We are witnessing a seismic change in consumer behavior. That change is being brought about by technology and the access people have to information.
- Howard Schultz
Notable Quotables
Whether you’re talking about the core consumer or the person on the street, the principle is the same: you have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.
- Phil Knight
I think our main real estate effort should be directed at getting out in front of expansion and letting the population build out to us.
- Sam Walton
The reason we love our parents is because they loved us first. Every single company should take this advice.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.
- Seth Godin
Bill Gates was in his 20s when he started with $50,000 and became the richest man in the world with $90 billion. It’s a good idea that he did not ask too many people for their ideas on what they thought was possible for his life.
- Robert Kiyosaki
My new favorite word is ‘awkward.’…The reason we need to be in search of awkward is that awkward is the barrier between us and excellence, between where we are and the remarkable. If it were easy, everyone would have done it already, and it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
- Seth Godin
Use what you have to run toward your best – that’s how I now live my life.
- Oprah Winfrey
Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.
- Napoleon Hill
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Every pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, but every optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
- Winston Churchill
Simply put, your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.
- Michael Gerber
The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
- Mark Zuckerberg
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
We allow no geniuses around our Studio.
- Walt Disney
It’s easier to add things on to a PC than it’s ever been before. It’s one click, and boom, it comes down.
- Bill Gates
Another noteworthy aspect is the strong free cash flow of more than €2 billion. This enabled us to reduce net indebtedness to its lowest level since 2006.
- Elmar Degenhart
Frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
- Jeff Bezos
You guarantee a good meal by picking the recipes well, not by following recipes well.
- Timothy Ferriss
His friends, drunk to the point of speaking in tongues, were asleep.
- Timothy Ferriss
I want to sit with 80- and 90-year-old people more than anyone. They have played this game before. Not one of them has told me, ‘I wish I had more money.’
- Gary Vaynerchuk
But the three rules I always stuck with were 1) Be on time 2) No profanity and 3) Never criticize a teammate.
- David Novak
The goal is to be able to live your life the way Michael Jordan played basketball, or Marvin Gaye sang a song. To be able to feel the way you feel when you laugh at a joke, but to feel that way all the time.
- Russell Simmons
Vision is perhaps our greatest strength… it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.
- Li Ka-shing
The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn’t thought of before and that aren’t talked about in the news all the time.
- Steve Wozniak
The most stable companies have strong leaders at every level of the organization. The only way to develop such widespread leadership is to make developing leaders a part of your culture. That is a strong part of Coca-Cola’s legacy.
- John Maxwell
It’s only lonely at the top if you forget all the people you met along the way and fail to acknowledge their contributions to your success.
- Harvey Mackay
The real benefit of having goals is what you become by reaching them.
- Zig Ziglar
Did you know that nearly one in three children live apart from their biological dads? Those kids are two to three times more likely to grow up in poverty, to suffer in school, and to have health and behavioral problems.
- Tony Dungy
What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people – ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.
- Larry Ellison
The UK desperately needs less government and freer markets.
- Rupert Murdoch
Always remember that your present situation is not your final destination. The best is yet to come.
- Zig Ziglar
Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.
- Peter Drucker
Indeed, the real question is not, Why greatness?” but What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?” If you have to ask the question, Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?” then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.
- James C. Collins
People stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.
- Winston Churchill
In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
- Ben Horowitz
The difficult task is to marry relentless discipline with creativity, neither letting discipline inhibit creativity nor letting creativity erode discipline.
- James C. Collins
Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.
- James C. Collins
I’m going to give away a lot more than half my money. I’d be happy to give that to the government if the government put together programs that were like I’m giving away to charity, in which I believe the money is effectively used to help people.
- Ray Dalio
Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.
- Zig Ziglar
We remain confident about the market opportunity ahead of us over the next three to five years.
- John Chambers
If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.
- Henry Ford
A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.
- Peter Drucker
The thing about fashion – it’s like ducks going quack, quack quack. It’s being dictated from above, and it just makes me want to rebel against it.
- Sara Blakely
The mistake that’s so easy to make is to get greedy as you choose your hive, to say, “this product is for everyone” or “anyone can benefit from this idea.” Well, there are seven billion people on the planet, so it’s unlikely your comment is correct; even if it is, there’s little chance that a virus would spread across a hive that big.
- Seth Godin
You don’t drown by falling into water. You only drown if you stay there.
- Zig Ziglar
Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.
- Henry Ford
I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!
- Steve Wozniak
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
- Henry Ford
I focus on giving specific, real-time coaching so my teammates can benefit immediately. Larry Senn taught me a very effective tool that works in both individual and team settings. Start out by sharing, here’s what you appreciate about a person’s work. By showing appreciation, you are setting the stage for acceptance of constructive suggestions. Then offer suggestions by saying, and you can be even more effective if you do such and such. And is a much better word than but because it’s additive by buillyng on a positive versus the usually negative but everyone is expecting to hear.
- David Novak
Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It’s time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must.
- Seth Godin
I look at every business and ask, How long can this last? How can I identify the status quo and change it?
- Sheldon Adelson
Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.
- Vida D. Scudder
Don’t Walter Cronkite me!
- Jack Welch
Nobody wanted to believe Jack Ma.
- Jack Ma
Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?
- Ray Kroc
I don’t want people in China to have deep pockets but shallow minds.
- Jack Ma
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
mean that you can’t do anything else but pray. But it does mean that you are always ready and willing to go before God with any concern or praise. Nothing is too small or too big for prayer. Prayer is simply opening your heart and connecting with God. It’s taking His promises and applying them to your life. Prayer processes the plan of God. You should bathe your life in prayer. Pray for wisdom, peace, and patience. Pray for your relationships, your job, and your children. Pray for your country and leaders. Pray with others, knowing that when two or more are gathered in His name, He is there.
- Joel Olsteen
Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.
- Elon Musk
There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.
- Phil Knight
Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the better.
- Jack Welch
Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.
- Peter Drucker
The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.
- Dale Carnegie
Find a need and fill it.
- Jack Nadel
The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.
- Mark Zuckerberg
A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.
- Bill Gates
I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.
- Sergey Brin
We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn’t be in this business.
- Jeff Bezos
Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.
- Peter Thiel
Future public education will require involvement and collaboration among various local, civic, private and nonprofit entities, a concept I like to refer to as ‘community entrepreneurship.’
- Donald Bren
[On becoming in 1969 a full-time employee of his five year old company] There were nervous moments. Every time I brought a fresh letter of credit home and it said, ‘Mr. And Mrs. Knight guarantee liabilities to the tune of $300,000,’ Penny’d say, ‘We don’t have $300,000.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t care. Just sign the thing.’
- Phil Knight
Have the humility to learn from those around you.
- John C. Maxwell
In my weekly staff meeting, I inserted an agenda item titled “What Are We Not Doing?
- Ben Horowitz
Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
- Peter Thiel
You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
I like to play cards. I’m not very good, because I don’t want to calculate, I just play by instinct. But I’ve learned a lot of business philosophy by playing poker.
- Jack Ma
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’s a belief that you’re supposed to be poor, and suffering, and show your humility. I just don’t see the Bible that way. I see that God came and Jesus died so that we might live an abundant life and be a blessing to others.
- Joel Olsteen
The thing that’s confusing for investors is that founders don’t know how to be CEO. I didn’t know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don’t know how to be CEOs, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn. The question is… can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
- Ben Horowitz
It’s what we wrestle with every single day. The intersection of comfort, danger, and safety. The balancing act between vulnerability and shame. The opportunity (or the risk) to do art. The willingness to take responsibility for caring enough to make a difference and to have a point of view.
- Seth Godin
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
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
- Haruki Murakami
Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I DECLARE God’s dream for my life is coming to pass. It will not be stopped by people, disappointments, or adversities. God has solutions to every problem I will ever face already lined up. The right people and the right breaks are in my future. I will fulfill my destiny. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
Thomas Edison had only three months of schooling during his entire life. He did not lack education, neither did he die poor. Henry Ford had less than a sixth grade schooling but he has managed to do pretty well for himself financially.
- Napoleon Hill
Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (iron ore or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of the companies on the list do that. The rest make unseemly profits by trafficking in ideas.
- Seth Godin
The strange history of the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it. Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you.
- Peter Thiel
I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.
- Winston Churchill
You must find something that you deeply love and are passionate about and are willing to sacrifice a lot to achieve.
- Howard Schultz
It’s not going out to people who aren’t going to go shopping. You’ve already got the people who are shopping.
- Jack Taylor
The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.
- Winston Churchill
That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity.
- Beryl Markham
Most of our wives are planners and meticulous budgeters. In fact, only 18 percent of us disagreed with the statement Charity begins at home. Most of us will tell you that our wives are a lot more conservative with money than we are.
- Thomas J Stanley
We just want to have great people working for us.
- Sergey Brin
I loved doing ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ Because you have to understand that I’d been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don’t think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.
- Steve Martin
In order to deal with all the medical cost demands and other challenges in the U.S., as we look to raise that revenue, the rich will have to pay slightly more. That’s quite clear.
- Bill Gates
I can’t imagine a day without coffee. I can’t imagine!
- Howard Schultz
The team with the best players wins.
- Jack Welch
