Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.
- Benjamin Franklin
Notable Quotables
One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions, your passions choose you.
- Jeff Bezos
My job is to help more people have jobs.
- Jack Ma
God will never ask you for something without first depositing it within you. If you will dare to take a step of faith, you will discover gifts inside that you never before realized were there.
- Joel Olsteen
Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.
- Brian Tracy
Yes, I think it’s okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It’s okay to say to them, “You’re not going where I need to go, and there’s no way I’m going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I’m heading off. I’m betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.
- Seth Godin
You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war. – To Neville Chamberlain
- Winston Churchill
Separate performance from people.
- David Robinson
I never thought about success. I always thought about doing the job at hand. My goal was getting through the show that night.
- Steve Martin
It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
- Elon Musk
If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.
- Steve Wozniak
Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.
- P.T. Barnum
Life is a classroom — only those who are willing to be lifelong learners will move to the head of the class.
- Zig Ziglar
I readily absorb ideas from every source, frequently starting where the last person left off.
- Thomas Edison
We’re all working together, that’s the secret.
- Sam Walton
Why do you ask so much?
- Lee Shau Kee
I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn’t turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book.
- Steve Martin
It is not so much that I am a blue-blooded oligarch: I just don’t feel like an oligarch.
- Vladimir Potanin
I’d like to dial it back 5% or 10% and try to have a vacation that’s not just e-mail with a view.
- Elon Musk
If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.
- Jeff Bezos
People don’t want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology – all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.
- Peter Thiel
Here’s a statistician joke for your next hot date: Person A: What happens when Bill Gates walks into a bar of 55 people? Person B: I don’t know. What? Person A: The average net worth jumps to more than a billion dollars!
- Timothy Ferriss
Get the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off of the bus.
- Jim Collins
Eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.
- Bill Gates
Pay attention to those employees who respectfully ask why. They are demonstrating an interest in their jobs and exhibiting a curiosity that could eventually translate into leadership ability.
- Harvey Mackay
Most of the reason we don’t do things is because we’re afraid to fail. I just made a decision one day that I was not going to do things in my life because of fear.
- Sara Blakely
Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don’t want.
- Timothy Ferriss
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
- General George S. Patton
Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution—whether they’re in sales, marketing, or advertising—has a job title that has nothing to do with those things. People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.
- Peter Thiel
You can’t spend as much money as I have, even if you try. I’ve been trying.
- Larry Ellison
Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, what do I want to do everyday for the rest of my life…do that.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Witchcraft is one of the most baseless, absurd, disgusting and silly of all the humbugs.
- P.T. Barnum
There are men in the world who derive as stern an exaltation from the proximity of disaster and ruin, as others from success.
- Winston Churchill
Good executives never put off until tomorrow what they can get someone else to do today.
- John C. Maxwell
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
- Winston Churchill
That’s why I can tell you with confidence that you are coming into greater victories. Enlarge your vision. Take the limits off God. You have not seen your best days. God has victories in your future that will amaze you. He will show up and show out in unusual ways. You may be in a tough time right now, but remember this: The enemy always fights you the hardest when he knows God has something great in store for you.
- Joel Olsteen
Southwest consistently turns a profit because they have an employee ownership program that gives their employees a sense of ownership that is very real. When the company does well financially, the employees do well financially. When the company struggles, the employees struggle.
- Clay Clark
I think everyone’s against abortion.
- Rupert Murdoch
I’m for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children?
- Steve Martin
I want the entire smartphone, the entire Internet, on my wrist.
- Steve Wozniak
Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.
- Larry Ellison
Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.
- Peter Thiel
No one ever wants to see his or her name linked to anything bad. Conscience is like a baby. It has to go to sleep before you can.
- Harvey Mackay
When I was a kid a long time ago, when the sun rose, I was outside on my bike. If my parents were lucky – poor parents! – I would be home before it got dark.
- Larry Ellison
So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.
- Joel Olsteen
Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.
- Richard Branson
swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor. At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table.
- Dale Carnegie
If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.
- Ben Horowitz
We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves and are generous enough and honest enough to engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen.
- Seth Godin
When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right.
- Rupert Murdoch
It was always a challenge for me to prove that a Russian financial investor can be as successful in the West as back at home in Russia.
- Alisher Usmanov
Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago? How did they work out? Didn’t you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn’t most of them turn out all right after all?
- Dale Carnegie
Without promotion, something terrible happens… nothing!
- P.T. Barnum
Look – this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do – ultimately, you’re at the end.
- Ben Horowitz
Gratitude is the single greatest treasure I will take with me from this experience.
- Oprah Winfrey
Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.
- George Soros
In creating an ideavirus, the advertiser creates an environment in which the idea can replicate and spread. It’s the virus that does the work, not the marketer.
- Seth Godin
I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft.
- Steve Ballmer
What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We’ve termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.’
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves
- Ray Kroc
You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.
- Dale Carnegie
You may be sitting around waiting for God to change your circumstances. Then you’re going to be happy, then your’re going to have a good attitude, then you’re going to give God praise. But God is waiting on you to get up on the inside. When you do your part, He’ll begin to change things and work supernaturally in your life.
- Joel Olsteen
If you had to boil down the Wal-Mart system to one single idea, it would porbably be communication, because it is one of the real keys to our success…Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
- Sam Walton
Going from PayPal, I thought: ‘Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?’ Not from the perspective, ‘What’s the best way to make money?
- Elon Musk
The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.
- Bill Gates
There is nothing either good or bad,” said Shakespeare, but thinking makes it so.
- Dale Carnegie
If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.
- Simon Sinek
Traditional corporations, particularly large-scale service and manufacturing businesses are organized for efficiency. Or consistency. But not joy. Joy comes from surprise and connection and humanity and transparency and new…If you fear special requests, if you staff with cogs, if you have to put it all in a manual, then the chances of amazing someone are really quite low. These organizations have people who will try to patch problems over after the fact, instead of motivated people eager to delight on the spot.The alternative, it seems, is to organize for joy. These are the companies that give their people the freedom (and the expectation) that they will create, connect and surprise. These are the organizations that embrace someone who make a difference, as opposed to searching the employee handbook for a rule that was violated.
- Seth Godin
There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That’s a beautiful deleveraging.
- Ray Dalio
Mitt – what I speak to Mitt Romney about is jobs. What I speak to Mitt Romney about is China, because he’s got a great view on China and how they’re trying to destroy our country by taking our jobs and making our product and manipulating their currency, so that it makes it almost impossible for our companies to compete.
- Donald Trump
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don’t know.
- Seth Godin
If into the security recordings you go, only pain will you find.
- Yoda
Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.
- Jack London
I’m just always looking forwards. I spend very little time, looking backwards.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.
- Clayton M. Christensen
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
Keep costs low and spirits high, and the people of Southwest Airlines will keep LUV in the air.
- Herb Kelleher
In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can’t you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that’s different from a California textbook that’s different from a Massachusetts textbook. That’s very expensive.
- Bill Gates
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
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
- George Eliot
To be a superstar, you must do something exceptional. Not just survive the Dip, but use the Dip as an opportunity to create something so extraordinary that people can’t help but talk about it, recommend it, and, yes, choose it.
- Seth Godin
Today, we’ve begun to make the extraordinary historic films of the National Archives available to the world for the first time online. Students and researchers whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh 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
I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It’s hard to memorize objectives, but it’s easy to remember a story.
- Ben Horowitz
I can’t stress enough the essential nature of really hearing what someone has to say even if it is totally contradictory to your own beliefs, and I wish this was a lesson I only had to learn once.
- David Novak
Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.
- Bill Gates
Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so love the people who treat you right, forget about the ones who don’t, and believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.
- Harvey Mackay
Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.
- Bill Gates
My blogging life is basically goalless. I like the zen nature of that, and paradoxically, it improves results.
- Seth Godin
In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming found that a mysterious antibacterial fungus had grown on a petri dish he’d forgotten to cover in his laboratory: he discovered penicillin by accident. Scientists have sought to harness the power of chance ever since. Modern drug discovery aims to amplify Fleming’s serendipitous circumstances a millionfold: pharmaceutical companies search through combinations of molecular compounds at random, hoping to find a hit.
- Peter Thiel
Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.
- Bill Gates
If one dream dies, dream another dream. If you get knocked down, get back up and go again.
- Joel Olsteen
The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don’t have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.
- Ben Horowitz
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
- Steve Jobs
My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.
- Reed Hastings
The first dollar is the most you will get if you don’t love what you are doing.
- Ray Kroc
Being too humble can cost you. Not talking about your accomplishments can hit you in the pocketbook. It’s those who visibly take credit for accomplishments who are rewarded with promotions and gem assignments, writes Klaus. As our economy has resulted in less job stability, self-promotion has become more important. Even if you aren’t an entrepreneur, says Klaus, you need to think like one and start talking up your most valuable product: you.
- Peggy Klaus
Many people say the privatisation was unfair: that is true – it was unfair. That is a fact: some people became rich and others did not. Unfair does not mean illegal, but it was inevitably unfair.
- Vladimir Potanin
What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.
- Warren Buffett
Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
- Winston Churchill
