In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It’s a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems. A brain, no matter how big, cannot solve a problem it doesn’t know about.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
Where I get my energy is: ‘How can I make it better?’
- Sara Blakely
To lead a meaningful life, one must build trust with others. To enjoy peace, a nation must win the confidence and support of its people. To achieve stable growth, an enterprise must live up to its conviction.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse.
- Timothy Ferriss
You don’t need a big close, as many sales reps believe. You risk losing your customer when you save all the good stuff for the end. Keep the customer actively involved throughout your presentation, and watch your results improve.
- Harvey Mackay
I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I’d imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them.
- Ray Kroc
If people look inward, they would see the opportunities for greatness.
- Aliko Dangote
Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.
- Bill Gates
Failing is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night.
- Zig Ziglar
Diversification and globalization are the keys to the future.
- Fujio Mitarai
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
The U.S. is talking about keeping interest rates near zero.
- Lee Shau Kee
Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
- Warren Buffett
This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing. It’s not politically viable; it’s not morally right; it’s just not going to happen.
- Michael Bloomberg
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
Our underwear used to just be cotton, but we wanted to see if we could create something out of synthetics.
- Tadashi Yanai
Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can be what you want to be.
- W. Clement Stone
I feel that people I trusted – I don’t know who, on what level – have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it’s for them to pay. And I think, frankly, that I’m the best person to see it through.
- Rupert Murdoch
A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
- Henry Ford
You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do. You want to be focused on it.
- Steve Martin
The man who does more than he is paid for will soon be paid for more than he does.
- Napoleon Hill
To do anything truly worth doing, I must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in with gusto and scramble through as well as I can.
- Og Mandino
Fortunately, problems are an everyday part of our life. Consider this: If there were no problems, most of us would be unemployed.
- Zig Ziglar
$1,000,000 in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows.
- Timothy Ferriss
Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
The challenge is to focus on the work, not on the fear that comes from doing the work.
- Seth Godin
If you want to earn more, learn more.
- Zig Ziglar
[In January 2011] I think Twitter is so unique that we must stay independent.
- Jack Dorsey
I love comedy. That’s what got me into the arts. I don’t even know how to categorize myself anymore.
- Steve Martin
IN A NUTSHELL SIX WAYS TO MAKE PEOPLE LIKE YOU PRINCIPLE 1 Become genuinely interested in other people. PRINCIPLE 2 Smile. PRINCIPLE 3 Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. PRINCIPLE 4 Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. PRINCIPLE 5 Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. PRINCIPLE 6 Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.
- Dale Carnegie
Revolution has values, revolution has purpose. Revolution has direction. Revolution has leaders. Revolution looks at the intersection ahead and pushes people to do the right thing. And it doesn’t always have to be loud. It doesn’t always have to be violent. It’s just as powerful in it’s stillness.
- Jack Dorsey
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
- Timothy Ferriss
No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.
- Winston Churchill
Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make
- Donald Trump
I look at every business and ask, How long can this last? How can I identify the status quo and change it?
- Sheldon Adelson
On balance, I am a supporter of the minimum wage going up. We’ve got to be very careful what we wish for because some employers – and there could be a lot of them – will be scared away from hiring new people or creating incremental hours for part-time people as a result of that wage going up.
- Howard Schultz
There are ways of fighting for your interests. I never do something in business that I wouldn’t do in life.
- Vladimir Potanin
Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.
- Bill Gates
You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.
- Harry Truman
Success is…knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others.
- John C. Maxwell
And well you should not. For my ally in the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. It’s energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we…(Yoda pinches Luke’s shoulder)…not this crude matter. (a sweeping gesture) You must feel the Force around you. (gesturing) Here, between you…me…the tree…the rock…everywhere! Yes, even between this land and that ship!
- Yoda
I think part of the reason we’re successful so far is that originally we didn’t really want to start a business.
- Larry Page
If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.
- Dale Carnegie
Much about success is just the result of simply the ability to follow up, follow through, and finish what we started.
- Zig Ziglar
I want the entire smartphone, the entire Internet, on my wrist.
- Steve Wozniak
Meeting sports athletes that are the best in the world is a thrill to this day.
- Phil Knight
When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.
- Howard Schultz
The timing of your decision is just as important as the decision you make.
- John C. Maxwell
So you need two professions: the one you have studied all this time, and your other profession the profession of persuasion that allows you to make good use of all those years of education, practice and dues-paying.
- Jerry Vass
Whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh, students and researchers can watch remarkable video such as World War II newsreels and the story of Apollo 11 — the historic first landing on the Moon.
- Sergey Brin
Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.
- Robert J. Sawyer
The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.
- Dale Carnegie
There is far more opportunity than there is ability.
- Thomas Edison
Well I think a lot of times we’re putting things off and I’m going to do it later. I’m going to break this bad habit or I’m going to pursue this dream or I’m going to treat my spouse better.
- Joel Olsteen
I believe people have to follow their dreams – I did.
- Larry Ellison
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
- Winston Churchill
Once you go from 10 people to 100, you already don’t know who everyone is. So at that stage you might as well keep growing, to get the advantages of scale.
- Sergey Brin
When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.
- Zig Ziglar
Be factual. Lying is really, really a bad idea, mostly because they’ll find you out. And then you’ll never get another item in that outlet for as long as they remember you, which will be forever.
- Michael Levine
I grew up in a house where my father encouraged my brother and me to fail. I specifically remember coming home and saying, ‘Dad, Dad, I tried out for this or that and I was horrible,’ and he would high-five me and say, ‘Way to go.’
- Sara Blakely
Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls– family, health, friends, integrity– are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered
- Gary Keller
You have to respect your parents. They are giving you an at-bat. If you’re an entrepreneur and go into the family business, you want to grow fast. Patience is important. But respect the other party… My dad and I pulled it off because we really respect each other.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.
- Bill Gates
In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
- Ben Horowitz
Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
- Jack Welch
WHY 20 MILE MARCHERS WIN 20 Mile Marching helps turn the odds in your favor for three reasons: 1. It builds confidence in your ability to perform well in adverse circumstances. 2. It reduces the likelihood of catastrophe when you’re hit by turbulent disruption. 3. It helps you exert self-control in an out-of-control environment.
- James C. Collins
You’ve got to embrace what you don’t know.
- Sara Blakely
There has never been a statue erected in honor of a critic.
- Zig Ziglar
In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.
- John C. Maxwell
If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.
- Elon Musk
The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.
- Elon Musk
Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.
- Andrew Carnegie
The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%.
- Andrew Carnegie
My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.
- Henry Ford
The Starbucks customer and the Teavana customer are two very different customers, two different need states that are highly complimentary.
- Howard Schultz
Those two priceless abilities: first, the ability to think. Second, the ability to do things in the order of their importance.
- Dale Carnegie
Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.
- Walt Disney
Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.
- Walt Disney
Education comes from within, you get it by struggle and effort and thought.
- Napoleon Hill
Most of the fans have ideas about their perfect phone. But many of them can’t do it because building a phone is tough. So they would give us feedback about the features that they think should be included in our next model. And if we incorporated that in our new phone, they will share the good news with their friends.
- Lei Jun
You were not created to just get by with an average, unrewarding, or unfulfilling life. God created you to leave your mark on this generation.
- Joel Olsteen
Indeed, if there is any one secret” to an enduring great company, it is the ability to manage continuity and change—a discipline that must be consciously practiced, even by the most visionary of companies.
- James C. Collins
Since all of them overestimated the competition, no one even showed up.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
The marriage partner is not really the problem. No other person can ultimately make you happy. You must learn how to be happy within yourself.
- Joel Olsteen
As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
- Peter Thiel
The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth.
- Stephen Wynn
A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.
- Napoleon Hill
Our minds were freewheeling. We rushed to get things done.
- Sam Walton
A goal properly set is halfway reached.
- Zig Ziglar
Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, Napster’s then-teenage founders, credibly threatened to disrupt the powerful music recording industry in 1999. The next year, they made the cover of Time magazine. A year and a half after that, they ended up in bankruptcy court.
- Peter Thiel
MONOPOLY. Tesla started with a tiny submarket that it could dominate: the market for high-end electric sports cars. Since the first Roadster rolled off the production line in 2008, Tesla’s sold only about 3,000 of them, but at $109,000 apiece that’s not trivial. Starting small allowed Tesla to undertake the necessary R&D to build the slightly less expensive Model S, and now Tesla owns the luxury electric sedan market, too. They sold more than 20,000 sedans in 2013 and now Tesla is in prime position to expand to broader markets in the future.
- Peter Thiel
To me, this is about preserving history and making it available to everyone
- Sergey Brin
Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.
- Henry Ford
The Franchise Prototype is also the place where all assumptions are put to the test to see how well they work before becoming operational in the business.
- Michael Gerber
You must develop a verification system for anything in your business that you expect to happen.
- Clay Clark
Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.
- Ben Horowitz
If you have the character to hang in there when its tough, you will develop or acquire every other characteristic necessary to WIN in the game of life.
- Zig Ziglar
The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether he would tolerate a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. Madden answered, “If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you’ll be so late you’ll miss the game, so you can’t do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you’ll have a player that’s so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.
- Ben Horowitz
