Cupcakes The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor. The third time, you might improvise and screw up. Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can. At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen. Others merely plod along. They’re cooks, not chefs. A cook follows a recipe. A chef invents one. We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs.
- Seth Godin
Notable Quotables
People do not wander around and then find themselves at the top of Mount Everest.
- Zig Ziglar
Why is this mediocre? We love to point out how broken our systems are. We enjoy getting angry at hotels or government agencies or airlines that are so obviously doing a poor job. Idiots! But we almost never look at merely mediocre products and wonder why they aren’t great. Mediocre services or products do what they’re supposed to, but have set the bar so low that it’s hardly worth the energy to cross the street to buy them. A resolute generic sameness pervades this mediocrity. Why isn’t every restaurant meal a fabulous buy for the money? Why isn’t every tax dollar spent with the intensity and focus it could be spent with? It seems as though we are willing to accept mediocre as long as the product, the service, or the organization isn’t totally broken.
- Seth Godin
Early must I rise. Leave now you must!
- Yoda
Only the paranoid survive.
- Andrew Grove
The future may be made up of many factors but where it truly lies is in the hearts and minds of men. Your dedication should not be confined for your own gain, but unleashes your passion for our beloved country as well as for the integrity and humanity of mankind.
- Li Ka-shing
[Less than a week after founding the forerunner to Nike] I forgot to make it part of the original agreement, but I think it ought to be made explicit: There will be no pissing on partners in the shower.
- Phil Knight
The patterns of success and failure we see among firms faced with sustaining and disruptive technology change are a natural or systematic result of good managerial decisions. That is, in fact, why disruptive technologies confront innovators with such a dilemma. Working harder, being smarter, investing more aggressively, and listening more astutely to customers are all solutions to the problems posed by new sustaining technologies. But these paradigms of sound management are useless—even counterproductive, in many instances—when dealing with disruptive technology.
- Clayton M. Christensen
I always joke and say I want to invent a comfortable stiletto and then retire.
- Sara Blakely
We have more than six and one-half times the level of wealth of our non-millionaire neighbors, but, in our neighborhood, these non-millionaires outnumber us better than three to one. Could it be that they have chosen to trade wealth for acquiring high-status material possessions?
- The Millionaire Next Door
I’m much more concerned about America than the Democratic Party.
- Howard Schultz
Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it’s a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.
- Ray Dalio
We know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition.
- Peter Thiel
I have never met a geologist or leading scientist who believes adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will have any significant effect on climate change.
- Gina Rinehart
After I met my partner, Mr. Protherow, we decided to start a banking project, and at the same time we started to think already about a business on a bigger scale. At the very beginning we thought more about gaining money, to have a normal life with our families, etc.
- Vladimir Potanin
Do you ever worry’ asked Dale Carnegie, I replied: ‘No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?’
- Henry Ford
Surround yourself only with those that uplift you.
- Oprah Winfrey
You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do. Once you decide, you should immediately execute the reorg: Don’t leave time for leaks and lobbying.
- Ben Horowitz
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
- Henry Ford
Success in the United States is not an entitlement in China. You have to go there and earn it, and earn it the right way.
- Howard Schultz
If a product’s future is unlikely to be remarkable – if you can’t imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product – it’s time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.
- Seth Godin
You may think you’ve got a long way to go, but you need to look back at how far you’ve already come. You may not be everything you want to be but atleast you can thank God that you’re not what you used to be.
- Joel Olsteen
Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it’s easier, it scales and it’s profitable. But people don’t like it – we want to be who we are, not who some marketer tells us to be.
- Seth Godin
The real estate market in mainland China, however, experienced a dramatic change during the past year. In the second half of 2007, transacted prices in many cities had been repeatedly bid up to all time highs as a result of fierce competition at land auctions. The subsequent upsurge in housing prices, which were beyond the affordability of the general public, resulted in an overheated property market.
- Lee Shau Kee
I’ve done a number of Super Bowl ads. And that is the best advertising of the year. That is when people realize they’re going to be compared directly against other ads.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment Would you capture it? Or just let it slip?
- Marshall Bruce Mathers III
We’d love to be involved with the creation of something very special, something quite large and something quite exciting.
- Richard Branson
The Internet revolution will determine which companies survive and which get left behind, … Increasingly, the Internet is recognized as the key driver in our global economy.
- John Chambers
Smith never wavered. Twenty-five years later, Kimberly-Clark owned Scott Paper outright and beat Procter & Gamble in six of eight product categories.12 In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.
- James C. Collins
My son is trying to be a sports writer, and my daughter is a college student. She wants to be a comedy writer, and she’s at film school. I discouraged both of them early on from getting involved in Starbucks. I didn’t think it would be fair; plus, they didn’t have any interest anyway.
- Howard Schultz
In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.
- Bill Gates
A CEO’s job is to supervise all systems and to indentify weaknesses before the weaknesses turn into system failures. This can happen in many different ways, but it is exceptionally disconcerting when you company is growing rapidly. Your sales are increasing, your product of service is getting attention from the media, and suddenly you can’t deliver. Why? Uusually, it’s because your systems imploded from the increased demand. You didn’t have enough phone lines, or operators answering the phones. You didn’t have enough production capacity or enough hours in the week to meet the demand; or you didn’t have the money to build the product or hire additional help. Whatever the reason, you missed the opportunity to move your business to the next level of success due to failure of one of your systems…At each new level of growth, the CEO must start planning the systems needed to support the next level of growth, from phone lines to lines of credit for production needs. Systems drive both cash flow management and communication. As your systems get better, you or your employees will have to exert less and less effort. Without well-designed and successful operating systems, your business will be labor intensive. Once you have well-designed and successful operating systems, you will have a saleable business asset.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself.
- Peter Thiel
I hate nobody except Hitler–and that is professional.
- Winston Churchill
I believe that greatest things happen only when you give others the credit. That’s the law of EMPOWERMENT in action.
- Napoleon Hill
The concept of serviced apartments makes economic sense for tenancies of short to medium term duration – a fact many leading Hong Kong and overseas corporations now appreciate.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The [Henderson] Group adopted a conservative approach in replenishing its land bank and focused its resources to convert agricultural land holdings in hand into development land in the past year with a view to bringing down the cost of land replenishment and good progress has been made in this respect.
- Lee Shau Kee
The better at communicating you are, and the more people you communicate to, the better your cash flow will be.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more things you’ll have to express gratitude for.
- Zig Ziglar
Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
To me, the idea and expectation that the day is slowly and surely coming when we will be able to honestly say we are our brother’s keeper and not his oppressor is very beautiful .
- Thomas Edison
A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.
- John D. Rockefeller
Don’t have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them.
- Steve Martin
I am placed in situations with opportunities in those situations that others are not. I don’t believe that that is happenstance. I believe that there is a God that has a plan for me.
- Ronald Perelman
Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.
- Winston Churchill
I don’t want to hear the specials. If they’re so special, put ’em on the menu.
- Jerry Seinfeld
We were guerilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit.
- Phil Knight
So go ahead. Fall down. The world looks different from the ground.
- Oprah Winfrey
When completed the new facility will have the capacity to accommodate approximately 3,000 staff.
- John Chambers
Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.
- Henry Ford
My opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.
- Elon Musk
By combining broadband Internet, phone and video services over a single cable line, we are taking a major step towards implementing future integrated data, voice and video telecommunications on a mass market scale.
- John Chambers
I want to change history, do something important in my life, and influence individuals like we have with millions of small businesses on Alibaba. Then they love and respect you because you made their life important.
- Jack Ma
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
mean that you can’t do anything else but pray. But it does mean that you are always ready and willing to go before God with any concern or praise. Nothing is too small or too big for prayer. Prayer is simply opening your heart and connecting with God. It’s taking His promises and applying them to your life. Prayer processes the plan of God. You should bathe your life in prayer. Pray for wisdom, peace, and patience. Pray for your relationships, your job, and your children. Pray for your country and leaders. Pray with others, knowing that when two or more are gathered in His name, He is there.
- Joel Olsteen
Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.
- Elon Musk
Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.
- Peter Thiel
For Starbucks, there will be no shortage of the highest-quality arabica beans. I suspect that for some others there could potentially be a problem, not in the near term, but over time.
- Howard Schultz
The possibilities of creative effort connected with the subconscious mind are stupendous and imponderable. They inspire one with awe.
- Napoleon Hill
I do feel, in a sense, the rules of engagement for citizenship has changed, and we must encourage other people to speak up and to take action.
- Howard Schultz
Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present, good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.
- Peter Thiel
If your business is not a brand, it is just a commodity.
- Donald Trump
Leadership must wake up every day with the mission of Finding a Better Way Every Day…There are no modest revolutions…GE was a place where the people got up everyday to searching for a better way.
- Jack Welch
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
- Zig Ziglar
New research shows that you will be dead longer than you will be alive.
- Zig Ziglar
if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments.
- Dale Carnegie
I really believed that I said then, and I still do. But we figured out a way to grow, and stay profitable, and there was no logical place to stop. The way I approached managing the business, I always tried to maintain a sense of hands-on, personal supervision – usually flying around to take a look at our stores on a regular basis. But from the very beginning, even on my paper routes in college, I have also been a delegator, trying to hire the best possible people to manage the stores. That’s been the case since back in Newport….We’re big now. We’re really big. That’s not something I like to focus on. I always wanted to be the best retailer in the world, not necessarily the biggest…(being big poses opportunities), but being big also poses big dangers. It has ruined many a fine company – including some giant retailers – who started out strong and got bloated or out of touch or were slow to react to the needs of their customers. Here’s the point: the biggest Wal-Mart gets, the more essential it is that we think small. Because that is exactly how we have become a big corporation.
- Sam Walton
Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.
- Warren Buffett
Skills are cheap. Passion is priceless.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.
- Oprah Winfrey
Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation.
- P.T. Barnum
Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.
- Sergey Brin
When York’s son, hitherto Earl of March, learned that his father’s cause had devolved upon him he did not shrink. He fell upon the Earl of Wiltshire and the Welsh Lancastrians, and on February 2, 1461, at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, near Hereford, he beat and broke.
- Winston Churchill
Allowing your kids to watch TV doesn’t have to mean they have no choice but to see commercials for junk food and alcohol.
- Charles Ergen
I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.
- Sam Walton
Law of Clarity – If you can’t explain what you sell to a ten-year old child then you don’t know what you sell.
- Jerry Vass
The epidemic So many people are frozen in the face of uncertainty and paralyzed at the thought of shipping work that matters that one might think that the fear is hardwired into us. It is. Scientists can identify precisely where your lizard brain lives. This is your prehistoric early brain, the same brain that’s in the lizard or the deer. Filled with fear, intent on reproduction. Steven Pressfield gives the voice of the lizard brain a name: he calls it the resistance. And the resistance is talking to you as you read this, urging you to compromise, to not be an troublemaker, to avoid rash moves. For many of us, the resistance is always chattering away, frequently sabotaging our best opportunities and ruining our best chance to do great work. Naming it helps you befriend it, and befriending it helps you ignore it.
- Seth Godin
Maybe you once were excited about that person God supernaturally brought into your life as a marriage partner, but now all the excitement has worn off. Don’t’ allow that sense of a miracle to slip away. Don’t get so familiar with each other that you take one another for granted.
- Joel Olsteen
Money has always been in politics. And I’m not sure you’d want money to be completely out of politics.
- Bill Gates
Steve Jobs’ ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.
- Bill Gates
Who’s your Jedi master? WHO’S your Jedi Master?
- Yoda
I try to help people with management stuff a lot.
- Ben Horowitz
Lanai at one time grew 98% of the world’s pineapples. But the world’s pineapples are now grown in two places, Costa Rica and Panama, because no one wants to spend $45 for a pineapple from the United States.
- Larry Ellison
I read the paper every day and the Bible every day, that way I know what both sides are up to.
- Zig Ziglar
The Internet will help achieve friction free capitalism” by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.
- Bill Gates
Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.
- John C. Maxwell
I’m Phil Knight, and I don’t believe in advertising.
- Phil Knight
When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation.
- Peter Thiel
It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.
- Jeff Bezos
One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision. Life is a whole, and luck is a whole, and no part of them can be separated from the rest.
- Winston Churchill
To a child love is spelled T-I-M-E.
- Zig Ziglar
I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful!
- Bill Gates
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
There comes a precious moment in all of our lives when we are tapped on the shoulder and offered the opportunity to do something very special that is unique to us and our abilities, what a tragedy it would be if we are not ready or willing.
- Winston Churchill
I’ve never been one to dwell on reverses.
- Sam Walton
A good thing to remember is somebody’s got it a lot worse than we do.
- Joel Olsteen
When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: Try to bear lightly what needs must be. Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity.
- Dale Carnegie
Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt.
- Seth Godin
I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks.
- Winston Churchill
I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.
- Warren Buffett
