If your feet are in two buckets and the average temperature of the water is 90 degrees, you’re probably fine—unless one bucket is at 35 and the other is at 145 degrees. On average, you’re fine. Based on variation, though, you’re miserable.
- Seth Godin
Notable Quotables
Performance of the local property leasing market showed gradual improvement, particularly with demand rising substantially for the leasing of grade A as well as grad B office properties, and part of these properties registered an increase of over 50% as compared to the level as at the end of last year.
- Lee Shau Kee
Don’t interrupt me while I’m interrupting.
- Winston Churchill
Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.
- Napoleon Hill
If my job would have been to sell someone something they didn’t need, I would not have been very good at it.
- Pat McGovern
You don’t build a business –you build people– and then people build the business.
- Zig Ziglar
The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.
- Peter Thiel
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
- Steve Jobs
You will find only what you bring in.
- Yoda
The outside of a horse is good for the inside of man.
- Winston Churchill
Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.
- Elon Musk
My wife watches me like a hawk.
- Carl Icahn
Without a sense of fairness and justice, no leader can command and retain the respect of his followers.
- Napoleon Hill
Baseball is like cricket, and I grew up in a country where they had cricket. So I understand cricket, soccer and basketball. I played basketball at the club level and a little bit in college, so that’s why I’m a basketball fanatic.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn’t white and I wasn’t black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
The “non-profit” institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its “product” is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their “product” is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.
- Peter Drucker
The S.A.L.H. were mostly South Africans, with a high proportion of hardbitten adventurers from all quarters of the world, including a Confederate trooper from the American Civil War.
- Winston Churchill
Your story needs to move people’s spirits and build their goodwill, so that when you finally do ask them to buy from you, they feel like you’ve given them so much it would be almost rude to refuse.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Stealing Coach Wooden’s sets of three, I have come up with a formula for success no matter what kind of business you happen to be in: 1) Make sure you have the right people around you; 2) Have fun and drive results by recognizing the achievements of others; and 3) Be a passionate learner, and pass on what you know to others. Not only will this make you a success in business, but it will make you a success in life.
- David Novak
The man who is bound in the slavery of debt is just as helpless as the slave who is bound by ignorance, or by actual chains.
- Napoleon Hill
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
Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.
- Peter Thiel
I believe you should have a world where you’ve got to license something at a fair price. There are good things I see on Samsung phones that I wish were in my iPhone. I wish Apple would use them and could use them, and I don’t know if Samsung would stop us.
- Steve Wozniak
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
- Jack London
I will not allow yesterday’s success to lull me into today’s complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure.
- Og Mandino
It is possible to become world-class, enter the top 5% of performers in the world, in almost any subject within 6-12 months, or even 6-12 weeks.
- Timothy Ferriss
In the years to come, that lure of partnership helped us attract a lot of good managers, but I don’t believe that we ever had one who bought more stock than Willard. And of course he feels pretty good about it today. – Sam Walton (on human resources, hiring, early history of Wal-Mart)
- Sam Walton
There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.
- Thomas Edison
If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them…let them be your friends.
- Winston Churchill
Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking tartar sauce with you.
- Zig Ziglar
New customers are silver…loyal customers are gold.
- Anonymous
Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.
- James C. Collins
Great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.
- Seth Godin
You know, if it’s a three-way race, the public has more choice than if it’s a two-way race, and has more choice in a two-way race than a one-way race.
- Michael Bloomberg
I was afraid of the internet… because I couldn’t type.
- Jack Welch
The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Everything we did we were setting the tone for the world.
- Steve Wozniak
If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.
- Seth Godin
The politics of partisanship and the resulting inaction and excuses have paralyzed decision-making, primarily at the federal level, and the big issues of the day are not being addressed, leaving our future in jeopardy.
- Michael Bloomberg
Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses – it’s progressing. Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set.
- Bill Gates
Don’t grow accustomed to living with less, doing less, and being less to the point that you eventually sit back and accept it.
- Joel Olsteen
I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.
- Winston Churchill
You can start from where you are with what you’ve got and go to where it is you want to go.
- Zig Ziglar
You are here today because of a decision you made yesterday.
- Bryan Smith
Every sale has 5 basic obstacles: need, money, hurry, desire, trust.
- Zig Ziglar
An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople. In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups: 1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes. This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
I don’t know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.
- Reed Hastings
Each time they Tweet, it sparks interaction.
- Jack Dorsey
To make a ton of steel on and half tons of iron stone has to be mined, transported by rail a hundred miles to the Lakes, carried by boat hundreds of miles, transferred to cars, transported by rail 150 miles to Pittsburgh; one and a half tons of coal must be mined and manufactured into coke and carried 50 (odd) miles by rail; and one ton of limestone mined and carried 150 miles to Pittsburgh. How then could steel be manufactured and sold without loss at 3 pounds for 2 cents. This, I confess seemed to me incredible, and little less than miraculous, but it was so.
- Andrew Carnegie
Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.
- Dale Carnegie
You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger.
- John C. Maxwell
If you want to be obsessed to be your best, you must get ride of the negative things that are weighing you down.
- George Foreman
No one is guaranteed a job in this.
- Jack Welch
We’re better than the rest of the country but we shouldn’t believe it too much.
- Peter Thiel
I’m concerned a little bit with the culture of celebrating the fundraise. My dad taught me that when you borrow money it’s the worst day of your life.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
- Abraham Lincoln
I want to be able to speak with errors in my wording, errors in my grammar. When you type things into Google search, it corrects your words. With speech, I want it to be general enough, smart enough, to know ‘No, he couldn’t have meant these words that I think he said. He must have really meant something similar.’
- Steve Wozniak
My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people.
- Bill Gates
should go out each day expecting good things, anticipating God’s blessings and favor. God has planned all of your days for good, not evil.
- Joel Olsteen
I would rather have people think we’re confused than let our competitors know what we’re going to do.
- Larry Page
If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.
- Seth Godin
Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad).
- Peter Thiel
We’re responsible for the creation of the PC industry. The whole idea of compatible machines and lots of software.. that’s something we brought to computing. And so it’s a responsibility for us to make sure that things like security don’t get in the way of that dream.
- Bill Gates
Money doesn’t change you, it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.
- Timothy Ferriss
I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.
- Steve Martin
I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t won that AOL deal
- Sergey Brin
Computing is kind of a mess. Your computer doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know what you’re doing. It doesn’t know what you know.
- Larry Page
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?
- Winston Churchill
The reality is that I surround myself with very smart, very strong people – including my ex-wives.
- Ronald Perelman
One thing I’ve always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they’ll tell you, ‘We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.
- Bill Gates
My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don’t care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that – building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.
- Mark Zuckerberg
That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity. —BERYL MARKHAM, West with the Night1
- James C. Collins
If you don’t see yourself as a winner, then you cannot perform as a winner.
- Zig Ziglar
But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you’re confident that you’ll catch a bird flying by. It’s an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn’t come by, but a few times it does.
- Reed Hastings
Getting knocked down in life is a given. Getting up and moving forward is a choice.
- Zig Ziglar
You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.
- Bill Gates
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m a catalyst for change. You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.
- Rupert Murdoch
If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.
- Henry Ford
The future of Windows is to let the computer see, listen and even learn.
- Bill Gates
If you’re single and you want to get married, put an empty photo album on your table. That’s where you’re going to put your wedding photos. When you see it, you’re moving toward it.
- Joel Olsteen
I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.
- Elon Musk
Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you.
- James C. Collins
If You Have A Lemon, Make A Lemonade That is what a great educator does. But the fool does the exact opposite. If he finds that life has handed him a lemon, he gives up and says: I’m beaten. It is fate. I haven’t got a chance. Then he proceeds to rail against the world and indulge in an orgy of selfpity. But when the wise man is handed a lemon, he says: What lesson can I learn from this misfortune? How can I improve my situation? How can I turn this lemon into a lemonade?
- Dale Carnegie
Consider scheduling a daily meeting with your new executive. Require them to bring a comprehensive set of questions about everything they heard that day but did not completely understand.
- Ben Horowitz
If something is worth doing, it is worth doing right. I take that one step further. You shouldn’t do anything unless you do it right.
- George Foreman
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
- Seneca
Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
- Winston Churchill
Not only must you be an artist, must you be generous, and must you be able to see where you can help but you must also be aware. Aware of where your skills are welcomed.
- Seth Godin
We saw strength across our core switching and routing businesses, as well as traction in our advanced technologies. The service provider and public sector segments, in particular, continue to be solid markets for our products.
- John Chambers
In a vacuum of feedback, there is almost no chance that your company will perform optimally.
- Ben Horowitz
Sometimes God will deliver you from the fire, and other times God will make you fireproof.
- Joel Olsteen
If you have a strong informed opinion, don’t keep it to yourself. Try to help people and make the world a better place. If you strive to do anything remotely interesting, just expect a small percentage of the population to always find a way to take it personally. F*ck ’em. There are no statues erected to critics.
- Timothy Ferriss
I could never have imagined that firing 67 people on national television would actually make me more popular, especially with the younger generation.
- Donald Trump
If people talk about you, being jealous, critical, and trying to make you look bad, don’t let that change you. You don’t need their approval when you have God’s approval.
- Joel Olsteen
It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.
- Winston Churchill
Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic. They are hard because you don’t know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness.
- Ben Horowitz
Become meaningful in your interactions and the path to success in any endeavor is simpler and far more sustainable.
- Dale Carnegie
I chose America as my home because I value freedom and democracy, civil liberties and an open society.
- George Soros
