Notable Quotables

I have to be ever vigilant to remain open to other people’s points of view. Just because I’m enthusiastic doesn’t necessarily mean I’m right. I have to always keep the doors open for honest communication or I could enthusiastically lead everyone right over the cliff.

- David Novak

I think Les Moonves is the most highly overrated person in television.

- Donald Trump

There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

- Andrew Carnegie

There’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap.

- Ben Horowitz

But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.

- Jeff Bezos

You must unlearn what you have learned.

- Yoda

Rockefeller succeeded because he believed in the long –term prospects of the business and never treated it as a mirage that would soon fade.

- Ron Chernow

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

- Bill Gates

Failure to deliver on committments is, in the end, unacceptable.

- Jack Welch

The love of a foster mother for her charge appears absolutely irrational.

- Winston Churchill

The possibilities of creative effort connected with the subconscious mind are stupendous and imponderable. They inspire one with awe.

- Napoleon Hill

Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation.

- P.T. Barnum

True success is when you reach back and bring somebody along with you.

- Joel Olsteen

One can get anything if he is willing to help enough others get what they want.

- Zig Ziglar

Really, truly, try to figure out what your palate is all about. If you’ve determined that you don’t like dirty old stinky wine – old-world flavors – you probably like new-world fruit bombs. Stick to Shirazes and California Cabernets or Zinfandels.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Excepting for reading my numbers on Saturday morning and going to our regular meetings, I don’t have much of a routine for anything else. I always carry my little tape recorder on trips, to record ideas that come up in my conversations with the associates. I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.

- Sam Walton

My drive into high tech doesn’t involve a lot of people – just me and a very small team.

- Raymond Kwok

Other people and things can stop you temporarily. You’re the only one who can do it permanently.

- Zig Ziglar

Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those who surrendered tamely were finished.

- Winston Churchill

Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it’s taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, ‘Let’s get out the camera and get that shot.’ You just have that, and software helps you pick what you want.

- Bill Gates

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

- Seth Godin

I feel like money makes you more of who you already are.

- Sara Blakely

I’ve always thought if we don’t want to enforce laws on the books, we should remove them from the books. But when you have laws, you breed contempt if you don’t enforce them.

- Michael Bloomberg

Learn to say ‘no’ to the good so you can say ‘yes’ to the best.

- John C. Maxwell

you don’t need to understand any of the biology, just as you don’t need to understand radiation to use a microwave oven.

- Timothy Ferriss

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

The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.

- James C. Collins

I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.

- Charles Dickens

The people who work within these industries or public services know that there are basic flaws. But they are almost forced to ignore them and to concentrate instead on patching here, improving there, fighting the fire or caulking that crack. They are thus unable to take the innovation seriously, let alone to try to compete with it. They do not, as a rule, even notice it until it has grown so big as to encroach on their industry or service, by which time it has become irreversible. In the meantime, the innovators have the field to themselves.

- Peter Drucker

The game of life does not proceed like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes they make five, or minus four, and sometimes the blackboard topples over in the middle of the sum and the pedagogue is left with a black eye.

- Winston Churchill

Exploring how you could make a bad situation worse can sometimes tell you what not to do.

- Harvey Mackay

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

- Jack Welch

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

- Winston Churchill

It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested? Collin’s advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.

- James C. Collins

Woody’s Allen’s great line about relationships. A relationship is like a shark, it either has to move forward or it dies. And that’s true about your company.

- Larry Ellison

The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.)

- James C. Collins

I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.

- Winston Churchill

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

- Helen Keller

At the end, the acquisition of wealth is ignoble in the extreme. I assume that you save and long for wealth only as a means of enabling you the better to do some good in your day and generation.

- Andrew Carnegie

The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.

- Warren Buffett

Rockefeller’s supreme insight was that he could solve the oil industry’s problems by solving the railroad’s problems at the same time, creating a double cartel in oil and rails. One of Rockefeller’s strength in bargaining situations was that he figured out what he wanted and what the other party wanted and then crafted mutually advanteous terms. Instead of ruining the railroads, Rockefeller tried to help them prosper, albeit in away that fortified his own position.

- Ron Chernow

I don’t shop online, but my wife buys everything at home. We buy sea crabs, fresh crabs, all kinds of things.

- Jack Ma

I mostly eat healthy. I just do. I’m not a vegan for health reasons – although obviously I’m 20 pounds lighter than when I started. I stayed 20 pounds lighter. I feel better. My friends say I look better. All that’s true. But I’m a vegan for compassionate reasons

- Russell Simmons

When we are not engaged in thinking about some definite problem, we usually spend about 95 percent of our time thinking about ourselves.

- Dale Carnegie

The sad truth is, if you push hard enough, and if you’re so stubborn that you must have things your way, God will sometimes allow you to undertake a project without His blessing or at the wrong time. The problem with that, of course, is when you start something in your own strength and in your own timing, you’re going to have to finish it and maintain it in your own strength.

- Joel Olsteen

I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it’s something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn’t compute with our existing educational system.

- 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

Don’t worry about failure, you only have to be right once.

- Drew Houston

I am placed in situations with opportunities in those situations that others are not. I don’t believe that that is happenstance. I believe that there is a God that has a plan for me.

- Ronald Perelman

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

Twitter was not started because we started a company. Twitter was started because we had a good idea, and it started out of a failed company. That can happen out of any company today.

- Jack Dorsey

The relationships we have with people are extremely important to success on and off the job.

- Zig Ziglar

Many brilliant people believe that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains, ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.

- Peter Drucker

These are all commodity-focused issues. The old conceit of a retailer was that if you offered the right products at a fair price in a convenient location, you’d do fine if you watched your expenses. Today, the issues are totally different.

- Seth Godin

Love him or hate him, Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money.

- Donald Trump

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

I used to have this debate with Steve Jobs, and he would always say, ‘You guys are doing too much stuff.’ He did a good job of doing one or two things really well. We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.

- Larry Page

Whatever your critics say about you has no bearing on your worth. You are a child of the Most High God. The Creator of the universe breathed life into you. You have seeds of greatness on the inside. You’ve been crowned with favor. God has already equipped and empowered you with everything you need. Don’t waste your valuable time trying to play up to people, trying to win over all your critics, or trying to prove to someone that you’re important.

- Joel Olsteen

The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.

- Jim Rohn

Its obvious that we don’t know one millionth of one percent about anything.

- Thomas Edison

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.

- Winston Churchill

Everybody understands the market in this area is consolidating.

- John Chambers

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

- Albert Schweitzer

Successful storytelling builds brand equity, and businesses with high brand equity don’t need to draw as much attention to themselves and their achievements as those that are still establishing their value to the customer.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

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

People define Christianity differently. I think a large portion of our population are Christians, they’re not all growing in their faith, they’re not all active, but I believe that a lot of people believe in Jesus and believe that he is their Lord and Savior.

- Joel Olsteen

I was fascinated with jeans, because you can impress your life upon the jeans you wear. The way you sit imprints on the jeans.

- Jack Dorsey

The Costa Rican government is prioritizing laying fiber optic over paving roads. Costa Rica is trying to become one of the Internet societies. This is happening throughout the world.

- Reed Hastings

you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.

- Timothy Ferriss

Good relations with the Wookiees, I have.

- Yoda

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters – to make them personalities.

- Walt Disney

Selling your company to the media is a necessary part of selling it to everyone else.

- Peter Thiel

They (the competition) need to avoid coming at us head-on, and do their own thing better than we do ours. It doesn’t make any sense to try to underprice Wal-Mart (DJC) on something like toothpaste (DJ Prices). That’s not what the customer is looking to a small store for anyway. Most independents are best off, I think, doing what I prided myself on doing for many years as a storekeeper, getting out on the floor and meeting everyone of the customers. Let them know how much you appreciate them, and ring that cash register yourself. That little personal touch is so important for an independent merchant because no matter how hard Wal-Mart tries to duplicate – and we try awfully hard – we can’t really do it.

- Sam Walton

Edison failed 10,000 times before he made the electric light. Do not be discouraged if you fail a few times.

- Napoleon Hill

With an export-driven economy, Hong Kong is unavoidably affected by any hiccup in the outside world.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I sent one e-mail in my life. I sent it to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft, and it ended up in court in Minneapolis, so I am one for one.

- Warren Buffett

In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Change is powerful, but change always comes with the possibility of failure as its partner. “This might not work” isn’t merely something to be tolerated; it’s something you must seek out.

- Seth Godin

Later these tales would be retold and embellished by the genius of Mallory, Spenser, and Tennyson.

- Winston Churchill

The best leaders are readers of people. They have the intuitive ability to understand others by discerning how they feel and recognizing what they sense.

- John C. Maxwell

Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

- Steve Jobs

Success is…knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others.

- John C. Maxwell

The ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

- Jack Welch

Russia is not a homogenous country, it’s a very fragmented country.

- Alexei Mordashov

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win — you’re still a rat.

- Lily Tomlin

There is nothing either good or bad,” said Shakespeare, but thinking makes it so.

- Dale Carnegie

In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.

- James C. Collins

The Group also continues to be bullish for the long-term prospects for the property market in mainland China…

- Lee Shau Kee

The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great. There is an important.

- James C. Collins

Feedback

Let us know what's going on.

Get Started

Your first month is ONLY $1!

You will be redirected to your dashboard in a moment.

Fill out the information below to cancel your subscription