I don’t consider myself enigmatic, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my public persona.
- Phil Knight
Notable Quotables
Here’s a quote from ultramarathoner Dick Collins: Decide before the race the conditions that will cause you to stop and drop out. You don’t want to be out there saying, “Well gee, my leg hurts, I’m a little dehydrated, I’m sleepy, I’m tired, and it’s cold and windy.” And talk yourself into quitting. If you are making a decision based on how you feel at that moment, you will probably make the wrong decision.
- Seth Godin
Extolling the virtues of conservation of energy, Churchill advised, “Never stand when you can sit, and never sit when you can lie down.
- Winston Churchill
If you’re going to buy a real book, a paper book, there better be a good reason. Perhaps scarcity is one of those reasons.
- Seth Godin
Now when I consider investing in a startup, I study the founding teams. Technical abilities and complementary skill sets matter, but how well the founders know each other and how well they work together matter just as much. Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together—otherwise they’re just rolling dice.
- Peter Thiel
For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
- Bill Gates
Profitability is a shallow goal if it doesn’t have a real purpose, and the purpose has to be share the profits with others.
- Howard Schultz
We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds
- Warren Buffett
Every job you take is a gamble that could increase your options or shut them down.
- Jack Welch
If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.
- Elon Musk
The culture was strong enough to transcend the original company.
- Peter Thiel
The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin.
- Seth Godin
Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.
- Timothy Ferriss
The screwball. Humor can often be effective and with this style, it’s emphasized. Appeal to the journalist’s heightened sense of the unusual. Stunts, sideshows, ancillary themes are put to work here.
- Michael Levine
Entrepreneurs are always biased to understate the scale of competition, but that is the biggest mistake a startup can make.
- Peter Thiel
Nobody walks this earth thinking he’s better than I think I am – I think I’m great. At the same time, it’s so obvious to me that I’m nobody.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Simply put, your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.
- Michael Gerber
In business, just the opposite is often true; silence means dissent. Have you ever been in a meeting where you sense there is obvious disagreement, but the disagreement never really gets put on the table? This what I call the Slow No’s.
- David Novak
Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Smart people instinctively understand the dangers of entrusting our future to self-serving leaders who use our institutions, whether in the corporate or social sectors, to advance their own interests.
- James C. Collins
I read Google News and use NetNewsWire to keep up with general and tech news.
- Steve Wozniak
I’m for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children?
- Steve Martin
Barring serious accidents, if you are not preoccupied with worry and you work hard, you can look forward to a reasonably lengthy existence…. Its not the hard work that kills, its the worrying that kills.
- Thomas Edison
Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.
- Bill Gates
Don’t become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific.
- Zig Ziglar
Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, cows lit by beautiful light, but they’re still boring.
- Seth Godin
The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.
- George Soros
I got a call from the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah had chosen Spanx as one of her favorite products in 2000. I had boxes of product in my apartment and I had two weeks notice that she was going to say she loved it on TV and I had no shipping department.
- Sara Blakely
Cisco will be well placed to continue building our presence in India as a critical part of our research and development efforts and as domestic market for networking products and solutions continues to expand.
- John Chambers
Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
- Colin Powell
It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.
- Napoleon Hill
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.
- Henry Ford
I do everything on my phone as a lot of people do.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Andrew Carnegie believed the formula (of Think & Grow Rich) should be taught in all public schools and colleges, and expressed the opinion that if it were properly taught it would so revolutionize the entire education system that the time spent in school could be reduced to less than half….As far as (formal) schooling is concerned, many of the (great american business) men had very little.
- Napoleon Hill
Sometimes put the idea away…
- Jack Dorsey
When you become a leader success is all about growing others.
- Jack Welch
Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.
- Napoleon Hill
To Admiral Cunningham it was against all tradition to abandon the Army in such a crisis. He declared, “It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition.
- Winston Churchill
Almost everything is like a machine.
- Ray Dalio
Its easy to have principles when you’re rich. The important thing is to have principles when you’re poor.
- Ray Kroc
The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
- Ben Horowitz
If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.
- Elon Musk
I’m a pretty conservative guy. But for some reason in business, I have always been pretty driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where we’ve been. On the one hand, in the community, I really am an establishment kind of guy; on the other hand, in the marketplace, I have always been a maverick who enjoys shaking things up and creating a little anarchy. And sometimes the establishments made me mad…
- Sam Walton
Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation…. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward!
- Thomas Edison
The buyer needs to talk at least 70% of the time.
- Clay Clark
Education and the Internet must go hand in hand, … It will serve as one of the great equalizers.
- John Chambers
He was contradicting everything he’d taught us about not running sick and making it worse. I knew it was just to make me acknowledge that his word was law, no matter how arbitrary. But that didn’t make it any easier to take. I was so mad I ran a personal record.
- Phil Knight
A waitress goes up to Winston Churchill and says, ‘Sir, your drunk.’ To which he replies, ‘I may be drunk, miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
- Winston Churchill
When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
- Winston Churchill
The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.
- Henry Ford
Casino gambling is colorful and dramatic and theatrical.
- Stephen Wynn
When men are fighting for their lives they are not often disposed to be complimentary to those who are trying to kill them.
- Winston Churchill
For the first time in a very long time, I believe the external factors are slowly starting to be more positive, … This is still a minority view, held by a minority of our customers, but we’ve seen early indications that the recovery could be gaining momentum.
- John Chambers
We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.
- Walt Disney
In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming found that a mysterious antibacterial fungus had grown on a petri dish he’d forgotten to cover in his laboratory: he discovered penicillin by accident. Scientists have sought to harness the power of chance ever since. Modern drug discovery aims to amplify Fleming’s serendipitous circumstances a millionfold: pharmaceutical companies search through combinations of molecular compounds at random, hoping to find a hit.
- Peter Thiel
Everything important to us—the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment—is singular.
- Peter Thiel
A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.
- Abraham Lincoln
Art isn’t only a painting; it’s anything that changes someone for the better, any nonanonymous interaction that leads to a human (not simply a commercial) conclusion.
- Seth Godin
The [Henderson] Group continuously strives to upgrade the quality of its development properties by applying new technologies and building materials to improve the efficiency and lower the cost of construction.
- Lee Shau Kee
You can be passionate about anything.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Some city-council people are really awesome, but most are uninspired. I meet with them as little as possible.
- Travis Kalanick
Hedgehog Concept—disciplined action, following from disciplined people who exercise disciplined thought.
- James C. Collins
And being as wicked as any man who ever lived, he exploited his advantage to the full.
- Winston Churchill
Whenever a company proudly announces the establishment of its beautiful, new, modern corporate headquarters, you can be sure it’s heading downhill. Why? Because instead of focusing on their business, the company’s managers are focusing on themselves. Messy desks, cramped quarters and unlovely surroundings are the physical manifestations of people too busy getting the work done to care much about their own creature comforts. The greatest danger to a business is not risk. It’s a lack of risk: complacency.
- Harvey Mackay
This Sunday School has been of help to me, greater perhaps than any other force in my Christian life, and I can ask no better things for you than that you, and all that shall come after you in this great band of workers for Christ, shall receive the same measure of blessedness which I have been permitted to have.
- John D. Rockefeller
Well, the odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first attempt. All of us who are attempting to go around the world in balloons are effectively flying in experimental craft because these craft cannot be tested.
- Richard Branson
What’s dangerous is not to evolve.
- Jeff Bezos
Direct your energy toward achieving a goal, and tackle the problems with an emphasis on edging closer to a successful result.
- Harvey Mackay
If you want success, if you want wisdom, if you want to be prosperous and healthy, you’re going to have to do more than meditate and believe; you must boldly declare words of faith and victory over yourself and your family.
- Joel Olsteen
If you complain you will remain, if you praise you will be raised.
- Joel Olsteen
Everybody says they want to be free. Take the train off the tracks and it’s free-but it can’t go anywhere.
- Zig Ziglar
You will know (the good from the bad) when you are calm, at peace. Passive. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.
- Yoda
The Franchise Prototype is also the place where all assumptions are put to the test to see how well they work before becoming operational in the business.
- Michael Gerber
I wanted to be a sailor, I wanted to sail the world, to navigate it.
- Jack Dorsey
Once you go from 10 people to 100, you already don’t know who everyone is. So at that stage you might as well keep growing, to get the advantages of scale.
- Sergey Brin
Your margin is my opportunity.
- Jeff Bezos
The next season starts right now.
- Tom Izzo
It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.
- Jeff Bezos
Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
- Warren Buffett
I think there’s plenty of room for blogs that exist to pay the blogger, or blogs that exist to turn a profit. That’s just not the kind of blog I’m writing, and I’m not the kind of blogger that could do that.
- Seth Godin
The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.
- Elon Musk
The connected economy of ideas demands that we contribute initiative. And yet we resist, because our lizard brain, the one that lives in fear, relentlessly exaggerates the cost of being wrong.
- Seth Godin
But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.
- Bill Gates
Even today few businessmen understand that research, to be productive, has to be the “disorganizer,” the creator of a different future and the enemy of today. In most industrial laboratories, “defensive research” aimed at perpetuating today, predominates.
- Peter Drucker
Politeness and civility are the best capital ever invested in business. Large stores, gilt signs, flaming advertisements, will all prove unavailing if you or your employees treat your patrons abruptly. The truth is, the more kind and liberal a man is, the more generous will be the patronage bestowed upon him.
- P.T. Barnum
I meet people overseas that know five languages – that the only language I’m comfortable in is English.
- Bill Gates
It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.
- Dale Carnegie
A penguin cannot become a giraffe, so just be the best penguin you can be.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
true love is always backed up with actions.
- Joel Olsteen
I’ll trade glib for common sense any day.
- Stephen Wynn
It truly levels the playing field and puts all the emphasis on the content. And all the emphasis on the merit of the idea.
- Jack Dorsey
I learned about why startups should train their people when I worked at Netscape. People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense.
- Ben Horowitz
I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don’t laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that’s not real laughter.
- Steve Martin
Same problem as every Hollywood studio: how can you reliably produce a constant stream of popular entertainment for a fickle audience? (Nobody knows.)
- Peter Thiel
Among the world’s 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.
- Wang Jianlin
If you want your life to be more rewarding, you have to change the way you think.
- Oprah Winfrey
No matter what any of us has—and how grateful we are for what we have—no one has it all.
- Sheryl Sandberg
Luck Is When Preparation Meets Opportunity.
- Seneca
