I bought a company in the mid-’90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I’ve made lots of dumb decisions. That’s part of the game.
- Warren Buffett
Notable Quotables
If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
- Peter Thiel
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
- Winston Churchill
I think that business book reporting, it’s all Jim Collins, it’s the story of victory; it’s success bias over and over again.
- Ben Horowitz
While there’s always room for improvement, … we were very pleased with our results in what is a seasonally-challenging quarter.
- John Chambers
People who are able to lift up others and boost the morale in organization are invaluable, and they are always a tremendous asset to a leader’s inner circle.
- Napoleon Hill
Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
- Winston Churchill
If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.
- John D. Rockefeller
Success must never be measured by how much money you have.
- Zig Ziglar
Anyone, even a child, can be taught to develop a positive mental attitude. The method is to repeat positive affirmations such as: Day by day, in every way, through the grace of God, I am getting better and better.
- Napoleon Hill
SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail.
- Bill Gates
Be the one to stand out in the crowd.
- Joel Olsteen
Other people’s successes are good news – for them and for you. Good for you because they show you a way to go.
- Stephen Wynn
Forty-five years ago, when I was 18, I came to San Francisco by boat and took two weeks to get here. I had a great impression. I think San Francisco is the welcoming gate for people from Asia.
- Tadashi Yanai
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.
- Dale Carnegie
I believe Success is achieved by ordinary people with Extraordinary Determination.
- Zig Ziglar
The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
- Winston Churchill
Luck plays a role in business but whether you succeed or fail depends on many other factors. I haven’t really had a failure.
- Lui Che Woo
When you look at a company that’s already succeeded or is at the very top of its game, it isn’t necessarily when it’s executing well. It tends to be peacetime – you’ve defeated the competition, you have the highest margins, the highest multiple.
- Ben Horowitz
Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.
- Elon Musk
I want to challenge you today to get out of your comfort zone. You have so much incredible potential on the inside. God has put gifts and talents in you that you probably don’t know anything about.
- Joel Olsteen
In life, you can blame a lot of people and you can wallow in self-pity, or you can pick yourself up and say, ‘Listen, I have to be responsible for myself.’
- Howard Schultz
God has already done everything He’s going to do. The ball is now in your court. If you want success, if you want wisdom, if you want to be prosperous and healthy, you’re going to have to do more than meditate and believe; you must boldly declare words of faith and victory over yourself and your family.
- Joel Olsteen
The Group will continue to press ahead steadily with an open mindset, a practical attitude, a broad vision and a unique insight, adhering to its ultimate objective of serving the nation and the wider community in the changing landscape.
- Cheng Yu-tung
When I came into office, people said, ‘Billionaire? How do they live? What do they eat? How do they sleep?’ Today, they see me on the subway coming uptown. A couple of people say hi, some people smile and nod. Some people just sleep. It’s not an issue.
- Michael Bloomberg
Every obnoxious act is a cry for help.
- Zig Ziglar
I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.
- Jeff Bezos
Deep knowledge from your manager goes a long way toward motivating you. And I have a pretty good capability for that.
- Larry Page
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
- Zig Ziglar
If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.
- Richard Branson
Medicine is the means by which we poor feeble creatures try to keep from dying or aching.
- P.T. Barnum
Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
- Peter Thiel
I’m a geek.
- Bill Gates
The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.
- Walt Disney
The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.
- Seth Godin
Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it.
- Bill Gates
It’s just not right that so many things don’t work when they should. I don’t think that will change for a long time.
- Steve Wozniak
Don’t kill competition. Competition is healthy for businesses. It keeps you – the entrepreneur – on your toes.
- Aliko Dangote
I was reading an article in the ‘New York Times;’ it talked about being in the zone, and being in the zone you’re so focused that time ceases to exist. It’s when you think, ‘Oh, I’ve been doing this for five hours and didn’t even know it.’ It’s the difference between hard work and going, ’12 o’clock, not moving.’
- Steve Martin
Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.
- Zig Ziglar
The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.
- Michael Bloomberg
Only the prepared speaker deserves to be confident.
- Dale Carnegie
But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.
- Peter Thiel
I’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.
- Elon Musk
By getting your customers to agree with you in small steps along the way, you have a better chance of reaching agreement when it’s time to do business.
- Harvey Mackay
Don’t be impatient. It’s not over until God says it’s over.
- Joel Olsteen
The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job – that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.
- Larry Page
Hong Kong has remained a strong financial centre. It has a solid business environment and geographically, it is well located, being next to China. During this time, there is no city that can match it.
- Lee Shau Kee
Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.
- Zig Ziglar
Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.
- Napoleon Hill
The way I did it, every job was A+.
- Steve Wozniak
One out of every five page views in the United States is on Facebook!
- Gary Vaynerchuk
But at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.
- Winston Churchill
Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.
- Joel Olsteen
Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model.
- Michael Gerber
If standard of living is your #1 objective, then quality of life almost never improves. But, if quality of life is your #1 objective, then standard of living improves.
- Zig Ziglar
The market’s going to move with tremendous speed. If there is such a thing as a killer app, video is it.
- John Chambers
What you study is more important than how you study. Students are subordinate to materials, much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong material, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn’t matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn’t matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency material. Material beats method.
- Timothy Ferriss
Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.
- Winston Churchill
Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I’d put myself in the latter category. But I’d never call myself a normal designer of anything.
- Steve Wozniak
I enjoy the hunt much more than the ‘good life’ after the victory.
- Carl Icahn
Chinese people, young people, they don’t go shopping a lot in department stores. All department store guys hate me. They say business is bad because of Jack.
- Jack Ma
The first thing I would do for anyone who’s trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.
- Timothy Ferriss
Once we finished Christmas Rappin’ we began shopping it around town. There was interest, but no one was biting. The industry’s attitude was that Rapper’s Delight despite its U.S. sales and international appeal was an unrepeatable fluke. We identified Polygram which had a great roster of funk and R&B acts (Kool and the Gang, the Gap Band, Parliament) as the best place for Kurtis, so we made up a gang of test pressings and took them to clubs all over the city. Response in the street from DJs and club goers was great. So to hype up PolyGram we placed fake orders for the record into their system by telling retailers and wholesalers to order the 12 inch through PolyGram. PolyGram didn’t own it yet, but we created an appetite for Christmas Rappin that led them to buy it…So in the fall of 1979 Kurtis Blow signed with Mercury Records a division of Polygram Records, making him the first rapper on a major label…Christmas eve 1979 was the first time that I heard Christmas Rappin’ on the radio; I was upstairs at my family’s house. Frankie Crocker the biggest radio DJ in New York played it on WBLS.
- Russell Simmons
Now when I consider investing in a startup, I study the founding teams. Technical abilities and complementary skill sets matter, but how well the founders know each other and how well they work together matter just as much. Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together—otherwise they’re just rolling dice.
- Peter Thiel
You are here today because of a decision you made yesterday.
- Bryan Smith
A culture of discipline is not a principle of business, it is a principle of greatness.
- James C. Collins
Start where you are, with what you have. Make something of it and never be satisfied.
- George Washington Carver
While technology is still important, the consumer has to lead innovation.
- Phil Knight
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
The words Think and Thank are inscribed in many of the Cromwellian churches of England. These words ought to be inscribed in our hearts, too: Think and Thank. Think of all we have to be grateful for, and thank God for all our boons and bounties.
- Dale Carnegie
Everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it? Even if you don’t consciously agree with that statement, your brain sure does.
- Seth Godin
I have this old ’57 Porsche Speedster, and the way the door closes, I’ll just sit there and listen to the sound of the latch going, ‘cluh-CLICK-click.’ That door! I live for that door. Whatever the opposite of planned obsolescence is, that’s what I’m into.
- Jerry Seinfeld
No man ever achieved worthwhile success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.
- Napoleon Hill
Don’t buy preground coffee.
- Howard Schultz
People need a goal to galvanize them.
- Napoleon Hill
His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.
- Thomas Edison
My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.
- Joel Olsteen
Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.
- Bill Gates
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
- Winston Churchill
Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo. The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec is.
- Seth Godin
How do leaders serve their people? They may pay good wages and treat employees with respect.
- John C. Maxwell
In bad times and good, I have never lost my sense zest for life
- Walt Disney
The subject of this book is managing oneself for effectiveness.
- Peter Drucker
Among the world’s 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.
- Wang Jianlin
To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.
- Bill Gates
If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook. And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school’s promise. It lets parents off the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook, since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook, because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone. If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault. That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. ‘I did what they told me to do and now I’m stuck and it’s not my fault.’ What they’ve exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next.
- Seth Godin
Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.
- Seth Godin
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
No man is ever whipped, until he quits in his own mind…A winner never quits and quitter never wins. No follower of this philosphy can reasonably expect accumulate a fortune without experience temporary defeat.
- Napoleon Hill
The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.
- John D. Rockefeller
Having a personality of caring about people is important. You cant be a good leader unless you generally like people. That is how you bring out the best in them.
- Richard Branson
Of course I needed somebody to run my new store, and I didn’t have much money, so I did something that I would do for the rest of my run in the retail business without any shame or embarrassment whatsoever: nose around other people’s stores searching for good talent. That’s when I made my first real hire, the first manager, Willard Walker.
- Sam Walton
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
We build dwellings and thereafter they build us.
- Winston Churchill
Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in.
- Seth Godin
I recall that Harry made a trip to San Bernardino about the time we were really starting to roll, and Dick McDonald asked him what he thought the future of McDonald’s would be. Harry told him that one day this company would be bigger than F. W. Woolworth. Dick really did a double take at that. He told me later, ‘I thought you had a genuine nut on your hands, Ray.’ But Harry knew exactly where he wanted to go, and he knew how to get there.
- Ray Kroc
I have the best job I could possibly have.
- Michael Bloomberg
To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.
- Peter Drucker
