As you and I march across the decades of time, we are going to meet a lot of unpleasant situations that are so. They cannot be otherwise. We have our choice. We can either accept them as inevitable and adjust ourselves to them, or we can ruin our lives with rebellion and maybe end up with a nervous breakdown.
- Dale Carnegie
Notable Quotables
Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.
- Peter Thiel
‘We are interested in others when they are interested in us.
- Publilius Syrus
In any new business, someone has to have a vision. You are as good as the people around you. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Identify your core community and go from there. Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to. In my experience it often takes as long as five years to make a business work. Partners can fail you. Staff may not execute properly. You could be too far ahead of the market. SO you have to be willing to hand in there and make it happen. From the founding of Phat Farm in 1992 until 1997, I lost money. By my account, I experienced $10 million in losses. But today Phat Farm is visible, it is imitated and it generates hundreds of millions of dollars. It took time, but good ideas often do need time to take off. Being an entrepreneur requires instinct, fortitude and the ability to accept that the world does not run on your schedule. Sometimes you just have to believe.
- Russell Simmons
The plot is certainly sensational, but it hardly represents what actually happened. It is difficult to believe that the European emigrants by whom America has been populated took away with them all the virtues and left behind them all the vices of the races from which they had sprung; or that a few generations of residence on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to create an order of beings definitely superior in morals, in culture, and in humanity to their prototypes in Europe. The American.
- Winston Churchill
The love of a foster mother for her charge appears absolutely irrational.
- Winston Churchill
An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.
- Seth Godin
The value we create is directly related to how much valuable information we can produce, how much trust we can earn, and how often we innovate.
- Seth Godin
The debt limits have to come down. The whole world of debt has to be changed as far as this country is concerned. We have to create jobs and we have to create them rapidly because if we don’t things are just going to head in a direction that’s going to be almost impossible to recover from.
- Donald Trump
Jim Collins, in his bestselling book Good to Great, demonstrates through massive research and comprehensive analysis that when it comes to CEO succession, internal candidates dramatically outperform external candidates. The core reason is knowledge. Knowledge of technology, prior decisions, culture, personnel, and more tends to be far more difficult to acquire than the skills required to manage a larger organization.
- Ben Horowitz
Certainly there are times in all of our lives when bad things happen, or things don’t turn out as we had hoped. But that’s when we we must a decision that we’re going to be happy inspite of our circumstances.
- Joel Olsteen
The millionaires and billionaires who chose to invest in Australia are actually those who most help the poor and our young. This secret needs to be spread widely.
- Gina Rinehart
If plan A” fails — remember you have 25 letters left.
- Chris Guillebeau
I’m a voracious reader.
- Howard Schultz
You only have to succeed the last time.
- Phil Knight
have a place where everyone matters
- Lee Cockerell
It’s amazing how people will give when you don’t ask. Many of them send money because they believe in the message.
- Joel Olsteen
Since we happened to be good at shoes, we thought we could be successful with casual shoes. But we got our brains beat out.
- Phil Knight
At the margin, they’ll be biased to claim value in the near term, not help you create more in the future. That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided,
- Peter Thiel
It’s not sufficient that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
- Larry Ellison
What is a movie star? A movie star is many things. They can be tall, short, thin, or skinny. They can be Democrats… or skinny.
- Steve Martin
An organization’s capabilities reside in two places. The first is in its processes—the methods by which people have learned to transform inputs of labor, energy, materials, information, cash, and technology into outputs of higher value. The second is in the organization’s values, which are the criteria that managers and employees in the organization use when making prioritization decisions. People are quite flexible, in that they can be trained to succeed at quite different things. An employee of IBM, for example, can quite readily change the way he or she works, in order to work successfully in a small start-up company. But processes and values are not flexible. A process that is effective at managing the design of a minicomputer, for example, would be ineffective at managing the design of a desktop personal computer. Similarly, values that cause employees to prioritize projects to develop high-margin products, cannot simultaneously accord priority to low-margin products. The very processes and values that constitute an organization’s capabilities in one context, define its disabilities in another context.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.
- Peter Thiel
They were going to get it all right the first time right… Open to change.
- Jack Dorsey
We have to innovate for a specific reason, and that reason comes from the market. Otherwise, we’ll end up making museum pieces.
- Phil Knight
Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.
- Henry Ford
There’s a fascinating statistic: One out of every four people in America has visited New York since 9/11. It is astounding. Now, I don’t know how you count it; it’s some people coming multiple times.
- Michael Bloomberg
This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing. It’s not politically viable; it’s not morally right; it’s just not going to happen.
- Michael Bloomberg
Corporations that navigate through these rough times will prosper as the region inevitably enters a new era of prosperity.
- Cheng Yu-tung
You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.
- Napoleon Hill
I’d learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.
- Ben Horowitz
It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has.
- Henry Ward Beecher
We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun together.
- Walt Disney
Un cambio de actitud Lo que diferencia a los individuos exitosos de aquellos que languidecen es exactamente lo mismo que separa a las organizaciones innovadoras y en crecimiento de aquellas que se estancan y mueren. Los ganadores han convertido la iniciativa en una pasión y en una práctica. Adelante, prepara una lista de las personas y organizaciones a las que admiras. Apuesto a que el séptimo imperativo es lo que las hace destacar. Como ves, el reto no consiste en perfeccionar tu capacidad de saber cuándo empezar o cuándo mantenerte al margen, sino en adoptar la costumbre de empezar.
- Seth Godin
I’ve already figured out when I’m going to be No. 2 and No. 1.
- Sheldon Adelson
If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.
- Seth Godin
No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.
- Andrew Carnegie
I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.
- Herbert Bayard Swope
The prizes of life are at the end of each journey, not near the beginning, and it is not given to me to know how many steps are necessary in order to reach my goal. Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner.
- Og Mandino
Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.
- Elon Musk
Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one’s aim.
- John D. Rockefeller
Let us work together to take Hong Kong to new heights.
- Cheng Yu-tung
God wants us to live consistently, He wants us to enjoy every single day of our lives.
- Joel Olsteen
I actually think that the economy has got some positives. It’s got the market. It’s got consumer confidence and it’s got banks throwing – I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world.
- Jack Welch
The S.A.L.H. were mostly South Africans, with a high proportion of hardbitten adventurers from all quarters of the world, including a Confederate trooper from the American Civil War.
- Winston Churchill
I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
- Winston Churchill
Life is not fair – get used to it!
- Bill Gates
Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.
- Ben Horowitz
In order to lead a country or a company, you’ve got to get everybody on the same page and you’ve got to be able to have a vision of where you’re going. America can’t have a vision of health care for everybody, green economy, regulations – can’t have a bunch of piece-meal activities. It’s got to have a vision.
- Jack Welch
It has been almost a decade since the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. Hong Kong has gone through both good times and bad times. During the past decade, Hong Kong has undoubtedly played an increasingly important role in the economic development of China.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs.
- Bill Gates
Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.
- Napoleon Hill
It’s not what you’ve got. It’s what you use that makes a difference.
- Zig Ziglar
Hard times may have held you down, but they will not last forever. When all is said and done, you will be better off than before.
- Joel Olsteen
In the 1960s, if you introduced a new product to America, 90% of the people who viewed it for the first time believed in the corporate promise. Then 40 years later if you performed the same exercise, less than 10% of the public believed it was true. The fracturing of trust is based on the fact that the consumer has been let down.
- Howard Schultz
Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It’s basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it’s wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.
- Bill Gates
We got so much better so quickly it was hard to believe. We totally stood Kmart off in those small towns of ours. Almost from the beginning, they weren’t very successful at taking our customers away in Jeff City and Poplar Bluff. Once Kmart arrived, we worked even harder at pleasing our customers, and they stayed loyal. This gave us a great surge of confidence in ourselves. But at that time our sales were 5 percent of Kmart’s. (through competition) Wal-Mart has lowered the gross margin in retailing from around 35 percent in the early 60s to only 22 percent today.
- Sam Walton
That was a great day in my life! Your time is too valuable to worry about pleasing everyone else or making them happy. I know people who spend more time worrying about what others think about them than they do focusing on their own dreams and goals. You’ve got to get free from that.
- Joel Olsteen
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.
- Dale Carnegie
Extraordinary results are directlydetermined by how narrow you can make your focus.
- Gary Keller
When completed the new facility will have the capacity to accommodate approximately 3,000 staff.
- John Chambers
Two metrics set the limits for effective distribution. The total net profit that you earn on average over the course of your relationship with a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV) must exceed the amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale—and the more it makes sense to spend it.
- Peter Thiel
That’s why it is important to enjoy the journey not just the destination. In this world, we will never arrive at a place where everything is perfect and we have no more challenges. As admirable as setting goals and reaching them maybe, you can’t get so focused on accomplishing your goals that you make the mistake of not enjoying where you are right now.
- Joel Olsteen
I have this system where if I buy three or four new things, I give away three or four things. Sometimes, it’s a very painful system, but shopping is even better when you know that someone else who needs it will be getting. Keep the clothing karma going, I say.
- Sara Blakely
Though the external environment is still fraught with uncertainties, mainland China, which has been less affected by the global financial tsunami, is expected to keep growing from strength to strength despite fine tuning of its moderately loose monetary policy on concerns of overheating in the property sector and inflation risk.
- Lee Shau Kee
We have merely scratched the surface of the store of knowledge which will come to us. I believe that we are now, a-tremble on the verge of vast discoveries – discoveries so wondrously important they will upset the present trend of human thought and start it along completely new lines .
- Thomas Edison
‘You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‘Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.’
- Joel Olsteen
The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.
- Steve Martin
Lay out what you’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
- David Novak
It is true that integrity alone won’t make you a leader, but without integrity you will never be one.
- Zig Ziglar
When someone expresses some feeling, attitude or belief, our tendency is almost immediately to feel that’s right,” or that’s stupid,” that’s abnormal,” that’s unreasonable,” that’s incorrect,” that’s not nice.” Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of the statement is to the other person.
- Dale Carnegie
Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
- Warren Buffett
The world is facing a new networked, digital lifestyle, and we will ensure that Canon remains ahead of the game.
- Fujio Mitarai
If into the security recordings you go, only pain will you find.
- Yoda
We should remember it wasn’t so long ago that confidence in New York was in short supply.
- Michael Bloomberg
All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
- Peter Thiel
While we remain cautious about the implications of a brief pause in the current 10-year expansion of the U.S. economy, we believe that Cisco has never been better positioned to help our customers solve their two most important business issues: Increasing productivity and creating new sources of revenue.
- John Chambers
There will be no pissing on partners in the shower.
- Phil Knight
the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19
- James C. Collins
If you can’t communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you’re giving up your potential.
- Warren Buffett
Indeed, it is as important to learn how to receive a blessing as it is to be willing to give one.
- Joel Olsteen
It’s not about toughness, it’s not about attitude. Companies don’t fail for lack of cash or attitude. Companies fail for lack of brains and effort.
- Mark Cuban
The U.S. has done a great job improving productivity. We’re making a lot more steel in Dearborn with fewer people. The unions have accepted much better work rules.
- Alexei Mordashov
Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It’s just cultural. People just don’t want to do it.
- Jack Welch
Out of clutter, find simplicity.
- Albert Einstein
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
If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
- Ben Horowitz
Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.
- Ray Dalio
Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.
- Bill Gates
What I would say to young entrepreneurs is there’s so many moments in your life where you have these dreams, and people are trying to protect you, and they say, perhaps, friends, family, parents sometimes, they don’t agree with it, they think, ‘This is just too high of a hurdle.’ And I don’t agree with that.
- Howard Schultz
To succeed in business, you must build a brand and never destroy it.
- Aliko Dangote
In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything.
- Peter Thiel
Edison failed 10,000 times before he made the electric light. Do not be discouraged if you fail a few times.
- Napoleon Hill
Today the financial market is no good, but the money is there.
- Jack Ma
If your imagination leads you to understand how quickly people grant your requests when those requests appeal to their self-interest, you can have practically anything you go after.
- Napoleon Hill
The way to achieve happiness is to try for perfection that is impossible to achieve, and spend the rest of your life trying to achieve it.
- Winston Churchill
As technology continues to virtualize money, brick ‘n mortar banks have become as superfluous as traditional bookstores.
- Reid Hoffman
Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph: a beginning, a struggle and a victory.
- Mahatma Gandhi
I’ve talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 had one thing in common: They all wanted validation…I would tell you that every single person you will ever meet shares that common desire.
- Oprah Winfrey
