It’s in the difficult times that we’re growing and you can’t just rebuke everything hard. We’ve got to endure it and fight the good fight of faith and pass the test.
- Joel Olsteen
Notable Quotables
Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be.
- Sam Walton
My motivation for all my companies has been to be involved in something that I thought would have a significant impact on the world.
- Elon Musk
Your network is your net worth.
- Porter Gale
There’s a sucker born every minute.
- P.T. Barnum
Religion is all bunk.
- Thomas Edison
The War was decided in the first twenty days of fighting, and all that happened afterwards consisted in battles which, however formidable and devastating, were but desperate and vain appeals against the decision of Fate.
- Winston Churchill
Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who’s going to build.
- Larry Ellison
If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.
- Rupert Murdoch
The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.
- Jeff Bezos
Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.
- Bill Gates
Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.
- Peter Thiel
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
Unrelenting confidence was necessary.
- Ben Horowitz
Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. …
- Dale Carnegie
We are interested in any sector with good growth potential.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
How you see your future is much more important than what happened in your past.
- Zig Ziglar
The order for the seats amounted to $90,000. Who do you suppose got the order—James Adamson or one of his competitors? From the time of this story until Mr. Eastman’s death.
- Dale Carnegie
It takes a decade to grow trees but a century to nurture human beings.
- Cheng Yu-tung
When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
- Elon Musk
As long as a person doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, he doesn’t grow.
- John Maxwell
Students of public speaking continually ask, How can I overcome self-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before an audience? Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that some horses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at the thundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing a farmer’s wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse as the train goes by? How would you cure a horse that is afraid of cars—graze him in a back-woods lot where he would never see steam-engines or automobiles, or drive or pasture him where he would frequently see the machines? Apply horse-sense to ridding yourself of self-consciousness and fear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying. You can never attain freedom from stage-fright by reading a treatise. A book may give you excellent suggestions on how best to conduct yourself in the water, but sooner or later you must get wet, perhaps even strangle and be half scared to death. 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
Wal-Mart’s leaders had obviously made a point of educating and informing everyone at all levels about all aspects of the company, and that shows a real respect for their people.
- David Novak
MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs. At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future. Note that there were many numbers as well as more qualitative goals that would have helped: Was our competitive win rate increasing or declining? Was customer satisfaction rising or falling? What did our own engineers think of the products? By managing the organization as though it were a black box, some divisions at HP optimized the present at the expense of their downstream competitiveness. The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company. It would have been better to take into account the white box. The white box goes beyond the numbers and gets into how the organization produced the numbers. It penalizes managers who sacrifice the future for the short term and rewards those who invest in the future even if that investment cannot be easily measured. CLOSING THOUGHT It is easy to see that there are many ways for leaders to be misinterpreted. To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors. Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create. Otherwise, the side-effect behaviors may be worse than the situation you were trying to fix.
- Ben Horowitz
The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.
- Bill Gates
His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.
- Thomas Edison
I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.
- Winston Churchill
It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
- Bill Gates
Almost everything is like a machine.
- Ray Dalio
Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill
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 top salesperson in the organization probably missed more sales than 90% of the sales people on the team, but they also made more calls than the others made.
- Zig Ziglar
A man does what he must – in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures – and that is the basis of all human morality.
- Winston Churchill
A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.
- Henry Ford
I believe that those who stay in faith are highly favored. You need to prepare for an exceeding, abundant, above-and-beyond life; a life where people go out of their way for no reason to be good to you; a life where you get promoted even though you weren’t the most qualified; a life where you find yourself in the right place at the right time.
- Joel Olsteen
Thomas Edison had only three months of schooling during his entire life. He did not lack education, neither did he die poor. Henry Ford had less than a sixth grade schooling but he has managed to do pretty well for himself financially.
- Napoleon Hill
It’s not like I’m anti-China. I just think it’s ridiculous that we allow them to do what they’re doing to this country, with the manipulation of the currency, that you write about and understand, and all of the other things that they do.
- Donald Trump
This presents a very curious phenomenon. There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines. If you haven’t identified the mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion, the unimportant becomes the important. Even if you know what’s critical, without deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks forced upon you (or invented, in the case of the entrepreneur) will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiae jumps in to replace.
- Timothy Ferriss
The ability to get the job done.
- Jack Welch
In 80% of the world, energy will be bought where it is economic. You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price.
- Bill Gates
Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s really complex to make something simple…
- Jack Dorsey
Make good decisions based on facts.
- David Novak
Faith in your new apprentice, misplaced may be. As is your faith in the dark side of the Force.
- Yoda
This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, this is just perhaps the end of the beginning.
- Winston Churchill
Life is too short to spend every day doing something you don’t love.
- Jack Welch
Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.
- Bill Gates
You can’t get too much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good.
- Jerry West
Cooperativeness in conversation is achieved when you show that you consider the other person’s ideas and feelings as important as your own.
- Dale Carnegie
Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.
- Ray Dalio
The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.
- John C. Maxwell
I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.
- Mark Zuckerberg
He declared he never stepped in front of the footlights without first saying to himself over and over: I love my audience. I love my audience.
- Dale Carnegie
What do you want? is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer.
- Timothy Ferriss
A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate
- Seth Godin
Life is not a dress rehearsal.
- Clay Clark
I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars; there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that.
- Bill Gates
Have the humility to learn from those around you.
- John C. Maxwell
We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun together.
- Walt Disney
You’re going to go through tough times – that’s life. But I say, ‘Nothing happens to you, it happens for you.’ See the positive in negative events.
- Joel Olsteen
When I started working on Southwest Airlines, I kid you not, only people flying on business and very wealthy people ever flew.
- Herb Kelleher
We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
- Abraham Lincoln
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
Un cambio de actitud Lo que diferencia a los individuos exitosos de aquellos que languidecen es exactamente lo mismo que separa a las organizaciones innovadoras y en crecimiento de aquellas que se estancan y mueren. Los ganadores han convertido la iniciativa en una pasión y en una práctica. Adelante, prepara una lista de las personas y organizaciones a las que admiras. Apuesto a que el séptimo imperativo es lo que las hace destacar. Como ves, el reto no consiste en perfeccionar tu capacidad de saber cuándo empezar o cuándo mantenerte al margen, sino en adoptar la costumbre de empezar.
- Seth Godin
Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.
- Dale Carnegie
There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.
- Roger Staubach
I read the paper every day and the Bible every day, that way I know what both sides are up to.
- Zig Ziglar
If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.
- Peter Thiel
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
Learn to do common things uncommonly well, we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable.
- George Washington Carver
I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.
- Winston Churchill
Hewlett Packard Chairman Built Company by Design, Calculator by Chance.
- James C. Collins
The reason you might choose to embrace the artist within you now is that this is the path to (cue the ironic music) security.
- Seth Godin
California, in a sense, is almost Starbucks’ largest country, with almost 3,000 stores
- Howard Schultz
The information about your project is objective, but your presentation is subjective. When your own subjectivity collides with that of the media, there’s plenty of room for confusion,misinterpretation and disinterest. That is why you must know precisely how to pitch before you make that first phone call or mail a press release.
- Michael Levine
Networking is one of the most powerful tools you can use to grow your company and reputation.
- Business Insider.com
The S.A.L.H. were mostly South Africans, with a high proportion of hardbitten adventurers from all quarters of the world, including a Confederate trooper from the American Civil War.
- Winston Churchill
Optimists are those who go after Moby dick in a row boat with a bucket of tarter sauce.
- Zig Ziglar
When people write checks, they are depleting an asset. And when people are using credit cards, they are increasing their liabilities. In other words, credit cards make it so much easier to get deeper and deeper into debt by increasing your monthly liabilties.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Last year my wife got a Rolls-Royce.
- Russell Simmons
I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
- Thomas Edison
CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.
- Peter Thiel
Change is powerful, but change always comes with the possibility of failure as its partner. “This might not work” isn’t merely something to be tolerated; it’s something you must seek out.
- Seth Godin
If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you—like a fever.
- Sam Walton
It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
- Paul Graham
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
- Winston Churchill
It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.
- Reed Hastings
The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.
- Peter Thiel
Excepting for reading my numbers on Saturday morning and going to our regular meetings, I don’t have much of a routine for anything else. I always carry my little tape recorder on trips, to record ideas that come up in my conversations with the associates. I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.
- Sam Walton
I’ve found reporters, editors, and producers to be an engaging lot overall, naturally curious and ever on the prowl for good stories.
- Michael Levine
Today is life – the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto.
- Dale Carnegie
Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?
- Peter Thiel
Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
- Steve Jobs
The 1980s will seem like a walk in the park when compared to new global challenges, where annual productivity increases of 6% may not be enough. A combination of software, brains, and running harder will be needed to bring that percentage up to 8% or 9%.
- Jack Welch
Learn to speak God’s favor over every area of your life. Remember, the more favor-minded you are, the more of God’s favor you’re going to experience.
- Joel Olsteen
China and India will, separately and together, unleash an explosion of demand.
- Mukesh Ambani
As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.
- Peter Thiel
I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.
- Mark Zuckerberg
