Notable Quotables

America is built around this premise that you can do it, and there are an awful lot of people who are unlikely to have done it who did.

- Michael Bloomberg

To succeed in business, you must build a brand and never destroy it.

- Aliko Dangote

My first professional job was to sell heavy-duty waterless cookware.

- Zig Ziglar

In the end, Mockler and the board were proved right, stunningly so. If a shareflipper had accepted the 44 percent price premium offered by Ronald Perelman on October 31, 1986, and then invested the full amount in the general market for ten years, through the end of 1996, he would have come out three times worse off than a shareholder who had stayed with Mockler and Gillette.20 Indeed, the company, its customers, and the shareholders would have been ill served had Mockler capitulated to the raiders, pocketed his millions, and retired to a life of leisure.

- James C. Collins

VaynerMedia filters the world how humans interact. This is how people are going to make buying decisions.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.

- Elon Musk

I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

- Jeff Bezos

That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity.

- Beryl Markham

I don’t think we’re going to run out of important things to do, compared with the resources that we have. There are many, many problems in the world that need solving.

- Larry Page

If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it.

- Muhammad Ali

Good relations with the Wookiees, I have.

- Yoda

I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

- Herbert Bayard Swope

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

- Elon Musk

Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.

- Andrew Carnegie

The interesting products out on the Internet today are not building new technologies. They’re combining technologies. Instagram, for instance: Photos plus geolocation plus filters. Foursquare: restaurant reviews plus check-ins plus geo.

- Jack Dorsey

If this market transition truly evolves the way that I think it’s most likely to, the worst decision you could make is not to move.

- John Chambers

If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.

- Reid Hoffman

Control, control, you must learn control!

- Yoda

When you deal with change, you have a couple choices: you can lead it and make the rules, or you can be a fast follower, or you can be a slow follower.

- Charles Ergen

We can make the world a better place, one butt at a time

- Sara Blakely

Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.

- Seth Godin

It’s paradoxical, but you want to identify the things that can kill you and engage them sooner. This is part of the metric behind fail fast. Of course, you’re not actually trying to fail; you want to succeed. But failing fast is much better than failing slowly, since it enables you to quickly to pivot, iterate, and redeploy capital. The one key mistake is that people tend to work first on the problems that they have the most confidence they can solve. In a good startup strategy you actually want to face death soonest because then you fail fast or get on a great path to success fast. Identify the hardest problems and try to solve those as soon as you can.

- Reid Hoffman

Giving should be entered into in just the same way as investing. Giving is investing.

- John D. Rockefeller

What we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

- Brian Tracy

I was a great student at a great school, Wharton School of Finance.

- Donald Trump

Microsoft is not about greed. It’s about innovation and fairness.

- Bill Gates

Mike suggested that we might want to turn our stockholders’ meetings into an event, and we went along with him.

- Sam Walton

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.

- Zig Ziglar

The best leaders are readers of people. They have the intuitive ability to understand others by discerning how they feel and recognizing what they sense.

- John C. Maxwell

It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.

- Ben Horowitz

I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.

- Reid Hoffman

I will be liken to the rain drop which washes away the mountain; the ant that devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attemps, repeated will complete my undertaking.

- Og Mandino

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

- Winston Churchill

I think that both parties should declare the debt limit as a political weapon of mass destruction which can’t be used. I mean, it is silly to have a country that has 237 years building up its reputation and then have people threaten to tear it down because they’re not getting some other matter.

- Warren Buffett

Some of the things I see around town are just disgusting.

- Jack Taylor

You’ve got to eat while you dream. You’ve got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum if you will. Getting it done in the short-range, and delivering a long-range plan, and executing on that.

- Jack Welch

the average person is more interested in his or her own name than in all the other names on earth put together.

- Dale Carnegie

I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family – father, mother, children – is fundamental to our civilisation.

- Rupert Murdoch

You’re not really free until you’re free from trying to please everybody.

- Joel Olsteen

I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.

- Larry Ellison

Our road to success has included its shares of ups and downs, as we have had to cope with the often volatile nature of our chosen fields of specialisation. Yet, thanks to the strong foundations established by the dedication and hard work of our employees, we have always been able to weather the storms.

- Cheng Yu-tung

we can not prepare for defeat and expect to live a life in Victory.

- Joel Olsteen

Every man should make his son or daughter learn some useful trade or profession, so that in these days of changing fortunes of being rich today and poor tomorrow they may have something tangible to fall back upon. This provision might save many persons from misery, who by some unexpected turn of fortune have lost all their means.

- P.T. Barnum

There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.

- Bill Gates

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

- Peter Drucker

A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.

- Elon Musk

A lot of people feel very good about Mitt Romney and I think he’s going to do a great job.

- Donald Trump

We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

- Jeff Bezos

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

- Peter Thiel

Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.

- Harvey Mackay

Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.

- Ben Horowitz

If you don’t know how it works, find out. If you’re not sure if it will work, try it. If it doesn’t make sense, play with it until it does. If it’s not broken, break it. If it might not be true, find out.

- Seth Godin

A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.

- Elon Musk

In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.

- Ben Horowitz

I don’t know what causes a person to be ambitious, but it is a fact that I have been overblessed with drive and ambition from the time I hit the ground.

- Sam Walton

I believe in God, family, and McDonald’s. And in the office, that order is reversed.

- Ray Kroc

I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.

- Seth Godin

If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it.

- Peter Thiel

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

- Richard Branson

What do you want? is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer.

- Timothy Ferriss

Cisco will be well placed to continue building our presence in India as a critical part of our research and development efforts and as domestic market for networking products and solutions continues to expand.

- John Chambers

Losing an A is a sin. Love ‘em, hug ‘em, kiss ‘em, don’t lose them! We conduct postmortems on every A we lose and hold management accountable for losses.

- Jack Welch

The question I ask myself like almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’ … Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

- Winston Churchill

FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON THE NUMBERS In the second example, I managed the team to a set of numbers that did not fully capture what I wanted. I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time—in that order. Unfortunately, the metrics that I set did not capture those priorities. At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them at every staff meeting, my people focused intensely on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result. Interestingly, I see this same problem play out in many consumer Internet startups. I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product. It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.

- Ben Horowitz

the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19

- James C. Collins

Does that mean that we should never hire or promote an inexperienced manager who had not already learned to do what needs to be done in this assignment? The answer: it depends. In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people–resources. In this circumstance, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience to do the job–because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead. But in established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by processes, and is less dependent upon managers with detailed, hands-on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience.

- Clayton M. Christensen

That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.

- Ben Horowitz

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

- Bill Gates

You will have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.

- Zig Ziglar

Most comedies are really hard to write, or to watch, because you kind of generally know what’s coming.

- Steve Martin

We just sort of factor all that information into the computer between the ears and come up with conclusions.

- Phil Knight

By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world. Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer.

- Bill Gates

The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

- Bill Gates

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines… There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.

- Bill Gates

I learned that a long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.

- Seth Godin

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

- Joel Olsteen

I ask every participant to think about who their personal business mentors have been and why. I tell them my own business hero was Andy Pearson and I give them a few Andy stories to illustrate why. Then we break into groups of about twenty to go around in a circle and have each person talk about the person who has mean the most to him…We reconvene in the larger group and discuss some of the traits that were exhibited by the mentors; integrity, passion, inspiration, a positive outlook, and so on. A lot of people said it was someone who, helped me realize what I could achieve or really cared about me as a person. Then I try to get them to go a little deeper. I say, Now suppose that you were a fly on the wall, looking down on this room ten years from now. What would you like people to be saying about you? How would you feel if someone were saying that you were the person who had the greatest impact on his or her professional life?

- David Novak

The challenge is to focus on the work, not on the fear that comes from doing the work.

- Seth Godin

[As a child] I would just question things…

- Elon Musk

A Prius is not a true hybrid, really. The current Prius is, like, 2 percent electric. It’s a gasoline car with slightly better mileage.

- Elon Musk

The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world.

- Richard Branson

Customers today are strongly value oriented. But just what does that mean? Customers tell us that value means the results they receive in relation to the total costs (both the price and other costs to customers incurred in acquiring the service).

- Gary W. Lo

1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality.2. A bad plan is better than no plan.3. Competitive markets destroy profits.4. Sales matters just as much as product.

- Peter Thiel

If the merit of the idea is strong, it spreads really quickly no matter who you are or where you are from.

- Jack Dorsey

If you don’t agree with the core principles, which are the premise of that compromise, then you have to have what I call principled confrontation. And so that is the thing that we do that I think can rub some people the wrong way.

- Travis Kalanick

Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.

- Elon Musk

Even today few businessmen understand that research, to be productive, has to be the “disorganizer,” the creator of a different future and the enemy of today. In most industrial laboratories, “defensive research” aimed at perpetuating today, predominates.

- Peter Drucker

Waiting isn’t easy, which is precisely why it is so effective when engaging with other people.

- Seth Godin

Feedback

Let us know what's going on.

Get Started

Your first month is ONLY $1!

You will be redirected to your dashboard in a moment.

Fill out the information below to cancel your subscription