Notable Quotables

When you own your choices, you own their consequences.

- Jack Welch

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

- Bill Gates

The word ‘Spanx’ was funny. It made people laugh. No one ever forgot it.

- Sara Blakely

Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.

- Jim Collins

The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers

- Sam Walton

If you’re passionate about something and you work hard, then I think you will be successful.

- Pierre Omidyar

Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.

- Mark Zuckerberg

The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.

- Nolan Bushnell

Faith in your new apprentice, misplaced may be. As is your faith in the dark side of the Force.

- Yoda

This office is smaller than the last one I had. I’m not trying to impress people. I want to be close to them.

- Stephen Wynn

You can make a positive out of the most negative if you work at it hard enough.

- Sam Walton

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

You can change your world by changing your words… Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.

- Joel Olsteen

I’ve always believed that businesses should be good citizens…

- Phil Knight

A leader once convinced a particular action is the right one, must have the determination to stick with it and be undaunted when the going gets rough.

- Ronald Reagan

Back in high school, I really wanted to be a diesel mechanic. I was building pools and it was still working with my hands. I was installing the (reinforcement) bars, shaping the pools and then they’d bring the cement in. It was great. . . . Then I had my accident.

- Ed Clark

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

I have made the tough decisions, always with an eye toward the bottom line. Perhaps it’s time America was run like a business.

- Donald Trump

Yes, I think it’s okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It’s okay to say to them, “You’re not going where I need to go, and there’s no way I’m going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I’m heading off. I’m betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.

- Seth Godin

I’m an entrepreneur. I’m not a politician.

- Robin Li

You’ve probably heard about “first mover advantage”: if you’re the first entrant into a market, you can capture significant market share while competitors scramble to get started. But moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision. In this one particular at least, business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.

- Peter Thiel

It’s not about how to get started, it’s about how to get noticed.

- Steve Case

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

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

- Jeff Bezos

You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do. Once you decide, you should immediately execute the reorg: Don’t leave time for leaks and lobbying.

- Ben Horowitz

A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

- Richard Branson

My training of cold-calling and everyone under the sun telling me no, and my keeping going, was a huge part of the first two years of Spanx.

- Sara Blakely

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

- Bill Gates

My friend didn’t understand what it means to be in the world, to be present and aware.

- Seth Godin

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

If people look inward, they would see the opportunities for greatness.

- Aliko Dangote

When sales people don’t know what to do, they talk. The ordinary salesperson vomits the presentation onto the Buyer’s desktop.

- Jerry Vass

The challenge, it turns out, isn’t in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by.

- Seth Godin

Many companies today are reducing hours of full-time people to get under the minimum so they don’t have to pay health care costs. I just shake my head because that’s not going to build long-term value and trust with your people.

- Howard Schultz

Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars. Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait. The grip of your hand, the irresistible surge of will and energy to execute your ideas.

- Henry Ford

So now, having learned from machines, organizations are applying the same logic to people. Letting people in the organization use their best judgment turns out to be faster and cheaper—but only if you hire the right people and reward them for having the right attitude.

- Seth Godin

It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.

- Napoleon Hill

And obviously, from our own personal point of view, the principal challenge is a personal challenge.

- Richard Branson

A baboon in a forest is a matter of legitimate speculation, a baboon in a zoo is an object of public curiosity, but a baboon in your wife’s bed is a cause of the gravest concern.

- Winston Churchill

Personally, I enjoy working about 18 hours a day. Besides the short catnaps I take each day, I average about four to five hours of sleep per night.

- Thomas Edison

I want to challenge you today to get out of your comfort zone. You have so much incredible potential on the inside. God has put gifts and talents in you that you probably don’t know anything about.

- Joel Olsteen

It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

On average, our total annual realized income is less than 7 percent of our wealth. In other words, we live on less than 7 percent of our wealth.

- Thomas J Stanley

We’re profitable and have the potential to be very profitable, … We generate cash from operations of over $1 billion per quarter. We have $19 billion in cash and equivalents in an industry that is in debt. We’ve gained more market share than we’ve ever gained in this last quarter. We’ve got the customer loyalty and strategy for where the industry’s going, which is combining networks for service providers and enterprises. So I’m very optimistic about our future if we execute right.

- John Chambers

while you can buy your way to growth, you absolutely cannot buy your way to greatness.

- James C. Collins

The key to high-quality communication is trust, and it’s hard to trust somebody that you don’t know.

- Ben Horowitz

We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside our windows today.

- Dale Carnegie

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

- Henry Ford

By establishing a reputation as being a person who always renders more service and better service than that for which you are paid, you will benefit by comparison with those around you who do not render such service, and the contrast will be so noticeable that there will be keen competition for your services, no matter what your life-work may be.

- Napoleon Hill

Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.” The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

- Ben Horowitz

Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.

- Peter Thiel

The profile of homebuyers in Hong Kong is becoming more diverse and a wider range of marketing channels is thus needed to promote the Group’s Hong Kong property projects.

- Lee Shau Kee

The breadth and maturity of our own businesses is allowing us to weather the prevailing storms.

- Cheng Yu-tung

We cannot start over, but we can begin now, and make a new beginning.

- Zig Ziglar

Make a point to continually search for a better way of doing things, even when things are going well, to ensure that a better alternative has not been overlooked and to keep your creative talents in practice.

- John C. Maxwell

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

- Henry Ford

Not only was the casual shoe effort a failure, but it was diluting our trademark and hurting us in running.

- Phil Knight

I believe the government of the United States should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

About three million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

- Bill Gates

I can’t read a computer screen and never use a calculator. It’s all in my head and by hand.

- Simon Reuben

(after listening to people gripe and complain just smile and remember) Crows can’t hang with eagles.

- Joel Olsteen

Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind’s eye, and you will be drawn toward it.

- Napoleon Hill

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you’re glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

- Bill Gates

We got so much better so quickly it was hard to believe. We totally stood Kmart off in those small towns of ours. Almost from the beginning, they weren’t very successful at taking our customers away in Jeff City and Poplar Bluff. Once Kmart arrived, we worked even harder at pleasing our customers, and they stayed loyal. This gave us a great surge of confidence in ourselves. But at that time our sales were 5 percent of Kmart’s. (through competition) Wal-Mart has lowered the gross margin in retailing from around 35 percent in the early 60s to only 22 percent today.

- Sam Walton

I was the only westerner to succeed in a place that’s like a toilet, and you always come out of a toilet with a smell.

- David Reuben

Differentiate yourself! Why are you different? What’s important about you? Why does the customer need you?

- Sara Blakely

I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.

- Jack Dorsey

My revenue was $4 million my first year in business, off of one $20 item.

- Sara Blakely

Working to fulfill someone else’s needs or dreams almost always catches up with you.

- Jack Welch

If you are satisfied with the results you are now getting, why change? If you are not satisfied, why not experiment?

- Dale Carnegie

The soul of business is not making money but making people happy.

- Aliko Dangote

Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

- Bill Gates

I’m very, very bullish about our prospects, and as I tell our board, as I tell our employees, this is the time to invest. There’s so much opportunity. Let’s just invest in that opportunity, and really get after it.

- Steve Ballmer

The most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.

- Ben Horowitz

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.

- Bruce Lee

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

- Winston Churchill

You will never become a category of one if you run with the pack.

- Seth Godin

Most people have ‘one way’ brains—they acquire information and do nothing. Guerillas have ‘two way’ brains—they obtain relevant information and act on it.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

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

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

Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

- Napoleon Hill

I would counsel people to go to college, because it’s one of the best times in your life in terms of who you meet and develop a broad set of intellectual skills.

- Bill Gates

20% of what you do accounts for 80% of your results

- Brian Tracy

Success doesn’t make you and failure doesn’t break you.

- Zig Ziglar

I’m not afraid to call a wine that tastes like Skittles or green peppers mixed with orange marmalade. I’ll say, ‘It tastes like chicken.’ I mean, that’s not what people think of when they think of wine, but that’s what it tastes like to me and it hits home.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Storytelling is the game. It’s what we all do. It’s why Nike is Nike, it’s why Apple is Apple, it’s why Walt Disney built Disney World and it’s why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.

- Jeff Bezos

Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.

- Bill Gates

The way to get things done,” says Schwab, is to stimulate competition. I do not mean in a sordid, money-getting way, but in the desire to excel.

- Dale Carnegie

As you stumble and learn, stumble and learn again, resolve to talk to yourself as if you were your best friend. So no What a #?%$@ idiot! when your BFF smashes an egg on the floor, m’kay? Be cool, like the Fonz.

- Timothy Ferriss

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