The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.
- Winston Churchill
Notable Quotables
It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
- Elon Musk
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
- John Wooden
History is more or less bunk.
- Henry Ford
Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.
- Zig Ziglar
The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.
- Peter Drucker
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). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.
- Peter Thiel
Great companies are built on great products.
- Elon Musk
My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.
- Bill Gates
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
- Thomas Edison
Enduring great companies don’t exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.
- James C. Collins
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
- Seneca
For 20-plus years I looked at thousands of storyboard for corporate and product ads, and I never allowed one advertisement on the air that I didn’t like.
- Jack Welch
When you go through a disappointment, when you go through a loss, don’t stop on that page. Keep moving forward. There’s another chapter in front of you, but you have to be willing to walk into it.
- Joel Olsteen
Culture drives great results.
- Jack Welch
There are a lot of things that go into creating success. I don’t like to do just the things I like to do. I like to do things that cause the company to succeed. I don’t spend a lot of time doing my favorite activities.
- Michael Dell
Man will occasionally stumble upon the truth but most times he will pick himself up and continue on.
- Winston Churchill
Ill Health (though not taking care of one’s body).
- Napoleon Hill
Determine your destiny or somebody else will.
- Jack Welch
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
You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on… So it’s a fixer-upper of a planet.
- Elon Musk
Cruel and Darwinian? Try Fair and Effective.
- Jack Welch
I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
- Winston Churchill
Be ready for problems–you’ll have them every day. Keep open to new ideas–that’s where innovation begins.
- Donald Trump
Happens to every guy sometimes this does.
- Yoda
Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
- Warren Buffett
Revolution has values, revolution has purpose. Revolution has direction. Revolution has leaders. Revolution looks at the intersection ahead and pushes people to do the right thing. And it doesn’t always have to be loud. It doesn’t always have to be violent. It’s just as powerful in it’s stillness.
- Jack Dorsey
Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
- Steve Martin
We’re not in the hamburger business. We’re in show business.
- Ray Kroc
The opportunity of a lifetime is to pick yourself. Quit waiting to get picked; quit waiting for someone to give you permission; quit waiting for someone to say you are officially qualified and pick yourself. It doesn’t mean you have to be an entrepreneur or a freelancer, but it does mean you stand up and say, ‘I have something to say. I know how to do something. I’m doing it. If you want me to do it with you, raise your hand.
- Seth Godin
You will give birth to more in the future than you’ve lost in the past.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Control your own destiny or someone else will.
- Jack Welch
It didn’t matter how bleak the situation or how stultifying their mediocrity, they all maintained unwavering faith that they would not just survive, but prevail as a great company. And yet, at the same time, they became relentlessly disciplined at confronting the most brutal facts of their current reality.
- James C. Collins
Uncontrolled Desire For Something For Nothing.
- Napoleon Hill
Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them.
- W. Clement Stone
We are gods in the chrysalis.
- Dale Carnegie
-Gardens, not buildings–Great projects start out feeling like buildings. There are architects, materials, staff, rigid timelines, permits, engineers, a structure.It works or it doesn’t.Build something that doesn’t fall down. On time.But in fact, great projects, like great careers and relationships that last, are gardens. They are tended, they shift, they grow. They endure over time, gaining a personality and reflecting their environment. When something dies or fades away, we prune, replant and grow again.Perfection and polish aren’t nearly as important as good light, good drainage and a passionate gardener.By all means, build. But don’t finish. Don’t walk away.Here we grow.
- Seth Godin
Leadership isn’t something that people hand to you. … [i]t’s a gradual process, one where you take responsibility years before you are given authority. And that’s something we can teach.
- Seth Godin
The timing of your decision is just as important as the decision you make.
- John C. Maxwell
My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.
- Joel Olsteen
We obviously are getting to be one of the largest players in the industry, so it’s hard to grow faster than that number, … But we’re very, very pleased with the last quarter results of 53 percent year-over-year. That’s on the upside, so I wouldn’t get too optimistic when it goes above 50 percent, just like we encouraged people two years ago, when it went below 30 percent growth for us, not to get too pessimistic.
- John Chambers
There are two main drivers of asset class returns – inflation and growth.
- Ray Dalio
If you take someone who lacks the experience and the know-how but has the real desire and the willingness to work his tail off to get the job done, he’ll make up for what he lacks. And that proved true nine times out of ten. It was one way we were able to grow so fast.
- Sam Walton
Great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.
- Seth Godin
Success is never accidental.
- Peter Thiel
Wrong Selection of Associates in Business
- Napoleon Hill
If you give a good thing to the world, then over time your karma will be good, and you’ll receive good.
- Russell Simmons
Starting a new South Indian restaurant is a really hard way to make money. If you lose sight of competitive reality and focus on trivial differentiating factors—maybe you think your naan is superior because of your great-grandmother’s recipe—your business is unlikely to survive.
- Peter Thiel
The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly ’cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.
- Bill Gates
We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster – closed and forgotten within the first year.
- Walt Disney
If there is to be a low-cost Uber, Uber will be the low-cost Uber.
- Travis Kalanick
People are using Windows PCs more than they watch TV now.
- Bill Gates
What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.
- Steve Wozniak
Differentiation (rating and evaluating people) Develops Great Organizations. Differentiation is hard, anybody who finds it easy doesn’t belong in the organization, and anyone who can’t do it falls in the same category…It is important for companies to continually remove the bottom 10 percent of their employees anually.
- Jack Welch
I’m not averse to making a lot of money. But where does that end? I hang out with people with hundreds of millions of dollars. Is that the standard by which I should measure myself? Where does that take you if you’re in my business? I think it takes you to pretty dark, corrupt places.
- Timothy Ferriss
Emerson said: Every man I meet is my superior in some way, In that, I learn of him.
- Dale Carnegie
The air of the English is down-to-earth. They care about details; there’s a tradition, but there’s also a counter-culture: the younger generation versus the older generation and so on. But then that’s well blended into a happy balance and crystallised into common sense.
- Tadashi Yanai
Character is to man what carbon is to steel.
- Napoleon Hill
The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.
- Seth Godin
With the addition of these volumes, our Gulf Coast region is off to a good start for 2006 in its effort to grow its production. Combined, all regions are now showing growth in both production and reserves which is very attractive, especially considering the organic strategy on which we have predominately focused.
- Dan Dinges
To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.
- Peter Thiel
Why don’t you start believing that no matter what you have or haven’t done, that your best days are still out in front of you.
- Joel Olsteen
Success is one thing you can’t pay for. You buy it on the installment plan and make payments every day.
- Zig Ziglar
The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
- Socrates
In the Soviet Union I was the head of all oil production. And you know in the Soviet Union, you didn’t get that job unless you were really worth it.
- Vagit Alekperov
Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.
- Donald Trump
I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.
- Thomas Edison
I hate how many people think “glass half-empty” when their glass is really four-fifths full. I’m grateful when I have one drop in the glass because I know exactly what to do with it.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work – what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?
- Ray Dalio
I use the iPhone and iPad every day, and I no longer touch PCs at all.
- Masayoshi Son
Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.
- Bill Gates
China will become the IT (information technology) center of the world. We believe in giving something back and truly becoming a Chinese company.
- John Chambers
Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people’s progress.
- Jeff Bezos
I think that diversity is key for the next American entrepreneurs. They want to be a part of this society where there is so much diversity they have to have people from all the experiences.
- Russell Simmons
Education is the ability to meet life’s situations.
- Dr. John G. Hibben
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
If you want to reach the top, don’t run over others. Likely, the only way you’ll reach the top is to be carried there by others.
- John C. Maxwell
I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.
- Larry Ellison
The people who skip the hard questions are in the majority, but they are not in demand.
- Seth Godin
The steel business is a local business. We do believe in the U.S. economy and would like to have a strong, balanced presence here.
- Alexei Mordashov
There is no decision that we can make that doesn’t come with some sort of balance or sacrifice
- Simon Sinek
Do not swallow anything Satan is trying to ram down your throat. Jesus comes first.
- Joel Olsteen
Our minds were freewheeling. We rushed to get things done.
- Sam Walton
Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice.
- Dale Carnegie
when the fierce, burning winds blow over our lives-and we cannot prevent them-let us, too, accept the inevitable. And then get busy and pick up the pieces.
- Dale Carnegie
These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.
- Winston Churchill
Get the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off of the bus.
- Jim Collins
If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them—not that they are working for you.
- Sam Walton
Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.
- Santana
I know when one door closes God will open up another door. What was meant for my harm God will use to my advantage. I’m not only coming out, I will come out better off than I was before.
- Joel Olsteen
Throw it all up on the wall and see what sticks.
- Timothy Ferriss
We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
- Peter Drucker
Life’s too short to fight the forces of change. Life’s too short to hate what you do all day. Life’s way too short to make mediocre stuff.
- Seth Godin
The responsibility of the leader is to define reality and create hope.
- David Novak
I know nothing about technology.
- Jack Ma
When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if they ever press charges.
- Jack Handee
Don’t be cocky. Don’t be flashy. There’s always someone better than you.
- Tony Hsieh
