Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.
- Elon Musk
Notable Quotables
Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.
- Russell Simmons
Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals. Management.
- Peter Drucker
Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.
- Peter Thiel
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
- Winston Churchill
My father died during open-heart surgery on March 29 of my senior year in college. I was getting set to go to law school. I remember sitting in the waiting room when the doctor walked in. I said to myself, The worst possible thing just happened. What will you do?
- Stephen Wynn
I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.
- Joel Olsteen
If you have a reputation as a big, stiff bureaucracy, you’re stuck.
- Jack Welch
Pacifists become militants. Freedom fighters become tyrants. Blessings become curses. Help becomes hindrance. More becomes less.
- Timothy Ferriss
When you have a dream that you can’t let go of, trust your instincts and pursue it. But remember: Real dreams take work, They take patience, and sometimes they require you to dig down very deep. Be sure you’re willing to do that.
- Harvey Mackay
In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.
- Peter Thiel
If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. Unreasonable and unrealistic goals are easier to achieve for yet another reason.
- Timothy Ferriss
When you do more than you’re paid for, eventually you’ll be paid for more than you do.
- Zig Ziglar
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.
- Wayne Gretzky
Most governments are pragmatic, most people are logical. There are pockets of extremism in Israel, in the U.S. and in the Muslim world. But we have to fight them with reason, with logic and with compassion.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
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
At Tencent, we may be businessmen, but we are still chasing our IT, our science. We are still striving to create something really cool, trying to create things we couldn’t even imagine without our new technologies. I am still clinging to this enthusiasm.
- Ma Huateng
Get your fire back.
- Joel Olsteen
Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.
- Zig Ziglar
Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.
- Bill Gates
The word ‘Spanx’ was funny. It made people laugh. No one ever forgot it.
- Sara Blakely
You get paid to deliver results.
- David Novak
Our customers call and e-mai us to say that’s how it feels when a Zappos box arrives. And that’s how we view this company.
- Tony Hsieh
Creative leaders inherently know when rules need to be challenged, and they can see when a more flexible approach should be taken.
- John C. Maxwell
The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application.
- Larry Ellison
A great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position.
- John C. Maxwell
There’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap.
- Ben Horowitz
It’s easy to get negative because you get beat down. You go through a few disappointments and it’s easy to stay in that negative frame of mind. Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is a whole cliche, but your attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.
- Joel Olsteen
How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?
- Seth Godin
tends to rivet our attention on the Icarus companies.
- James C. Collins
My natural inclination to be improv rather than an educated character serves me well.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
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
In the old days, Hong Kong was undeveloped, coming from a low base. Now it is on a high base, making it difficult to earn high multiples. We will certainly diversify out of Hong Kong and out of property. [On being asked where?] I don’t know. I haven’t found it yet.
- Lee Shau Kee
They have done great things within what you would call established American sports. Freddy has the potential to bring soccer almost for the first time into the public’s consciousness. Soccer in the United States isn’t really part of the culture. What it needs, I think, is a superhero, and he clearly could be it. Now, that’s putting a lot of pressure on him, but the kid’s got all the potential to do that.
- Phil Knight
Men, women, and children who cannot live on gravity alone need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is, in my opinion, in a business established by the Creator of our nature. If he worthily fulfills his mission and amuses without corrupting, he need never feel that he has lived in vain.
- P.T. Barnum
It’s no use saying, “We are doing our best.” You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
- Winston Churchill
P – Passion, you care about the team, passion and players
- Jack Welch
It’s the power of the brand. We’ve never formally advertised.
- Sara Blakely
DAY TWENTY I DECLARE that I am calm and peaceful. I will not let people or circumstances upset me. I will rise above every difficulty, knowing that God has given me the power to remain calm. I choose to live my life happy, bloom where I am planted, and let God fight my battles. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
- Jeff Bezos
The smartest business decision you can make is to hire qualified people. Bringing the right people on board saves you thousands, and your business will run smoothly and efficiently.
- Brian Tracy
SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company’s lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.
- Elon Musk
In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.
- Bill Gates
Stop talking and start doing
- Walt Disney
Pessimism doesn’t grow your business or even maintain the status quo. The pessimists on your staff make the job harder for everyone around them. They make difficulties out of opportunities.
- Harvey Mackay
We’ll see how that evolves. Obviously, it doesn’t mean we’ll just be willing to do anything that’s requested of us.
- Sergey Brin
I’ll repeat something you might consider tattooing on your forehead: What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.
- Timothy Ferriss
(Wright is) a visionary with a great strategic mind, and he’s a strong business leader with outstanding people skills, … He’s a terrific guy and will be a key force in guiding the company’s future growth.
- Jack Welch
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
It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
- Winston Churchill
Whatever you accept your employees will expect.
- Clifton Taulbert
Money is like manure, its only good if you spread it around.
- Winston Churchill
There are several styles of pitching, but all have two principles in common: they appeal personally to the individual being contacted, even if he or she is a stranger and they rely on logic to make a case.
- Michael Levine
The beauty of this deal is bringing a clinical expertise. Medco had developed therapeutic resource centers, where they got their pharmacist to have specialties in things like diabetes, heart problems and asthma. Express Scripts took a different approach. We tried to understand why people do what they do with behavioral economics, which is: What drives human behaviors? What drives people to do what they did? By combining those two pieces, we get that much stronger.
- George Paz
When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right.
- Rupert Murdoch
Trees will improve property values, take pollutants out of the air, help with water runoff.
- Michael Bloomberg
I think we are not serious about attacking the long-term debt problem, and that’s one of the things that he’s going to have to find a way to get on the agenda.
- Michael Bloomberg
Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.
- Yoda
Luck Follows Persistence.
- Jim Collins
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
- Winston Churchill
In the old generation, if one kid bought a PlayStation 2 and the other kid bought an Xbox, at his house you played PlayStation, at your house you played Xbox. Now that it’s online, all those early buyers who… you want to play with, they’ve got their reputation online of who they are and how good they are at these games.
- Bill Gates
I don’t want to hear the specials. If they’re so special, put ’em on the menu.
- Jerry Seinfeld
If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.
- Peter Thiel
Eighty-five per cent of the crowd is going to fall in love with me – they’re going to feel it, wow. But fifteen per cent are going to think, ‘This guy is obnoxious.’ I spend enormous time with them – every negative review of ‘Crush It!’ on Amazon has a response from me – and I can probably bring back ten of the fifteen.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
You want supply to always be full, and you use price to basically either bring more supply on or get more supply off, or get more demand in the system or get some demand out. It’s classic Econ 101.
- Travis Kalanick
Keep something in front of you Studies tell us that we move toward what we consistently see. You should keep something in front of you, even if it’s symbolic, to remind you of what you are believing for.
- Joel Olsteen
I intentionally abandoned the hard stuff early on because not only do I think it’s useless, I think it’s a distraction.
- Seth Godin
The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.
- Peter Thiel
Law has become a business. Health care has become a business. Unfortunately, politics has also become a business. That really undermines society.
- George Soros
I’m short on New York, long on Silicon Valley.
- Peter Thiel
We have little choice but to move beyond quality and seek remarkable, connected, and new. Remarkable, as you’ve already figured out, demands initiative.
- Seth Godin
When launching something new, you have to go for it—“playing not to lose” can never be an option.
- Jack Welch
Back in high school, I really wanted to be a diesel mechanic. I was building pools and it was still working with my hands. I was installing the (reinforcement) bars, shaping the pools and then they’d bring the cement in. It was great. . . . Then I had my accident.
- Ed Clark
Bottom line: God will not allow any person to keep you from your destiny. They may be bigger, stronger, or more powerful, but God knows how to shift things around and get you to where you’re supposed to be.
- Joel Olsteen
You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There’s another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.
- Bill Gates
Every time I went on stage I was so terrified I almost threw up.
- Sara Blakely
Success (a win) doesn’t make you, and failure (a loss) doesn’t make you.
- Zig Ziglar
If something is expensive to develop, and somebody’s not going to get paid, it won’t get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
- Bill Gates
I had learned that for any big idea you had to sell, sell, sell to move the needle at all.
- Jack Welch
I think God’s justice is making wrongs right.
- Joel Olsteen
Life is fraught with opportunities to keep your mouth shut.
- Winston Churchill
I like sports, and I enjoy playing basketball and lifting weights.
- Joel Olsteen
Failure to me became not trying versus not succeeding.
- Sara Blakely
Monopolists downplay their monopoly status to avoid scrutiny, while competitive firms strategically exaggerate their uniqueness.
- Peter Thiel
You always have to give something when you get something.
- Jack Nadel
It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
- Elon Musk
Whenever you have multiple devices including multiple PCs that you want to share information with, it’s always been a bit complicated.
- Bill Gates
When you catch a glimpse of your potential, that’s when passion is born.
- Zig Ziglar
You weren’t created to simply exist, to endure, or to go through the motions; you were created to be really alive.
- Joel Olsteen
If you wake up deciding what you want to give versus what you’re going to get, you become a more successful person. In other words, if you want to make money, you have to help someone else make money.
- Russell Simmons
There is no decision that we can make that doesn’t come with some sort of balance or sacrifice
- Simon Sinek
Computers already have enough power to outperform people in activities we used to think of as distinctively human. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Jeopardy!’s best-ever contestant, Ken Jennings, succumbed to IBM’s Watson in 2011. And Google’s self-driving cars are already on California roads today. Dale Earnhardt Jr. needn’t feel threatened by them, but the Guardian worries (on behalf of the millions of chauffeurs and cabbies in the world) that self-driving cars “could drive the next wave of unemployment.
- Peter Thiel
No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.
- Peter Drucker
I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial… I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.
- Winston Churchill
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
I cut the feet out of my control top pantyhose one night, threw them on under my white pants and realized that the toning and shaping was perfect and that the hosiery material is thin enough that I could make shape wear out of it.
- Sara Blakely
The Group is well positioned to meet the challenges ahead and will as ever continue to pursue higher growth.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Businesses often forget the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can’t deliever good service from unhappy employees.
- Tony Hsieh
God created you to leave your mark on this generation. You have gifts and talents that you have not tapped into. There are new levels of your destiny still in front of you. But break out starts in your thinking. As you put these keys into action, making room for increase, expecting shifts of God’s favor, praying bold prayers, and keeping the right perspective, then God will release floods of His goodness that will thrust you beyond barriers of the past into the extraordinary life you were designed to live.
- Joel Olsteen
Many people say the privatisation was unfair: that is true – it was unfair. That is a fact: some people became rich and others did not. Unfair does not mean illegal, but it was inevitably unfair.
- Vladimir Potanin
