Apple has a complex suite of proprietary technologies, both in hardware (like superior touchscreen materials) and software (like touchscreen interfaces purpose-designed for specific materials).
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.
- Napoleon Hill
If you’re a Wal-Mart of a Meijer you can draw the shoppers without using signs to advertise your specials, … But when you’re a little guy, you really depend on those signs.
- Michael Ward
Washington is unpredictable these days.
- Stephen Wynn
I think it’s fair to say that our distribution system today is the envy certainly of everyone in our industry, and in alot of others as well…We’ve spend almost $700 million builing up the current computer and satellite systems we have….You can’t generate sales unless you have the product there when the customer wants it.The math is pretty simple: if we both sell the same goods for the same price at retail, we’ll earn 2.5 percent more profit than they will right there.
- Sam Walton
They don’t understand that Excellence isn’t about working extra hard to do what you’re told. It’s about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing.
- Seth Godin
Even if you have a world class idea and want to give it away for the good of humanity, you will have to sell the concept. If you can’t sell it, you’ll be stuck with your idea, poorer for your brilliance and generosity.
- Jerry Vass
Treasure the love you have received above all. It will survive long after your gold and good health have vanished.
- Og Mandino
We’ve been able to go deep rather than broad.
- Jack Dorsey
Great vision without great people is irrelevant.
- Jim Collins
Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
- Warren Buffett
Stand by your principles and be comfortable with confrontation. So few people are, so when the people with the red tape come, it becomes a negotiation.
- Travis Kalanick
Success is not what you have, but who you are.
- Bo Bennett
It was not her sex appeal but the obvious relish with which she devoured the hamburger that made my pulse begin to hammer with excitement.
- Ray Kroc
Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.
- Donald Trump
Although Hong Kong continued to be affected by the slowdown of the global economy in the past financial year, most of the retail shopping properties owned by the Group are located in new towns where continual growth of residents are maintained and consumer spending power are segregated, thereby providing a good support to stabilise rental of the retail shopping properties located in such new towns.
- Lee Shau Kee
There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.
- Warren Buffett
Even though I am nearly deaf, I seem to be gifted with a kind of inner hearing which enables me to detect sounds and noises that the listeners do not perceive.
- Thomas Edison
Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.
- Mark Zuckerberg
You do not get what you want. You get what you negotiate.
- Harvey Mackay
I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
- Jeff Bezos
It is well documented that I am a lifelong football fan. My love of the British game started with the 1966 World Cup.
- Alisher Usmanov
I don’t like paying taxes, but I like sleeping at night.
- Leonardo Del Vecchio
In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.
- Winston Churchill
The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn’t get bigger or heavier.
- Bill Gates
Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it’s a good thing they’ll be reading a newspaper on a screen.
- Bill Gates
My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.
- Peter Drucker
Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.
- Elon Musk
I think there is probably no better person to aspire to emulate than Steve Jobs and what he has done at Apple in terms of his leadership, his innovation, not settling for mediocrity.
- Howard Schultz
We appreciate size, but only if it is robust growth. Just to be big is not a target.
- Alexei Mordashov
Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.
- Warren Buffett
Simon received the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his contribution to organizational decision making: It is impossible to have perfect and complete information at any given time to make a decision.
- Timothy Ferriss
Step up to the front, select what you want, create your plan, put your plan into action, and follow through with Persistence. Capitalist America will not rest.
- Napoleon Hill
Lay out what you’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
- David Novak
At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
You don’t have to start from scratch to have a massive impact on the world.
- Jack Dorsey
I don’t know what causes a person to be ambitious, but it is a fact that I have been overblessed with drive and ambition from the time I hit the ground.
- Sam Walton
It seems like a good cause. I’ve been watching it on TV and, it makes me want to help.
- Ed Clark
The factory has programmed that adventurous impulse out of us. The economic imperative of the last century has been to avoid risk, avoid change, and most of all, avoid exploration and the new. An efficient factory fears change because change means retooling and risk and a blip in productivity. Sure, we’ll put up with change if we have to, and welcome the predictable incremental change of productivity improvement, but please leave us alone when it comes to the word “bold.” Avoiding risk worked then but doesn’t work now. Now “what’s next?” is in fact the driving force for individuals and for organizations. Ever onward, ever faster.
- Seth Godin
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
In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.
- Ben Horowitz
If you concentrate on what you have, you will always end up having more. If you focus on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.
- Oprah Winfrey
Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others…He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds – or on persons devoted to them – have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a ‘dirty little atheist’ he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with ‘The Rights of Man’ he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But ‘The Age of Reason’ cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen – a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the attacks of his countrymen. That those attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how strong prejudice, when once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up Paine as an example of everything bad.The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty – who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause – can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.
- Thomas Edison
Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don’t approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.
- Bill Gates
The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn’t thought of before and that aren’t talked about in the news all the time.
- Steve Wozniak
Life’s most soothing things are a child’s goodnight and sweet music….
- Thomas Edison
We drink the can, not the beverage
- Seth Godin
If you’re looking for an abdominal exercise well-suited to power development without bulk, look no further than the Janda sit-up.
- Timothy Ferriss
You can’t just let nature run wild.
- Walt Disney
When you’ve got a strong enough why, you can always find the how.
- Zig Ziglar
Getting every employee’s mind into the game is a huge part of what the CEO job is all about. Taking everyone’s best ideas and transferring them to others it the secret. Nothing is more important.
- Jack Welch
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
This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Fortune favors the bold.
- Virgil
If it’s not meeting a need, turn it into a seed. Remember, we will reap what we sow. When you do good for other people, that’s when God is going to make sure that His abundant blessings overtake you.
- Joel Olsteen
Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.
- Henry Ford
Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, happier families.
- Howard Schultz
There are two paths people can take. They can either play now and pay later, or pay now and play later. Regardless of the choice, one thing is certain. Life will demand a payment.
- John C. Maxwell
Let your motto then always be ‘Excelsior’, for by living up to it there is no such word as fail.
- P.T. Barnum
The price of success is much lower than the price of failure.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s flattering to people who stop you and say that you’ve helped them and all. But, again, you know, you’ve got to stay humble because as quick as you came up, you can come down.
- Joel Olsteen
Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.
- Winston Churchill
Selling is essentially a transfer of feelings.
- Zig Ziglar
Growth is the great separator between those who succeed and those who do not. When I see a person beginning to separate themselves from the pack, it’s almost always due to personal growth.
- John C. Maxwell
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years of trying to get other people interested in you.
- Dale Carnegie
Think of social media as the Internet. I can’t think of anyone betting against the Internet in 2012.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The Overseas Chinese habit is to save a lot and make a lot of friends.
- Lee Shau Kee
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
- Anatole France
Beaujolais is so underrated.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I like money, but it’s never been about the money.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.
- Seth Godin
Giving should be entered into in just the same way as investing. Giving is investing.
- John D. Rockefeller
The [Henderson] Group continuously strives to upgrade the quality of its development properties by applying new technologies and building materials to improve the efficiency and lower the cost of construction.
- Lee Shau Kee
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
Always avoid the acute angle.
- Dale Carnegie
Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.
- Larry Ellison
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
- Ben Horowitz
Will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer, instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.
- Peter Thiel
I DECLARE a legacy of faith over my life. I declare that I will store up blessings for future generations. My life is marked by excellence and integrity. Because I’m making right choices and taking steps of faith, others will want to follow me. God’s abundance is surrounding my life today. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
- Elon Musk
Nine out of ten businesses fail, so I came up with a foolproof plan — create ten businesses.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
- Steve Jobs
Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
I look at Facebook as being more conscientious about operator concerns, we are not 100 percent there, but we are finding consensus.
- Jon Fredrik Baksaas
If you are nervous about making the jump or simply putting it off out of fear of the unknown, here is your antidote. Write down your answers to these questions, and keep in mind that thinking a lot will not prove as fruitful or as prolific as simply brain vomiting on the page. Write and do not edit – aim for volume. Spend a few minutes on each answer.1. Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering.2. What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily?3. What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probably scenarios?4. If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?5. What are you putting off out of fear?6. What is it costing you – financially, emotionally, and physically – to postpone action?7. What are you waiting for?
- Timothy Ferriss
A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
- Peter Thiel
There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.
- Ben Horowitz
Here is the salient fact which distinguishes the English Revolution from all others: that those who wielded irresistible physical force were throughout convinced that it could give them no security. Nothing is more characteristic of the English people than their instinctive reverence even in rebellion for law and tradition. Deep in the nature of the men who had broken the King’s power was the conviction that law in his name was the sole foundation on which they could build.
- Winston Churchill
Let us accept the natural order in which we move. Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time. Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows. The glory of light cannot exist without its shadows. Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together. The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making – once.
- Winston Churchill
Where there is no vision, there is no hope.
- George Washington Carver
Desire is created when something happens in your life that suddenly changes the way you see yourself in relationship to your future.
- Zig Ziglar
Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.
- Peter Drucker
The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.
- Napoleon Hill
This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
- James C. Collins
For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life. But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.
- James C. Collins
Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
- Ben Horowitz
I’m not a big believer in trying to jam stuff down somebody’s throat: ‘You’re going to do it my way.’ I’d rather show by example and live my life and have people say, ‘You know what, I want to live like Joel has. He’s got peace and joy, and he seems content.’
- Joel Olsteen
Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!
- Steve Wozniak
Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started ‘Wine Library TV.’ They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them—not that they are working for you.
- Sam Walton
