Without promotion, something terrible happens… nothing!
- P.T. Barnum
Notable Quotables
The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.
- Peter Thiel
Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.
- Richard Branson
When I started working on Southwest Airlines, I kid you not, only people flying on business and very wealthy people ever flew.
- Herb Kelleher
All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.
- Walt Disney
The good-to-great leaders never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes. They never aspired to be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results.
- James C. Collins
Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment Would you capture it? Or just let it slip?
- Marshall Bruce Mathers III
The regulatory systems in place disincentive innovation. It’s intense to fight the red tape.
- Travis Kalanick
Spare the conquered and confront the proud.
- Winston Churchill
You have no ability, if you’re a financial institution and you’re threatened with criminal prosecution, you have no ability to negotiate.
- Warren Buffett
I always want to listen to people and receive good criticism, but I just don’t have to answer to them; I have to answer to God.
- Joel Olsteen
Over the course of your career, your Detroit will surely call you at one point or another. If you can go, that’s great. If you can’t, make peace with the reasons why.
- Jack Welch
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
- Steve Jobs
Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.
- John C. Maxwell
Rockefeller preferred to own raw land. In 1873, he invested in seventy-nine scenic acres at Forest Hill, a lovely, thickly wooded spot, crisscrossed by steep ravines and gulleys, just four miles east of his Euclid Avenue home.
- Ron Chernow
I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.
- Warren Buffett
Dear Sir: My ten years of bank experience should be of interest to a rapidly growing bank like yours. In various capacities in bank operations with the Bankers Trust Company in New York, leading to my present assignment as Branch Manager, I have acquired skills in all phases of banking including depositor relations, credits, loans and administration. I will be relocating to Phoenix in May and I am sure I can contribute to your growth and profit. I will be in Phoenix the week of April 3 and would appreciate the opportunity to show you how I can help your bank meet its goals. Sincerely.
- Dale Carnegie
There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking.
- Bill Gates
Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.
- Bill Gates
I don’t have any opinions about Russians. There are celebrity persons in each country. Different people do different things.
- Alexei Mordashov
The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.
- Winston Churchill
I’m not as interested in what you make as I am in what you’re passionate about. What business are you really in?
- Howard Schultz
There is always plenty of capital for those who can create practical plans for using it.
- Napoleon Hill
People need to buy homes.
- Cheng Yu-tung
We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill
Continually get the word out about how you’re handling the situation.
- David Novak
The sudden attacks on the United States of America brought about adverse effects on the global economy in the short term. However, Mainland China has until now been able to maintain its economic growth on a steady course.
- Lee Shau Kee
Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean giving up familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, and relationships that have lost their meaning.
- John C. Maxwell
An apology? Bah! Disgusting! Cowardly! Beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he might be.
- Steve Martin
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
Only 17 percent of us or our spouses ever attended a private elementary or private highschool. But 55 percent of our children are currently attending or have attended private schools.
- Thomas J Stanley
Much about success is just the result of simply the ability to follow up, follow through, and finish what we started.
- Zig Ziglar
Poker is a game where you don’t have to have the best hand to win. Poker is really reading other people and reading human emotion, which certainly comes into play in business.
- Charles Ergen
When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
- Steve Jobs
Control your own destiny or someone else will.
- Jack Welch
Keep something in front of you Studies tell us that we move toward what we consistently see. You should keep something in front of you, even if it’s symbolic, to remind you of what you are believing for.
- Joel Olsteen
I started thinking about joy. Everything in our society is so purposeful. Let’s bring joy back to the experience.
- Sara Blakely
Good communication is a give-and-take proposition. Don’t think of your pitch as a short speech, after which you get a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
- Michael Levine
If you’re a Wal-Mart of a Meijer you can draw the shoppers without using signs to advertise your specials, … But when you’re a little guy, you really depend on those signs.
- Michael Ward
God puts people in our lives on purpose so we can help them succeed and help them become all He created them to be. Most people will not reach their full potential without somebody else believing in them.
- Joel Olsteen
We saw – we conducted the experiment. I mean, it’s been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we’re gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs.
- Larry Ellison
Success (a win) doesn’t make you, and failure (a loss) doesn’t make you.
- Zig Ziglar
At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Managing a business, small or large, today requires an extremely disciplined, thoughtful approach with regard to the pressure that people are under.
- Howard Schultz
I started the site when I was 19. I didn’t know much about business back then.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.
- Winston Churchill
That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.
- Peter Thiel
I DECLARE I have the grace I need for today. I am full of power, strength, and determination. Nothing I face will be too much for me. I will overcome every obstacle, outlast every challenge, and come through every difficulty better off than I was before. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
Time is wasted because there is so much time available.
- Timothy Ferriss
[On the first twitter tweet] The first tweet that was actually written by a human was by me and it was inviting co-workers.
- Jack Dorsey
If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.
- Ray Kroc
If a hurricane strikes, we can blame the president for not being there; we can blame Congress and FEMA; we can blame the state governments; but in the end, it’s the mayors and the local city governments that have to be prepared for emergencies and be prepared to act.
- Michael Bloomberg
Your first mistake might be assuming that people are rational.Your second mistake could be assuming that people are eager for change.And the marketer’s third mistake is assuming that once someone knows things the way you know them, they will choose what you chose.
- Seth Godin
One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.
- Ben Horowitz
There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.
- Peter Thiel
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
Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
- Steve Martin
Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.
- Elon Musk
We asked ourselves what we wanted this company to stand for. We didn’t want to just sell shoes. I wasn’t even into shoes – but I was pasionate about customer service.
- Tony Hsieh
Lack of Self-Discipline.
- Napoleon Hill
If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.
- Henry Ford
Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
- Peter Drucker
Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
- Ben Horowitz
Good intentions aren’t enough. People have good intentions when they set a goal to do something, but then they miss a deadline or other milestone.
- Harvey Mackay
You reinforce the behaviors that you reward, he explained. If you reward candor, you’ll get it.
- Jack Welch
No man ever achieved worthwhile success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.
- Napoleon Hill
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
If it’s set up in such a way that it breaks the conditionality required by the (International Monetary Fund), I think that would be a step backward.
- John Chambers
Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it: if you are sick you should not take it.
- Henry Ford
Freedom does not come automatically, it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound
- Rollo May
If I am gone tommorrow am I happy with my life?
- Stacy Thorn
The wealthy class often looks down on the poor as those people. And deprived people view the rich as cold and heartless. The way to break down the barrier between the rich and poor is to asociate with each other and to help one another. Make a connection. If you can break down the barrier, it may pave the way to recovery for some person, a family, maybe an entire community.
- George Foreman
I do know this… I seem to reach a lot of previously unchurched people. So many people have told me they never went to church until they heard our message of hope that God is a good God who desires to bless those who are faithful and obedient to Him through Jesus Christ.
- Joel Olsteen
Nigeria has moved into low-middle-income, but their north is very poor, and the health care systems there have broken down.
- Bill Gates
I’ve never been one to dwell on reverses.
- Sam Walton
I come back to the same thing: We’ve got the greatest pipeline in the company’s history in the next 12 months, and we’ve had the most amazing financial results possible over the last five years, and we’re predicting being back at double-digit revenue growth in fiscal year ’06.
- Steve Ballmer
When someone we love is having difficulty and is giving us a bad time, it’s better to explore the cause than to criticize the action.
- Zig Ziglar
California, in a sense, is almost Starbucks’ largest country, with almost 3,000 stores
- Howard Schultz
It’s very beautiful over there.
- Thomas Edison
You must find something that you deeply love and are passionate about and are willing to sacrifice a lot to achieve.
- Howard Schultz
Three out of four of us who are self-employed consider ourselves to be entrepreneurs. Most of the others are self-employed professionals, such as doctors and accountants.
- Thomas J Stanley
I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.
- Elon Musk
I think that business book reporting, it’s all Jim Collins, it’s the story of victory; it’s success bias over and over again.
- Ben Horowitz
Google’s search algorithms, for example, return results better than anyone else’s. Proprietary technologies for extremely short page load times and highly accurate query autocompletion add to the core search product’s robustness and defensibility.
- Peter Thiel
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
- Robert Kennedy
We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
- Winston Churchill
There are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training. Therefore, training should be the most basic requirement for all managers in your organization. An effective way to enforce this requirement is by withholding new employee requisitions from managers until they’ve developed a training program.
- Andrew Grove
If you wake up deciding what you want to give versus what you’re going to get, you become a more successful person. In other words, if you want to make money, you have to help someone else make money.
- Russell Simmons
Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.
- Napoleon Hill
In 20 years from now we will all be able to click and watch TV.
- Reed Hastings
Pouring espresso is an art, one that requires the barista to care about the quality of the beverage.
- Howard Schultz
The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is “value” to the customer?), standardizing the “product,” designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.
- Peter Drucker
You don’t need a big close, as many sales reps believe. You risk losing your customer when you save all the good stuff for the end. Keep the customer actively involved throughout your presentation, and watch your results improve.
- Harvey Mackay
Life’s a fight. It’s a good fight of faith.
- Joel Olsteen
To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.
- Bill Gates
The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
- Winston Churchill
Yes, I think it’s okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It’s okay to say to them, “You’re not going where I need to go, and there’s no way I’m going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I’m heading off. I’m betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.
- Seth Godin
I broke into an industry that was completely money-focused. Nobody was paying attention to the women and thinking about how these undergarments felt, or how they fit…All of a sudden I showed up and charged more for one pair than anybody can comprehendand women lined up in droves to buy them. I think I left the industry in show, but I really believed that we needed to make it better not cheaper.
- Sara Blakely
When you import goods, you import poverty and you export jobs to other parts of the globe where such goods are produced.
- Aliko Dangote
If I were to retire, I would keep my family’s interest in the company the same and say, Don’t sell.
- Sheldon Adelson
