[In January 2011] We have built the simplest way to accept credit cards. It’s a little tiny device that we give away for free, and you just download some softwares from the app store and plug it in to your mobile phone or iPad and suddenly you can take credit cards. So if you’re a tax accountant or a lawyer or doctor or even a hair stylist, you can now accept credit cards.
- Jack Dorsey
Notable Quotables
Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike”, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
- Peter Thiel
Men want to make women happy.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Checks should be endorsed immediately: FOR DEPOSIT ONLY.
- Robert Kiyosaki
When you learn to listen to your fear, you’ve found a compass that can show you what matters.
- Seth Godin
I never worry about action, but only inaction.
- Winston Churchill
As he brooded over how to raise the money, he was informed by his father that he had always intended to give each of his children $1,000.00 at age twenty-one, and he now offered to advance John the money. But, John, he added lest his son expect miracles, the rate is ten. Having just retrieved a thousand dollars from Hewitt, Bill might have been looking for a high return on these idle funds. John knew his father too well to plead for a gift and accepted the 10 percent loan, which was higher than the prevailing rate. So on April 1, 1858 backed up by this borrowed money, John D. Rockefeller left Isaac Hewitt and joined the partnership of Clark and Rockefeller at 32 River Street (in Cleveland). At eighteen, he was catapulted to a partner’s rank in a commission house. It was a great thing to be my own employer, said Rockefeller. Mentally I swelled with pride – a partner in a firm with $4,000 capital! The moment was fraught with meaning for him and after his first day at work, he went back to the Cheshire Street house, fell to his knees, and implored the Lord to bless his new enterprise.
- Ron Chernow
If you hold on to what you want so tightly, it almost becomes an idol.
- Joel Olsteen
Life is not a portfolio: not for a startup founder, and not for any individual. An entrepreneur cannot “diversify” herself: you cannot run dozens of companies at the same time and then hope that one of them works out well. Less obvious but just as important, an individual cannot diversify his own life by keeping dozens of equally possible careers in ready reserve.
- Peter Thiel
Attitude, not Aptitude, determines Altitude.
- Zig Ziglar
es it’s thinner, but I wanted storage. I don’t have broadband at home, and you can’t get great broadband connection in hotels, so I carry all my personal media in the iPad. So I was hoping Apple has a 256GB iPad. I was hoping for more storage so I could put every episode of Big Bang Theory on my iPad. So I emailed my wife and said ‘nope, I don’t want one of those.
- Steve Wozniak
A productive employee who is kept busy working at his or her job is far more likely to be happy at that job and less likely to look for employment elsewhere.
- Zig Ziglar
Discontent is the first necessity of progress.
- Thomas Edison
The dove is my emblem…. I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it…. I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill…
- 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
To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
- Elbert Hubbard
Money motivates neither the best people nor the best in people.
- Dee Hock
Aim for the highest.
- Andrew Carnegie
No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
- Andrew Carnegie
The more we thought, the more they all sounded boring compared to Apple. You didn’t have to have a real specific reason for choosing a name when you were a little tiny company of two people; you choose any name you want.
- Steve Wozniak
Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.
- Bill Gates
I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.
- Jeff Bezos
Live an active life among people who are doing worthwhile things, keep eyes and ears and mind and heart open to absorb truth, and then tell of the things you know, as if you know them. The world will listen, for the world loves nothing so much as real life.
- Dale Carnegie
Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.
- Warren G. Tracy
My personal opinion is that I’m in the media too much. I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman. I would like to be without any extra visibility.
- Viktor Vekselberg
An organization’s capabilities reside in two places. The first is in its processes—the methods by which people have learned to transform inputs of labor, energy, materials, information, cash, and technology into outputs of higher value. The second is in the organization’s values, which are the criteria that managers and employees in the organization use when making prioritization decisions. People are quite flexible, in that they can be trained to succeed at quite different things. An employee of IBM, for example, can quite readily change the way he or she works, in order to work successfully in a small start-up company. But processes and values are not flexible. A process that is effective at managing the design of a minicomputer, for example, would be ineffective at managing the design of a desktop personal computer. Similarly, values that cause employees to prioritize projects to develop high-margin products, cannot simultaneously accord priority to low-margin products. The very processes and values that constitute an organization’s capabilities in one context, define its disabilities in another context.
- Clayton M. Christensen
If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
- Peter Thiel
Everything about my journey to get Spanx off the ground entailed me having to be a salesperson – from going to the hosiery mills to get a prototype made to calling Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. I had to position myself to get five minutes in the door with buyers.
- Sara Blakely
The way of the warrior: keep death in mind at all times. If a warrior keeps death in mind at all times and lives as though each day might be his last, he will conduct himself properly in all his actions.
- Principle of the Bushido
You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated.
- James C. Collins
In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.
- John C. Maxwell
Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.
- Seth Godin
An enterprise shall help the people overcome all difficulties to savor the fruit to be borne on the motherland, come rain or shine.
- Cheng Yu-tung
It’s hard to say with 100 percent certainty that we’re totally out of it (the dry pattern), and it’s going to shift. But it’s leaning in that direction.
- Ed Clark
Today I will be a successful sales professional, and I will learn something today that will make me even more professional tomorrow.
- Zig Ziglar
They are, therefore, not overly impressed by speed in decision-making. Rather they consider virtuosity in manipulating a great many variables a symptom of sloppy thinking. They want to know what the decision is all about and what the underlying realities are which it has to satisfy. They want impact rather than technique, they want to be sound rather than clever.
- Peter Drucker
It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.
- Dale Carnegie
As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.
- John C. Maxwell
The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.
- Elon Musk
Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it’s really let us down.
- Bill Gates
I’ve got to keep breathing. It’ll be my worst business mistake if I don’t.
- Steve Martin
As a general rule, everyone you involve with your company should be involved full-time. Sometimes you’ll have to break this rule; it usually makes sense to hire outside lawyers and accountants, for example. However, anyone who doesn’t own stock options or draw a regular salary from your company is fundamentally misaligned.
- Peter Thiel
I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.
- Mark Zuckerberg
With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top.
- Seth Godin
Life’s too short to spend it trying to keep others happy. You can’t please everyone. To fulfill your destiny, stay true to your heart.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m a physician. I’ve been blessed with ideas and resources to use technology to make the world a better place. That’s what I would like to leave behind.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.
- Henry Ford
We will be one of the most productive residential developers in China in the next few years.
- Lee Shau Kee
The challenge, it turns out, isn’t in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by.
- Seth Godin
Always remember that nothing kills great ideas more than people with small ideas and limited imaginations.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.
- Peter Thiel
Small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. 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).
- Peter Thiel
The construction arm of the Group always firmly adheres to the principle of ‘People is our priority’ and deploys a vast amount of resources to quality facilities and training of staff to ensure a safe and good working environment.
- Lee Shau Kee
When you’re in comedy, people always come up and say, ‘Oh, it must be so hard.’ It really isn’t hard unless you’re not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.
- Reid Hoffman
Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.
- Elon Musk
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
- David Novak
You are safer here tonight than you would be on the streets of any other city in the world.
- Michael Bloomberg
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
- John Wooden
The ‘morality of compromise’ sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don’t compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.
- Andrew Carnegie
The real problem when working with a consultant, a therapist or a coach isn’t that we don’t know what to do. The real problem is that we don’t want to change our mind.
- Seth Godin
Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace: “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.
- Michael Gerber
Capitalism works.
- Michael Bloomberg
Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.
- Jeff Bezos
Speak the truth. Transparency breeds legitimacy.
- John C. Maxwell
Never forget, the real secret of giving advice is this: Once you’ve given it, don’t concern yourself with whether it is followed or not, and refrain from saying ‘I told you so.’
- Harvey Mackay
I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.
- Elon Musk
There was a moment when I was watching Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in ‘Badboys’ that I felt, you know, inspired. I don’t know if I was proud, because so many people do the work. Everyone’s part of a team that develops over the years and gives people chances. There have been some good moments watching people develop.
- Russell Simmons
I haven’t failed,I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
- Zig Ziglar
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
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
- Og Mandino
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
- Abraham Lincoln
Be there for your kids. Later, when you need them, they’ll be there for you.
- Zig Ziglar
You cannot expect to live a positive life if you hang with negative people.
- Joel Olsteen
How Many Marriages Would Be Better If the Husband and the Wife Clearly Understood That They’re On the Same Side?
- Zig Ziglar
You cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure.
- Zig Ziglar
The student who elects to risk it all—which is nothing—to establish an online video rental service that delivers $5,000 per month in income from a small niche of Blu-ray aficionados, a two-hour-per-week side project that allows him to work full-time as an animal rights lobbyist.
- Timothy Ferriss
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
- Winston Churchill
In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.
- Reed Hastings
One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.
- Jeff Bezos
When we put $4 billion into the U.S. economy, they were OK with this. When we preserved jobs in Dearborn, or preserved jobs in Columbus, or preserved jobs in Pennsylvania, everyone was happy.
- Alexei Mordashov
Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
What is school for? If you’re not asking that, you’re wasting time and money.
- Seth Godin
A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.
- Peter Drucker
I think when I was young, let’s call it high school, and even before that, I just loved comedy, and I loved comedians. I grew up watching Laurel and Hardy. That’s really a long time ago. I loved Jerry Lewis. I just loved comedians.
- Steve Martin
Entrepreneurs are always biased to understate the scale of competition, but that is the biggest mistake a startup can make.
- Peter Thiel
The worse a situation becomes the less it takes to turn it around, the bigger the upside.
- George Soros
The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship.
- Seth Godin
Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
- Peter Thiel
I think so many people are reactive… they see things in a short term way they’re right up against it.
- Ray Dalio
In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.
- Steve Wozniak
None of us got to where we are alone. Whether the assistance we received was obvious or subtle, acknowledging someone’s help is a big part of understanding the importance of saying thank you.
- Harvey Mackay
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
It’s clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them.
- Seth Godin
Bill Milliken is a big hero of mine.
- Anne Cox Chambers
Go as far as you can see. When you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.
- Zig Ziglar
Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.
- Rupert Murdoch
[On a company founder.] A founder is not a job, it’s a role, it’s an attitude. And it’s something that can happen again, and again, and again. In fact it has to happen, again and again and again. Otherwise we would not move forward.
- Jack Dorsey
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
