Notable Quotables

Before success comes in any man’s life, he’s sure to meet with much temporary defeat and, perhaps some failures. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and the most logical thing to do is to quit. That’s exactly what the majority of men do.

- Napoleon Hill

People who do not succeed have one distinguishing trait in common. They know all the reasons for failure, and have what they believe to be air-tight alibis to explain their lack of achievement: 1) If I had the money… 2) If I could get the job… 3) If I had been given a chance… 4) If I were younger… 5) If I were older… 6) If I only had a better education… 7) If I could just save some money… 8) If I lived in a big city… 9) If I were not so fat… 10) If my talents were better known… 11) If I didn’t have a past… 12) If I had my own business… 13) If I had the courage…

- Napoleon Hill

There are two main drivers of asset class returns – inflation and growth.

- Ray Dalio

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep form meddling with them while they do it.

- Theodore Roosevelt

I grew up in a house where my father encouraged my brother and me to fail. I specifically remember coming home and saying, ‘Dad, Dad, I tried out for this or that and I was horrible,’ and he would high-five me and say, ‘Way to go.’

- Sara Blakely

Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that’s right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that’s better than television in terms of social connectivity.

- Reid Hoffman

The thing for you is a burial permit. You have only to speak and I will see that you get it.

- Dale Carnegie

The jack-of-all-trades seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.

- Napoleon Hill

To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.

- Winston Churchill

If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.

- Ray Kroc

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.

- Og Mandino

If you don’t let people flourish in their jobs, why are they going to stay?

- Joel Olsteen

A long while ago, a great warrior faced a situation which made it necessary for him to make a decision which insured his success on the battlefield. He was about to send his armies against a powerful foe, whose men outnumbered his own. He loaded his soldiers into boats, sailed to the enemy’s country, unloaded soldiers and equipment, then gave the order to burn the ships that had carried them. Addressing his men before the first battle, he said, ‘You see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores alive unless we win! We now have no choice—we win, or we perish!’ They won. Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat. Only by so doing can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win, essential to success.

- Napoleon Hill

Whether it’s eight o’clock in the morning or eight o’clock at night, I always try to greet others before they have a chance to speak to me.

- Zig Ziglar

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.

- Winston Churchill

Anger is a waste of energy. Steam which is used to blow off a safety valve would be better used to drive an engine.

- Winston Churchill

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

- Jeff Bezos

They told you to get your résumé in order, to punch your ticket, to fit in, and to follow instructions. They told you to swallow your pride, not to follow your dream. They promised trinkets and prizes and possibly riches if you would just suck it up and be part of the system, if you would merely do what you were told and conform. They sold you debt and self-storage and reality TV shows. They sold your daughters and sons, too.All in exchange for what would happen later, when it was your turn. It’s your turn.

- Seth Godin

The surest foundation of a manufacturing concern is quality. After that, and a long way after, comes cost.

- Andrew Carnegie

Any jerk can have short-term earnings. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the company sinks five years later.

- Jack Welch

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.

- Bill Gates

The Dip creates scarcity, scarcity creates value.

- Seth Godin

The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want.

- Dale Carnegie

If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost.

- Zig Ziglar

Jim Collins, in his bestselling book Good to Great, demonstrates through massive research and comprehensive analysis that when it comes to CEO succession, internal candidates dramatically outperform external candidates. The core reason is knowledge. Knowledge of technology, prior decisions, culture, personnel, and more tends to be far more difficult to acquire than the skills required to manage a larger organization.

- Ben Horowitz

The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them.

- Zig Ziglar

You have to be responsible when you’re running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.

- Ben Horowitz

The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,

- Peter Thiel

At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress is globalization—taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere.

- Peter Thiel

The ‘Billionaire’ song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It’s funny.

- Bill Gates

Persistent people are able to visualize the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can’t see it.

- Seth Godin

I think part of the reason we’re successful so far is that originally we didn’t really want to start a business.

- Larry Page

Among the world’s 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.

- Wang Jianlin

We’re on our way to Greece, in the hands of a confused, foolish government. It’s got to stop. It’s got to stop.

- Stephen Wynn

Policosanol: 20–25 mg Alpha-lipoic acid: 100–300 mg (I take 300 mg with each meal, but some people experience acid reflux symptoms with more than 100 mg) Green tea flavanols (decaffeinated with at least 325 mg EGCG): 325 mg Garlic extract: 200 mg

- Timothy Ferriss

My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It’s their work that I’m supporting. So it’s not me doing it. But I can empower them. I can support them, and I can help them.

- George Soros

I find it fascinating that a lot of business books that do well are from people who’ve never made any money in business.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we’re afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason.

- Seth Godin

The freedom of the new kind of work (which most of us do, most of the time) is that the tasks are vague and difficult to measure. We can waste an hour surfing the ’Net because no one knows if surfing the ’Net is going to help us make progress or connections. This freedom is great, because it means no one is looking over your shoulder; no one is using a stopwatch on you. This freedom is a pox, because it’s an opening for the resistance. Freedom like this makes it easy to hide, easy to find excuses, easy to do very little.

- Seth Godin

SpaceX has the potential of saving the U.S. government $1 billion a year. We are opposed to creating an entrenched monopoly with no realistic means for anyone to compete.

- Elon Musk

We base our investment strategies on quality, trust, synergy and initiative.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don’t have investments in.

- Ben Horowitz

The most frightful of all spectacles is the strength of the civilization without its mercy.

- Winston Churchill

I am a fifty-seven-year-old male, married with three children. About 70 percent of us earn 80 percent or more of our household’s income.

- Thomas J Stanley

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

There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

- Timothy Ferriss

In Germany they had no kings. They developed them in Britain from leaders who claimed descent from the ancient gods.

- Winston Churchill

You can change everything about your business by changing your thinking about your business.

- Zig Ziglar

The record results for the third quarter once again demonstrate the ability of GE’s diverse mix of leading global businesses to deliver top-line growth, increased margins and strong cash generation.

- Jack Welch

I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars; there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that.

- Bill Gates

I think it’s quite great to set yourself a big challenge, and then you’ve got another reason for keeping fit.

- Richard Branson

[On an American taking second place in the Olympics] He didn’t win the silver, he lost the gold

- Phil Knight

I would summarize the quarter as a solid quarter from a revenue and earnings per share perspective and a strong quarter from an orders perspective.

- John Chambers

I think what we’re lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.

- Howard Schultz

I believe life is a series of near misses. A lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see And pursuing that vision.

- Howard Schultz

This includes daily newspapers, local TV shows and talk shows; local all-news or talk-radio programs, weekly entertainment guides; local bureaus of the wire services;public access and other local cable TV stations, city magazines, business newsletters and ethnic publications.

- Michael Levine

Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared, but only men of character are trusted.

- Zig Ziglar

And so I believe that God plays this enormous role in my life. And I believe that it’s my obligation to give back and to follow the rules that were set. And it also gives me an enormous sense of my own place and an enormous sense of stability.

- Ronald Perelman

People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.

- Theodore Roosevelt

I’m not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I’m doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.

- George Soros

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

I’m very careful about saying who would and wouldn’t go to heaven. I don’t know.

- Joel Olsteen

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM – and they keep track of this – is a little over four years.

- Bill Gates

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

- Steve Jobs

The Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is.

- Michael Gerber

Make failure your teacher, not your undertaker.

- Zig Ziglar

I started the site when I was 19. I didn’t know much about business back then.

- Mark Zuckerberg

We beat our expectations in the run up to Christmas and this time last year we had particularly high stock levels leading to a bigger clearance.

- Simon Wolfson

Steve really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn’t there. He took over the project, and it was really my own opinion — only my opinion — that he wanted to compete with the Lisa group that had kicked him out.

- Steve Wozniak

Don’t fall in love with your wit. Your cleverly turned phrase may not, as you hope, show off how much gray matter you have, especially if the phrase is at someone else’s expense.

- Harvey Mackay

With a population of more than 600 million people, an emerging middle class that is driving strong consumption, and a robust and resilient economy, Southeast Asia presents a compelling growth opportunity for Starbucks.

- Howard Schultz

I kept saying, Sam, we’re making a good living. Why go out why expand so much more? The stores are getting farther and farther away. After the seventeenth store, though, I realized there wasn’t going to any stopping it.

- Helen Walton

I am convinced that in order for you, as a patient, to be protected, it has to be transparent, evidence-based, objective information. Not self-serving information. Not pharma-driven information. Not ad-driven information. It is transparent, objective, evidence-based information.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

The battle is all over except the ‘shouting’ when one knows what is wanted and has made up his mind to get it, whatever the price may be.

- Napoleon Hill

Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.

- Seth Godin

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

- Elon Musk

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

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

- Elon Musk

I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.

- Steve Wozniak

We’re all obsessed with ideas because ideas, not products, are the engine of our new economy.

- Seth Godin

If you wait until all the lights are green before you leave home, you’ll never get started on your trip to the top.

- Zig Ziglar

As long as a person doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, he doesn’t grow.

- John Maxwell

When the pressure is on, great leaders are at the their best.

- Napoleon Hill

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

They are, therefore, not overly impressed by speed in decision-making. Rather they consider virtuosity in manipulating a great many variables a symptom of sloppy thinking. They want to know what the decision is all about and what the underlying realities are which it has to satisfy. They want impact rather than technique, they want to be sound rather than clever.

- Peter Drucker

It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path at Dell. There’s always an opportunity to make a difference.

- Michael Dell

As youngsters, my mother taught her children that while we might not be the smartest people around, we could be courteous, polite and considerate of others.

- Zig Ziglar

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