Notable Quotables

You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.

- John C. Maxwell

A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.

- Seth Godin

No one has a transparent view of the world. In fact, we all carry around a personal worldview—the biases and experiences and expectations that color the way we perceive the world.

- Seth Godin

I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.’ Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.

- Larry Ellison

The future of Windows is to let the computer see, listen and even learn.

- Bill Gates

MAY 13 Guard Against Pessimism For the Kingdom of God is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. ROMANS 14:17 NLT I HEARD A STORY ABOUT TWO FARMERS. When the rain fell, one farmer said, Thank You, Lord, for watering our crops.” But the other farmer said, Yeah, but if the rain keeps up, it’s going to rot the roots.” When the sun came out, the positive farmer said, Thank You, Lord, that our crops are getting the vitamins and minerals they need. We’ll have a wonderful harvest this year.” But the negative farmer said, Yeah, but if it keeps up, it’s going to scorch those plants. We’re never going to make a living.” Don’t you know people who are always focused on the negative? Be sure to guard against their negative attitudes infecting your thinking! Stay focused on the positive things in life.

- Joel Olsteen

We have little choice but to move beyond quality and seek remarkable, connected, and new. Remarkable, as you’ve already figured out, demands initiative.

- Seth Godin

There is no decision that we can make that doesn’t come with some sort of balance or sacrifice

- Simon Sinek

I’ll repeat something you might consider tattooing on your forehead: What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

- Timothy Ferriss

But innovation and change make inordinate time demands on the executive. All one can think and do in a short time is to think what one already knows and to do as one has always done.

- Peter Drucker

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.

- Jeff Bezos

You have in the U.S. around two million new diagnoses of cancer a year, and 13 million survivors, so you have about 10,000 patients that require analysis every day. That’s about five petabytes that need to be transmitted and computed on a daily basis.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

No, I’m not settling here. I’m going to keep pressing forward.

- Joel Olsteen

Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we’re going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.

- Elon Musk

Life’s most soothing things are a child’s goodnight and sweet music….

- Thomas Edison

Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun.

- Peter Thiel

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

Out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

- Ben Horowitz

I’m healthy as can be – not an ache or a pain. A lot of my prayer is thanking the Lord that I am healthy. I pray for long life and good health.

- Joel Olsteen

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

- Thomas Edison

Disruptive companies often pick fights they can’t win.

- Peter Thiel

I think the currency of leadership is transparency. You’ve got to be truthful. I don’t think you should be vulnerable every day, but there are moments where you’ve got to share your soul and conscience with people and show them who you are, and not be afraid of it.

- Howard Schultz

Hold on to that new, enlarge vision of victory that God has given you. Start expecting things to change in your favor. Dare to boldly declare that you are standing strong against the forces of darkness.

- Joel Olsteen

It’s about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it’s Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it’s going to be, ‘Storyteller.’

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Exploring how you could make a bad situation worse can sometimes tell you what not to do.

- Harvey Mackay

Productivity is grounded in the PC. Where does the computing power come from? How would you run ‘USA Today’ without PCs? Run a hospital without PCs? People don’t want products, they want solutions.

- Michael Dell

Bell took the opposite approach, building multiple restaurants in a single neighborhood to eliminate the competition. It’s a strategy that’s widely used today by many companies like Starbuck’s, Barnes & Noble, and many others, and it worked for Bell.

- David Novak

Take one cup of love, two cups of loyalty, three cups of forgiveness, four quarts of faith and one barrel of laughter. Take love and loyalty and mix them thoroughly with faith; blend with tenderness, kindness and understanding. Add friendship and hope. Sprinkle abundantly with laughter. Bake it with sunshine. Wrap it regularly with lots of hugs. Serve generous helpings daily.

- Zig Ziglar

The biggest cowards are managers who don’t let people know where they stand.

- Jack Welch

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

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.

- Winston Churchill

I am optimistic that we can achieve a better future. It’s not true that the Philippines is a hopeless case.

- Henry Sy

Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

- Peter Thiel

Success is…knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others.

- John C. Maxwell

Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally.

- Bill Gates

I don’t know what would have happened to Wal-Mart if we had laid low and never stirred up the competition. My guess is that we would have remained a strictly regional operator.

- Sam Walton

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

The thing I lose patience with the most is the clock. Its hands move too fast.

- Thomas Edison

Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

- Ben Horowitz

There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

- Andrew Carnegie

I’m not a public official. I’m a businessman, I’m a builder, I’m a planner.

- Donald Bren

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

- Winston Churchill

Once Microsoft lost its grip on developers, it became only a matter of time before it lost its monopoly on operating systems.

- Ben Horowitz

For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t.

- Peter Thiel

Properly understood, technology is the one way for us to escape competition in a globalizing world. As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.

- Peter Thiel

We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like 10 or 20 years from now.

- Peter Thiel

Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. The reason is simple: it’s easier to dominate a small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.

- Peter Thiel

This is indicative of how quickly CEO caution can put the foot on the brake.

- John Chambers

The Starbucks customer and the Teavana customer are two very different customers, two different need states that are highly complimentary.

- Howard Schultz

If you’re a person struggling to eat and stay healthy, you might have heard about Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, but you’ll never have heard of Bill Gates.

- Bill Gates

We vote for a presidential candidate without saying, “Why not run the country for a month and then we’ll see . .

- Seth Godin

To change somebody’s behavior, change the level of respect she receives by giving her a fine reputation to live up to. Act as though the trait you are trying to influence is already one of the person’s outstanding characteristics.

- Dale Carnegie

The best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.

- Peter Drucker

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I cut the feet out of my control top pantyhose one night, threw them on under my white pants and realized that the toning and shaping was perfect and that the hosiery material is thin enough that I could make shape wear out of it.

- Sara Blakely

But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.

- Peter Thiel

Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing, right into your product or service. Not slapping on marketing as a last-minute add-on, but understanding that if your offering itself isn’t remarkable, it’s invisible.

- Seth Godin

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without vicory there is no survival.

- Winston Churchill

The prevailing low mortgage rate, reasonable affordability and the low completion volumes for private-residential units in the coming few years should lend support to the local residential property market.

- Lee Shau Kee

Well I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

- Richard Branson

If it’s a good idea, someone has already probably thought about it first.

- Jack Nadel

The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom.

- Timothy Ferriss

Failure to deliver on committments is, in the end, unacceptable.

- Jack Welch

An individual artist needs only a thousand true fans in her tribe. It’s enough.

- Seth Godin

Nowhere are the benefits of closer economic ties more pronounced than in Mainland China and Hong Kong. The two places have their own advantages. One has the manpower, natural resources and manufacturing might, while the other has the management skills and marketing know-how.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers’ needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager’s business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.

- Peter Drucker

Don’t sling mud at others or soon you will find yourself in a deeper hole than when you started.

- Clay Clark

You cannot expect to live a positive life if you hang with negative people.

- Joel Olsteen

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment Would you capture it? Or just let it slip?

- Marshall Bruce Mathers III

The local property market remained volatile throughout the period under review due to negative developments occurring both in the local as well as overseas markets.

- Lee Shau Kee

Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.

- 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

95% financing arrangement offered by Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation Limited in a period of sustained low interest have added impetus to secondary trading activities in the property market.

- Lee Shau Kee

1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward.2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

- Peter Thiel

The only way to solve the problem of Boko Haram is to create jobs.

- Aliko Dangote

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

- Peter Drucker

About two-thirds of us work between forty-five and fifty-five hours per week.

- Thomas J Stanley

Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos’s founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books—those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock—also drew the most enthusiastic customers. Amazon became the dominant solution for anyone located far from a bookstore or seeking something unusual. Amazon then had two options: expand the number of people who read books, or expand to adjacent markets. They chose the latter, starting with the most similar markets: CDs, videos, and software. Amazon continued to add categories gradually until it had become the world’s general store. The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company’s scaling strategy.

- Peter Thiel

I try to keep a positive intention and use whatever resources I have to benefit others. I try to create businesses that I think are not hurtful. I try to do things that I think are helpful to the environment, to the animals, and to the planet.

- Russell Simmons

The most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.

- Ben Horowitz

I try to make my life about service, and hope that one day we can all ‘see’ a little better because God is with everyone and everywhere.

- Russell Simmons

The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.

- Warren Buffett

The little things in life frequently make the difference in success and failure.

- Zig Ziglar

It’s hard to improve public education – that’s clear.

- Bill Gates

Even if you are predisposed to being overweight, you’re not predestined to be fat.

- Timothy Ferriss

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

- Albert Schweitzer

Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.

- Ben Horowitz

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