So sure, start with a slogan. But don’t bother wasting any time on it if you’re merely going for catchy. Aim for true instead.
- Seth Godin
Notable Quotables
If you had to buy a new plane every time you flew somewhere, it would be incredibly expensive.
- Elon Musk
When overtaken with the temporay feelings of potential failure, burn all of your bridges of retreat, thus making retreat impossible.
- Napoleon Hill
Through the wisdom of its government leaders and the entrepreneurship of its private sector, India has rapidly risen to become a major force in the global economy, … Cisco believes that the Internet, and related technologies, will be a key enabler for India to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation.
- John Chambers
This has been a very positive test for Kawasaki.
- Yoda
Part of being a winner is knowing when enough is enough. Sometimes you have to give up the fight and walk away, and move on to something that’s more productive.
- Donald Trump
Never be bothered by what people say, as long as you know in your heart you are right.
- Dale Carnegie
Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.
- Joel Olsteen
Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It’s just cultural. People just don’t want to do it.
- Jack Welch
Many a false step was made by standing still.
- Timothy Ferriss
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
- Steve Jobs
If you’re in business, first and foremost, you have to be nice. Show your customers that you care.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.
- Bill Gates
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the better.
- Jack Welch
Lack of ambition to aim above mediocrity.
- Napoleon Hill
If you think the people you attract could be better, then it’s time for you to improve yourself.
- Napoleon Hill
Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.
- Zig Ziglar
Well, in war, you can only be killed once. But in politics, many times.
- Winston Churchill
Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.
- Reed Hastings
The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work in a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
- Seth Godin
The optimist sees opportunity in every danger, the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.
- Winston Churchill
Every one of us gets through the tough times because somebody is there, standing in the gap to close it for us.
- Oprah Winfrey
When you give directives to a child, especially a teenager, you must consider the nature of your child.
- Zig Ziglar
Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ is my go-to song to pump myself up if I’m having a tough time or if I get really nervous right before a speech.
- Sara Blakely
Poker is a game where you don’t have to have the best hand to win. Poker is really reading other people and reading human emotion, which certainly comes into play in business.
- Charles Ergen
The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
- Bill Gates
Capitalism works.
- Michael Bloomberg
If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
- Winston Churchill
Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation…. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward!
- Thomas Edison
What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people – ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.
- Larry Ellison
I like all kinds of music. I listen to Abigail Washburn, the Punch Brothers, and Marc Johnson, the great clawhammer player. I also listen a lot to Sirius Radio, there’s a lot of bluegrass there.
- Steve Martin
Leadership is not dictatorship
- Tony Hsieh
By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.
- Mark Zuckerberg
My general attitude to life is to enjoy every minute of every day. I never do anything with a feeling of, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to do this today.’
- Richard Branson
There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.
- Jerry Seinfeld
A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it’s less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.
- Bill Gates
When someone does a small task beautifully, their whole environment is affected by it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.
- Winston Churchill
Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles.
- Peter Thiel
You know you’re getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It’s like, ‘See if you can blow this out.’
- Jerry Seinfeld
Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.
- Bill Gates
My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.
- Bill Gates
A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn’t dramatic.
- Ray Dalio
The general upward trend in residential property prices seems to be continuing, with the luxury end of the residential market poised to show better performance in particular.
- Lee Shau Kee
Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius.
- Peter Thiel
Every time you resist temptation you are winning for your children.
- Joel Olsteen
Hay dos errores que podemos cometer en el camino hacia la verdad. No recorrer todo el camino, y no empezar.
- Siddhartha Gautama
Too often, that solution is nothing more than adding another layer. What you should be doing is going to the source of the problem to fix it, and sometimes that requires shooting the culprit,
- Sam Walton
A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them.
- Ben Horowitz
Since all of them overestimated the competition, no one even showed up.
- Timothy Ferriss
That’s why it is important to enjoy the journey not just the destination. In this world, we will never arrive at a place where everything is perfect and we have no more challenges. As admirable as setting goals and reaching them maybe, you can’t get so focused on accomplishing your goals that you make the mistake of not enjoying where you are right now.
- Joel Olsteen
Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.
- Henry Ford
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.
- Timothy Ferriss
A corporation’s primary goal is to make money. Government’s primary role is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others.
- Larry Ellison
Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.
- Peter Drucker
I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.
- Jeff Bezos
Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.
- Elon Musk
When the economy does pick up, … so will … spending.
- John Chambers
By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.
- Ben Horowitz
The world has the habit of making room for the man whose actions show that he knows where he is going.
- Napoleon Hill
Even though I’m a hype man myself, I like the practicality of it all. People who understand how to turn a profit. At the end of the day, this is still business so I’m looking for real practical knowledge of how to actually make money, not necessarily raise it.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance – and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.
- Oprah Winfrey
Kickstarter eliminates the risk that publishers and booksellers face. They have limited resources and limited shelf space, and Kickstarter is proof to them that something is going to work.
- Seth Godin
You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
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
Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that… you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.
- Elon Musk
No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.
- Ben Horowitz
No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.
- Andrew Carnegie
The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand – without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it….
- Thomas Edison
Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitate to get in the way if you’re moving.
- Timothy Ferriss
The sad truth is, if you push hard enough, and if you’re so stubborn that you must have things your way, God will sometimes allow you to undertake a project without His blessing or at the wrong time. The problem with that, of course, is when you start something in your own strength and in your own timing, you’re going to have to finish it and maintain it in your own strength.
- Joel Olsteen
The choice to have a great attitude is something that nobody or no circumstance can take from you.
- Zig Ziglar
Twitter was around communication and visualizing what was happening in the world in real-time. Square was allowing everyone to accept the form of payment people have in their pocket today, which is a credit card.
- Jack Dorsey
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
- Bill Gates
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
- John Wooden
Two metrics set the limits for effective distribution. The total net profit that you earn on average over the course of your relationship with a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV) must exceed the amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale—and the more it makes sense to spend it.
- Peter Thiel
If you aim at nothing you will hit every time.
- Zig Ziglar
Somebody needs what you have to give. It may not be your money; it may be your time. It may be your listening ear. It may be your arms to encourage. It may be your smile to uplift. Who knows? Maybe just like that little baby, putting your arm around somebody and letting him or her know that you care can help begin to heal that person’s heart. Maybe you can give a rescuing hug.
- Joel Olsteen
You get to keep making art as long as you are willing to make the choices that let you make your art.
- Seth Godin
Where is the love that will overlook a person’s faults?
- Joel Olsteen
In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive.
- Bill Gates
Sometimes, we’re so focused on being consistent that we also lower the bar on amazing.
- Seth Godin
What goes on in Europe concerns us greatly because, if Europe comes apart, the E.U. comes apart, then you’re going to have enormous impact on America, that’s a very big trading partner of ours, and people own securities around the world in this day and age.
- Michael Bloomberg
Think of the transformation as a process of buildup followed by breakthrough, broken into three broad stages: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. Within each of these three stages, there are two key concepts, shown in the framework and described below. Wrapping around this entire framework is a concept we came to call the flywheel, which captures the gestalt of the entire process of going from good to great.
- James C. Collins
But this “spray and pray” approach usually produces an entire portfolio of flops, with no hits at all. This is because venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.
- Peter Thiel
Our improvement and innovative ideas have never been hindered by our proven record, which instead has paved the way for determined, practical development and new directions.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.
- Steve Ballmer
I have always said that everyone is in sales. Maybe you don’t hold the title of salesperson, but if the business you are in requires you to deal with people, you, my friend, are in sales.
- Zig Ziglar
Saudi Arabia has stability. The social contract and the political contract between the king and the rulers and the royal family and the ruled people in Saudi Arabia is very strong and the bondage is so solid.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
If you look at space companies, they’ve failed either because they’ve had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.
- Elon Musk
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
We feel like right now, computers are still pretty bad. You’re just messing around. You’re scrolling on your touchscreen phone, and trying to find stuff. You’re in a car. It’s bouncy, and you can’t– it doesn’t really work. I think the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend with it is still pretty bad. So I think our job is to solve that, and most of the things we’re doing make sense in that context.
- Larry Page
The thing that I’m going to focus on today is essentially the cloud that has been over Nike’s head over the last couple years.
- Phil Knight
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
People who build family businesses are not classically trained. They have to deal with an enormous amount of politics. You think corporate politics are tough? Go work for your dad or your mom.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence. A good product manager is the CEO of the product. Good product managers take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product.
- Ben Horowitz
Appreciation – Learn to give flowers while people are still living.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Indecision is the seedling of fear.
- Napoleon Hill
