The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
Reaching the top is a monumental achievement, but remaining there may be the most spectacular feat of all.
- John C. Maxwell
A lot of psychological principles and even medical principles, you see them coming around to what the Bible said hundreds of years ago: a merry heart is good like a medicine.
- Joel Olsteen
A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.
- John C. Maxwell
The most valuable kind of company maintains an openness to invention that is most characteristic of beginnings.
- Peter Thiel
The reason that I have Global Grind is to communicate ideas to people who might otherwise not be listening.
- Russell Simmons
You can’t win by being more average than average.
- Seth Godin
You’ve been destined to live in victory, destined to overcome, destined to leave your mark on this generation.
- Joel Olsteen
Nobody kicks a dead dog.
- Dale Carnegie
People who build family businesses are not classically trained. They have to deal with an enormous amount of politics. You think corporate politics are tough? Go work for your dad or your mom.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Making it good at scale means admitting that it must be different and embracing the changes that you’ll need to make to keep things from falling apart.
- Ben Horowitz
It’s my view that solar energy may be the ultimate solution for energy for most of the world. I believe, based on what little I know about it, that there is a possibility of a breakthrough.
- Donald Bren
Value is achieved primarily through frontline employees who are satisfied, loyal, and productive, in part because of the high degree of capability they possess to deliver results to customers
- Service Profit Chain
All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.
- Jeff Bezos
Anyone who has held an iDevice or a smoothly machined MacBook has felt the result of Steve Jobs’s obsession with visual and experiential perfection. But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively.
- Peter Thiel
Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.
- Reed Hastings
Politics are close to me, but there are different ways of participating in politics.
- Vagit Alekperov
Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
- Peter Thiel
Bottom line: God will not allow any person to keep you from your destiny. They may be bigger, stronger, or more powerful, but God knows how to shift things around and get you to where you’re supposed to be.
- Joel Olsteen
Remember the proverb of Solomon: “He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand; but the hand of the diligent maketh rich.
- P.T. Barnum
Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it
- Aristotle
Be helpful. When you see a person without a smile, give him one of yours.
- Zig Ziglar
I don’t know why you should be proud of something. It doesn’t make you any better or worse. You are what you are.
- Michael Bloomberg
I would as soon leave my son a curse as the almighty dollar.
- Andrew Carnegie
Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.
- Warren Buffett
People who are able to lift up others and boost the morale in organization are invaluable, and they are always a tremendous asset to a leader’s inner circle.
- Napoleon Hill
In the 1960s, if you were a blue collar worker or uneducated, and you had an injury on the job, the company basically dismissed you.
- Howard Schultz
This is why so many small and medium-sized businesses don’t use tools that bigger firms take for granted. It’s not that small business proprietors are unusually backward or that good tools don’t exist: distribution is the hidden bottleneck.
- Peter Thiel
Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.
- Harvey Mackay
The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them. Thus they are able to reign over all the mountain streams. So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to be before them, he putteth himself behind them. Thus, though his place be above men, they do not feel his weight; though his place be before them, they do not count it an injury.
- Dale Carnegie
Change isn’t made by asking permission. Change is made by asking forgiveness, later.
- Seth Godin
Desire is the ingredient that changes the hot water of mediocrity to the steam of outstanding success.
- Zig Ziglar
I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.
- Elon Musk
10% of Americans hold 73% of the country’s wealth.
- Robert Kiyosaki
People buy titles, and not contents of books. By merely changing the name of one book that was not moving his sales on that book jumped upward more a million copies. The inside of the book was no changed in any way. He merely ripped off the cover bearing the title that did not sell, and put on new cover with a title that had box-office value.
- Napoleon Hill
I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.
- Winston Churchill
Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.
- Winston Churchill
Inability to Cooperate With Others.
- Napoleon Hill
I like the word ‘autopilot’ more than I like the word ‘self-driving.’ ‘Self-driving’ sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. ‘Autopilot’ is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.
- Elon Musk
If you want to reach a goal, you must ‘see the reaching’ in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.
- Zig Ziglar
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
We do lots of Stuff. The only way you are going to have success is to have lots of failures first.
- Sergey Brin
Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.
- Zig Ziglar
When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.
- Howard Schultz
I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
- Peter Thiel
The choice to have a great attitude is something that nobody or no circumstance can take from you.
- Zig Ziglar
Lack of Capital.
- Napoleon Hill
Desire is created when something happens in your life that suddenly changes the way you see yourself in relationship to your future.
- Zig Ziglar
The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings.
- Winston Churchill
It took Flickr two years to reach the milestone of 100 million uploaded pictures. It took Instagram eight months
- Gary Vaynerchuk
A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.
- Richard Branson
Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.
- Elon Musk
Act enthusiastic and you will be enthusiastic.
- Dale Carnegie
We so much time putting these organizations and public figures on this massive, massive pedestal, but we have to remember they go through all the small details of live that we do. And you can make them human again and you can interact with them.
- Jack Dorsey
We feel like right now, computers are still pretty bad. You’re just messing around. You’re scrolling on your touchscreen phone, and trying to find stuff. You’re in a car. It’s bouncy, and you can’t– it doesn’t really work. I think the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend with it is still pretty bad. So I think our job is to solve that, and most of the things we’re doing make sense in that context.
- Larry Page
The customer reaction to Dell going private has been a lot more positive than I would have ever imagined. Customers see it as – ‘You don’t have to be distracted. Now you can totally focus on your business.’ So they see it as a positive.
- Michael Dell
I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America.
- Sam Walton
We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – and then they figured out where to drive it.
- James C. Collins
In some ways, running a successful business is a bit like coaching a football team. The fundamentals of football are blocking and tackling. The fundamentals of a business are it’s governing policies andprocesses. To carry out the metaphor, touchdowns are profits. The best business idea in the world cannot survive bad execution. So when you sit down to develop your workflow, internal policies, and business structure, be merciless, probe for weaknesses and assume that the worst will happen. – Jack Nadel (Author&Entrepreneur)
- Jack Nadel
Let’s test the Shakespearean model in the real world. Imagine a production called Gates and Schmidt, based on Romeo and Juliet. Montague is Microsoft. Capulet is Google. Two great families, run by alpha nerds, sure to clash on account of their sameness.
- Peter Thiel
The worse a situation becomes the less it takes to turn it around, the bigger the upside.
- George Soros
I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens.
- Elon Musk
Life’s a journey. It’s a journey about discovering limits.
- Larry Ellison
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
I’ve never been one to dwell on reverses.
- Sam Walton
Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.
- Jerry Seinfeld
In fact, technology has been the story of human progress from as long back as we know. In 100 years people will look back on now and say, ‘That was the Internet Age.’ And computers will be seen as a mere ingredient to the Internet Age.
- Reed Hastings
The beauty of this deal is bringing a clinical expertise. Medco had developed therapeutic resource centers, where they got their pharmacist to have specialties in things like diabetes, heart problems and asthma. Express Scripts took a different approach. We tried to understand why people do what they do with behavioral economics, which is: What drives human behaviors? What drives people to do what they did? By combining those two pieces, we get that much stronger.
- George Paz
Giving away money to the right cause, with a leveraged effect and your own involvement in how it is spent, will ‘give you peace of mind.’
- Lee Shau Kee
Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.
- Dale Carnegie
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
- Albert Einstein
My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m a big supporter of President Obama.
- Russell Simmons
We all must recognize that homeland security funds should be allocated by threat and no other reason.
- Michael Bloomberg
That which becomes acceptable becomes inevitable.
- Michael Levine
Determine your destiny or somebody else will.
- Jack Welch
It’s a matter of invitations versus context. Twitter is really good at providing context, like, I’m having coffee at Third Rail Coffee.’ Foursquare is about invitations to places. In this respect Foursquare has started to replace Yelp for me.
- Jack Dorsey
Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.
- Peter Drucker
It was a big momentum deal, so when the bottom comes out from under it, you have to go back to the well and start the whole thing.
- Travis Kalanick
Lack of Self-Discipline.
- Napoleon Hill
I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.
- Steve Wozniak
When you give directives to a child, especially a teenager, you must consider the nature of your child.
- Zig Ziglar
Every breakthrough business idea begins with solving a common problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. I discovered a big one when I took apart an IBM PC. I made two interesting discoveries: The components were all manufactured by other companies, and the system that retailed for $3,000 cost about $600 in parts.
- Michael Dell
People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.
- Zig Ziglar
It is my practice to try to understand how valuable something is by trying to imagine myself without it.
- Herb Kelleher
We have most of the software industry running Autonomy.
- Larry Ellison
Don’t let any opportunity lead you away from serving God. That’s a price that’s too high to pay.
- George Foreman
I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.
- Andrew Carnegie
Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it: if you are sick you should not take it.
- Henry Ford
Every one of us gets through the tough times because somebody is there, standing in the gap to close it for us.
- Oprah Winfrey
The one essential character trait of any leader is personal integrity.
- David Novak
Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.
- John D. Rockefeller
The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.
- Bill Gates
Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.
- Steve Wozniak
I wanted to be a sailor, I wanted to sail the world, to navigate it.
- Jack Dorsey
There are a lot of things that go into creating success. I don’t like to do just the things I like to do. I like to do things that cause the company to succeed. I don’t spend a lot of time doing my favorite activities.
- Michael Dell
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
- Winston Churchill
I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.
- Thomas Edison
When we began Starbucks, what I wanted to try to do was to create a set of values, guiding principles, and culture.
- Howard Schultz
You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.
- Henry Ford
