most important thing that a leader can say.
- David Novak
If you look upon chronic diseases as an epidemic, and you see that the chronically ill are the poor, then you see that this issue of the uninsured is not really a moral but a financial obligation to change health care.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Maintain a pragmatic approach, keep up with the multitude of trials and strive to remain its level of attainment in order for achieving sound performance and scaling new heights.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Success is due to our stretching to the challenges of life. Failure comes when we shrink from them.
- John C. Maxwell
Live to learn, and you will really learn to live.
- John C. Maxwell
May the Force be with you.
- Yoda
If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?
- Timothy Ferriss
The secret of happiness is renunciation.
- Andrew Carnegie
Great CEOs build exceptional strategies for gathering the required information continuously. They embed their quest for intelligence into all of their daily actions from staff meetings to customer meetings to one-on-ones. Winning strategies are built on comprehensive knowledge gathered in every interaction the CEO has with an employee, a customer, a partner, or an investor.
- Ben Horowitz
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln
Teams only succeed when the players have a unified vision, no matter how much talent or potential there is.
- John Maxwell
It is a fine game to play – the game of politics – and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.
- Winston Churchill
He listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.
- Ron Chernow
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Linchpins are the essential building blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations. They don’t bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.
- Seth Godin
Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.
- Ray Dalio
If you can’t make 40% on your money in Russia, you’re a fool.
- Simon Reuben
You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
- Peter Thiel
The most “successful” companies seemed to embrace a sort of anti-business model where they lost money as they grew.
- Peter Thiel
Today is our most precious possession. It is our only sure possession.
- Dale Carnegie
I remember clearly when the financial plan – If i may call it so – of my life was formed. It was out in Ohio, under the ministration of a dear old minister who preached, Get money; get it honestly, and then give it away wisely. I wrote that down in a little book.
- Ron Chernow
It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don’t know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.
- Elon Musk
After assessing the prospects of the various business segments of Henderson Cyber, the company, Henderson Investment, Hong Kong and China Gas and Henderson Cyber jointly announced in August 2005, the proposed privatisation of Henderson Cyber by Henderson Investment and Hong Kong and China Gas…
- Lee Shau Kee
Be courageous. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has emerged from these stronger and more prosperous. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith! Go forward!
- Thomas Edison
I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.
- Steve Martin
My first professional job was to sell heavy-duty waterless cookware.
- Zig Ziglar
When you do more than you’re paid for, eventually you’ll be paid for more than you do.
- Zig Ziglar
After Scour, I started a company called Red Swoosh. The idea was to take those litigants who sued us for a huge amount of money and turn them into customers with the same technology. I wanted to get them to pay me. It was a revenge business.
- Travis Kalanick
One of the main reasons that we lose our enthusiasm in life is because we become ungrateful..we let what was once a miracle become common to us. We get so accustomed to his goodness it becomes a routine..
- Joel Olsteen
For every sale you miss because you were too enthusiastic, you’ll miss a hundred because you weren’t enthusiastic enough.
- Zig Ziglar
I have found from costly experience that it is much easier to analyze the facts after writing them down. In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us reach a sensible decision. As Charles Kettering puts it: A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
- Dale Carnegie
There is no elevator to success…you have to take the stairs.
- Zig Ziglar
God has amazing things in your future.
- Joel Olsteen
Art isn’t only a painting; it’s anything that changes someone for the better, any nonanonymous interaction that leads to a human (not simply a commercial) conclusion.
- Seth Godin
I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the Government needed a dictator. Of course, it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up as dictators. What I now ask of you is military success and I will risk the dictatorship.
- Dale Carnegie
The question isn’t ‘What do we want to know about people?’ It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?
- Mark Zuckerberg
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
- Peter Thiel
If the terrorists have the sympathy of people, it’s much harder to find them. So we need people on our side, and that leads us to be responsible leaders of the world, show some concern with the problems.
- George Soros
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
The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.
- Marc Benioff
Of course I’m an egoist. Where do you get if you aren’t?
- Winston Churchill
…What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might. When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day… If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology. The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words, diseased… I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and more than that no man can do. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim. I have been working on the same lines for many years. I have tried to go as far as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe that I am right; I cannot help believing as I do… I cannot accept as final any theory which is not provable. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved. Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as fact. Some things are provable, some things disprovable, some things are doubtful. All the problems which perplex us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through scientific investigation. The thing which most impresses me about theology is that it does not seem to be investigating. It seems to be asserting, merely, without actual study. …Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now.
- Thomas Edison
Brands mature over time, like a marriage. The bond you feel with your spouse is different than when you first met each other. Excitement and discovery are replaced by comfort and depth.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
It had been a ‘grow, grow, grow’ era, and some people, especially young people who’d never been through a downturn before, didn’t like being told to suddenly get very conservative. But I insisted we were facing a very risky environment
- Debra Cafaro
It’s not enough to do good things. You have to let people know what you’re doing.
- Phil Knight
I’d like to dial it back 5% or 10% and try to have a vacation that’s not just e-mail with a view.
- Elon Musk
A difficult time can be more readily endured if we retain the conviction that our existence holds a purpose, a cause to pursue, a person to love, a goal to achieve.
- John C. Maxwell
Treasure the love you have received above all. It will survive long after your gold and good health have vanished.
- Og Mandino
The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.
- Jack Welch
My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.
- Steve Jobs
Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.
- Bill Gates
I’d say it’s been my biggest problem of my life…it’s money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.
- Walt Disney
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
Dinosaurs did not walk with humans. The evolutionary record says different. They gambled.
- Steve Martin
What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.”
- James C. Collins
The great news is that God knows everything about you, both good and bad, and He still loves you and values you unconditionally. God does not always approve of our behavior. He is not pleased when we go against his will, and when we do, we always suffer the consequences and have to work with Him to correct our thoughts, words, actions, or attitudes. And while you should work to improve in the areas where you fall short, nothing you do will ever cause God to love you less…or more. His love is a constant you can depend on.
- Joel Olsteen
I can be stressed, or tired, and I can go into a meditation and it all just flows off of me. I’ll come out of it refreshed and centered and that’s how I’ll feel and it’ll carry through the day.
- Ray Dalio
It’s really a full-time job to manage our lives.
- Sara Blakely
Branding is what people think about you before they even know you.
- Bryan Smith
I read Google News and use NetNewsWire to keep up with general and tech news.
- Steve Wozniak
The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.
- Jeff Bezos
Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.
- Walt Disney
It’s important that the company be a family, that people feel that they’re part of the company, and that the company is like a family to them. When you treat people that way, you get better productivity.
- Larry Page
I think that the act of teaching is the most gratifying and rewarding of all human endeavors.
- David Novak
I want people to learn what democracy means.
- Jack Ma
If you’re going to buy a real book, a paper book, there better be a good reason. Perhaps scarcity is one of those reasons.
- Seth Godin
When you’ve got a strong enough why, you can always find the how.
- Zig Ziglar
Lack of Capital.
- Napoleon Hill
Keep in mind, hurting people often hurt other people as a result of their own pain. If somebody is rude and inconsiderate, you can almost be certain that they have some unresolved issues inside. They have some major problems, anger, resentment, or some heartache they are trying to cope with or overcome. The last thing they need is for you to make matters worse by responding angrily.
- Joel Olsteen
You get paid to deliver results.
- David Novak
Did you ever stop to think that a dog is the only animal that doesn’t have to work for a living? A hen has to lay eggs, a cow has to give milk, and a canary has to sing. But a dog makes his living by giving you nothing but love.
- Dale Carnegie
The danger of the Web is that you can go from idea to public announcement in under ten minutes.
- Seth Godin
It’s not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it’s a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.
- Elon Musk
The subject of this book is managing oneself for effectiveness.
- Peter Drucker
[On the Swoosh] It was 1971 and Ford had spent $2 million getting a trademark. We didn’t have $2 million. So I went by the graphic arts department at Portland State
- Phil Knight
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
Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.
- Peter Drucker
We have the brand, and we have the fulfillment capability. Now we had to get the Net, and that’s the easiest part of the game,
- Jack Welch
Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.
- Ray Dalio
It’s easier to explain price once than to apologize for quality forever.
- Zig Ziglar
All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.
- Walt Disney
It’s not about toughness, it’s not about attitude. Companies don’t fail for lack of cash or attitude. Companies fail for lack of brains and effort.
- Mark Cuban
The seed of a bamboo tree is planted, fertilized and watered. Nothing happens for the first year. There´s no sign of growth. Not even a hint. The same thing happens – or doesn´t happen – the second year. And then the third year. The tree is carefully watered and fertilized each year, but nothing shows. No growth. No anything. For eight years it can continue. Eight years! Then – after the eight years of fertilizing and watering have passed, with nothing to show for it – the bamboo tree suddently sprouts and grows thirty feet in three months!
- Zig Ziglar
What makes a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers. The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.
- Peter Thiel
I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It’s done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.
- Richard Branson
Facing a market which awaited exploration and development, the Group decided to become a pioneer in its economic reform by taking up the responsibility to engage in the development of the Mainland.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I hope you will take good care of your health, this is religious duty, and you can accomplish so much for the world if you keep well and strong.
- John D. Rockefeller
I’d be happy to provide advice if anybody asked me no matter who the President is.
- Michael Bloomberg
