There is no sure path to success, but the surest path to failure is trying to please everyone.
- Timothy Ferriss
Notable Quotables
It’s not always easy to get over some of those bumps in the road, those disillusionments and disappointments. It’s going to take a strong will. Sometimes, it may take courage. Sometimes nothing but faith in God and say, I refuse to be trapped in the past. I’m not going to let the past destroy my future. I’m pressing on. I’m straining forward, knowing that God has great things in store for me.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m optimistic about the country. I’m optimistic about the American people.
- Howard Schultz
The factory has programmed that adventurous impulse out of us. The economic imperative of the last century has been to avoid risk, avoid change, and most of all, avoid exploration and the new. An efficient factory fears change because change means retooling and risk and a blip in productivity. Sure, we’ll put up with change if we have to, and welcome the predictable incremental change of productivity improvement, but please leave us alone when it comes to the word “bold.” Avoiding risk worked then but doesn’t work now. Now “what’s next?” is in fact the driving force for individuals and for organizations. Ever onward, ever faster.
- Seth Godin
Foreign politicians don’t have resources – or limited resources. It’s useless dealing with them.
- Wang Jianlin
My parents got one bedroom, my three sisters got the other bedroom, and my brother and I made do with a rollaway in the kitchen.
- David Green
It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.
- Warren Buffett
Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted. It’s more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted.
- Bill Gates
Whether changes happen depends on people’s mind and view.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done. That would be you.
- Seth Godin
People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast.
- Peter Thiel
Like getting into a bleeding competition with a blood bank.
- Richard Branson
Japan’s biggest problems are conservatism and cowardice.
- Tadashi Yanai
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
- Winston Churchill
[On a small business class taught at university by Frank Shallenberger] Shallenberger started by defining the type of person who was an entrepreneur, and I realized he was talking to me.
- Phil Knight
Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
- Jack Welch
The principle is competing against yourself. It’s about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before.
- Steve Young
If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.
- Jeff Bezos
Energy is the essence of life. Every day you decide how you’re going to use it by knowing what you want and what it takes to reach that goal, and by maintaining focus.
- Oprah Winfrey
My friend didn’t understand what it means to be in the world, to be present and aware.
- Seth Godin
So, if you look at what’s common among some of the companies I have, including the Four Seasons, NewsCorp, George V, the Plaza, these are all irreplaceable brands in their own fields.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it. But I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States.
- Stephen Wynn
Let’s realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn us in return; or, like the gentle Taft, will say: I don’t see how I could have done any differently from what I have.
- Dale Carnegie
The special prosecutor basically supported what we had told the Board of Elections all along.
- Michael Ward
I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.
- John D. Rockefeller
Think of Internet on the TV like the Web browser. The amount of time you spend on the PC in the browser is just going to grow continuously.
- Reed Hastings
If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was ‘satisfactory,’ I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?
- Bill Gates
He felt the Gettysburg Address was one of the greatest documents ever written, mainly because Lincoln had said so much with so few words.
- David Novak
Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
- Jack Welch
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human body, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.
- Thomas Edison
For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.
- Winston Churchill
Many times, we miss out on God’s best because we give up too soon. We don’t realize how close we are to victory.
- Joel Olsteen
Intemperance.
- Napoleon Hill
Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can be what you want to be.
- W. Clement Stone
The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself.
- Peter Thiel
When you get a thing the way you want it, leave it alone.
- Winston Churchill
I do a little thing about the way people shake the sweetener packet. You know, like they’re all excited. I want to get all the granules down to one end. I love all these rituals.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Newspaper readership is still growing in India.
- Bill Gates
There’s no reason in 2014, to do shit you hate. NONE.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
You cannot let where you are today cause you to get stuck. I’m going to be my best right now. That’s what faith is all about.
- Joel Olsteen
Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass…if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass…slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own…structure.
- Dale Carnegie
There is no right or wrong way of giving. People in Los Angeles have made major contributions in different ways to the city: Eli Broad to art. David Geffen to hospitals. I’m not judgmental.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
- Peter Drucker
The most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”
- Ben Horowitz
I get great satisfaction from both business and philanthropy.
- Donald Bren
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
- Dale Carnegie
You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.
- Jeff Bezos
If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.
- Ray Kroc
If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.
- Jeff Bezos
If you don’t love what you’re doing with unbridled passion and enthusiasm, you’re not going to succeed when you hit obstacles.
- Howard Schultz
It is important that all of us, however old or young, have a mindset that enables us to capture all the opportunities that changes in the world are bringing to us. A mindset that is characterized by creativity and initiative, harnessed by focus and discipline. In our company, this mindset is requisite and indelible.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I just believe that the interesting time in a career is pre-success, what shaped things, how did you get to this point.
- Steve Martin
We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers. That is my new battle cry. Live and breathe Starbucks the way our customers do.
- Howard Schultz
Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
- Winston Churchill
We need a great president.
- Donald Trump
Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.
- Og Mandino
When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal. And it has nothing to do with money. I mean, you buy clothes with money, and cars. But I really wanted to work with people I enjoyed working with, who I admired and liked.
- Larry Ellison
It’s insane to me to ask anybody to be what they’re not. Know what you know the best, love the most. That’s always going to be the answer to the thing that you have the best shot at winning at.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for people telling you that you are nuts.
- Larry Ellison
Wal-Mart is an amazing success story. What I particularly admire very much about the late Sam Walton was his policy of valuing his employees. Giving value to employees is very rare in the retail industry. I also admire the strategies Walton used to build up his discount store concept.
- Tadashi Yanai
Certainly there’s a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.
- Bill Gates
No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.
- Napoleon Hill
You’re not better than anybody else, but you’re not less than anybody else. You’re a child of the Most High God.
- Joel Olsteen
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
I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that’s true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.
- Winston Churchill
Gas consumption is growing everywhere.
- Vagit Alekperov
Every dream I’ve ever had in life has come true ten times over.
- Steve Wozniak
We are beginning to see the benefits of global consolidation.
- Lakshmi Mittal
God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us.
- Joel Olsteen
The Roman world, like an aged man, wished to dwell in peace and tranquillity and to enjoy in philosophic detachment the good gifts which life has to bestow upon the more fortunate classes. But new ideas disturbed the internal conservatism, and outside the carefully guarded frontiers vast masses of hungry, savage men surged and schemed. The essence of the Roman peace was toleration of all religions and the acceptance of a universal system of government. Every generation after the middle of the second century saw an increasing weakening of the system and a gathering movement towards a uniform religion. Christianity asked again all the questions which the Roman world deemed answered for ever, and some that it had never thought of.
- Winston Churchill
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
Advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away, it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later.
- Peter Thiel
Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.
- Napoleon Hill
Be fair. You have to be able to see their point of view.
- Michael Levine
We wouldn’t survive if people didn’t trust us.
- Sergey Brin
I wish I could do a lot of things different. I’m not going to tell you what they are, but if I had a list of all my films right now, I’d go, ‘Okay, I’ll cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out.’ Really. But I’ve made over 40 films. How can I not have some losers in there?
- Steve Martin
El séptimo imperativo • El primer imperativo es estar al tanto; al tanto del mercado, de las oportunidades y de quién eres. • El segundo imperativo es estar preparados, para entender lo que sucede a tu alrededor. • El tercer imperativo es estar conectado, para que confíen en ti. • El cuarto imperativo es ser coherente, para que el sistema sepa qué esperar de ti. • El quinto imperativo es crear un valor, para tener algo que vender. • El sexto imperativo es ser productivo, para ofrecer un buen precio. No obstante, es posible que hagas todas estas cosas y aun así fracases. Un empleo no es suficiente, ni una fábrica, ni una industria. Solían serlo, pero ya no lo son. El mundo está cambiando muy rápido, y sin la chispa de la iniciativa te limitas a reaccionar ante lo que te rodea. Asimismo, sin la capacidad de incitar y experimentar estás estancado, a la deriva, esperando el empujón…
- Seth Godin
I was lucky enough to co-found a business in college that ended up with 400 employees, and I launched 20 different projects while I was there – a project a week.
- Seth Godin
I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.
- Elon Musk
Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans.
- Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles
I think long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia.
- Elon Musk
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
On every occasion, we were able to rely on our unique qualities – resourcefulness, perseverance, diligence and passion for excellence – to rise above our difficulties.
- Cheng Yu-tung
We can be certain that cities around the world will compete for the jobs that the next revival of the financial services industry will bring.
- Michael Bloomberg
Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it’s a powerful metaphor: in business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.
- Peter Thiel
The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.
- Bill Gates
Pull in your belt, spend less, and reduce debt.
- Ray Dalio
Every one of us gets through the tough times because somebody is there, standing in the gap to close it for us.
- Oprah Winfrey
If I was a businessman, or saw myself as a businessman, I would have never gone into the airline business.
- Richard Branson
You can’t manage what you can’t measure.
- Peter Drucker
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.
- Dale Carnegie
Don’t use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe.
- Joel Olsteen
I taught myself how to program.
- Jack Dorsey
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Just learn from the guys who have already done it well. You need a mentor, a seasoned coach who is willing to share his wisdom and experience with you. Ask someone who has already been successful to guide you.
- George Foreman
The biggest part of my job now is to quickly develop successors, and around the world I am working to develop new business leaders in the company.
- Tadashi Yanai
As one’s fortunes are reduced, one spirit must expand to fill the void.
- Winston Churchill
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
- Winston Churchill
He possessed a sense of calling in both religion and business, with Christianity and capitalism forming the twin pillars of his life.
- Ron Chernow
