Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.
- Yoda
Notable Quotables
When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.
- Walt Disney
You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated.
- James C. Collins
The polar opposite business cliché warns that “the best product doesn’t always win.
- Peter Thiel
You will need to find ways to do less and less to make more and more.
- Robert Kiyosaki
It’s true that I run a multi-national group but I have no interests in India. So please tell me, what should my identity be?
- Lakshmi Mittal
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
Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.
- Dale Carnegie
In every organization everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear.
- Seth Godin
During their lifetimes, every man and woman will stumble across a great opportunity. Sadly, most of them will simply pick themselves up, dust themselves down and carry on as if nothing ever happened.
- Winston Churchill
Don’t be so nervous. It’s not a big deal.
- Lee Shau Kee
Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it.
- 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
You have to respect your parents. They are giving you an at-bat. If you’re an entrepreneur and go into the family business, you want to grow fast. Patience is important. But respect the other party… My dad and I pulled it off because we really respect each other.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I love comedy. That’s what got me into the arts. I don’t even know how to categorize myself anymore.
- Steve Martin
Most People have a desire to look for the exception instead of the desire to become exceptional.
- John C. Maxwell
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
If you pay that price daily by planning and preparing and working to become the right kind of person, then you can legitimately expect to have all that life has to offer.
- Zig Ziglar
The warrior mentality, the very fight to survive, is truly what created our culture.
- Herb Kelleher
Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. New Yorkers probably know that as much if not more than anybody else after the terrible tragedy of 9/11.
- Michael Bloomberg
I’ll repeat something you might consider tattooing on your forehead: What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.
- Jeff Bezos
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.
- Napoleon Hill
The tool that’s most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.
- Bill Gates
You may be sitting around waiting for God to change your circumstances. Then you’re going to be happy, then your’re going to have a good attitude, then you’re going to give God praise. But God is waiting on you to get up on the inside. When you do your part, He’ll begin to change things and work supernaturally in your life.
- Joel Olsteen
It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.
- Peter Drucker
Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.
- Bill Gates
In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
- Clayton M. Christensen
I can become someone’s miracle.
- Joel Olsteen
It enjoys strong network effects from its content ecosystem: thousands of developers write software for Apple devices because that’s where hundreds of millions of users are, and those users stay on the platform because it’s where the apps are.
- Peter Thiel
Keep the right perspective Some people would love to have your problems. They would gladly trade places with you. They would love to have the job that frustrates you. They would love to sit in traffic in that car you don’t like. They would love to have your husband, who gets on your nerves. They would love to live in the house you think is too small.
- Joel Olsteen
I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
- Steve Jobs
People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for them.
- Dale Carnegie
Initiative = Happiness
- Seth Godin
I kept saying, Sam, we’re making a good living. Why go out why expand so much more? The stores are getting farther and farther away. After the seventeenth store, though, I realized there wasn’t going to any stopping it.
- Helen Walton
When I think about parallels between myself and an Olympian, I believe that success in the world of business is underpinned by very similar principles of perseverance and hard work.
- Lakshmi Mittal
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
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 story drives the mission.
- Jim Cathcart
The responsibility of the leader is to define reality and create hope.
- David Novak
The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.
- Thomas Edison
As soon as we associate reading with a test, we’ve missed the point.
- Seth Godin
People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
- Timothy Ferriss
Victory is always possible for the person who refuses to stop fighting.
- Napoleon Hill
The potential financial reward for building the ‘next Windows’ is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.
- Bill Gates
We’ve got to give people room to have a bad day.
- Joel Olsteen
when praise is specific, it comes across as sincere—not something the other person may be saying just to make one feel good.
- Dale Carnegie
Employees were invited to send complaints or suggestions directly to him and he always took an interest in their affairs. He was the best employer of his time, instituting hospitalization and retirement pensions. He was a fine boss if workers abided by the rules, but if they did something foolish, like show interest in a union, they promptly forfeited his sympathy. Rockefeller never acknowledged the legitamacy of organized labor, nor did he tolerate union organizers on his premises.
- Ron Chernow
If someone’s criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”
- Timothy Ferriss
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
It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.
- Larry Page
If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that’s a good discussion. Maybe that’s the way to help close the deficit.
- Bill Gates
If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.
- Andrew Carnegie
Having a personality of caring about people is important. You cant be a good leader unless you generally like people. That is how you bring out the best in them.
- Richard Branson
I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.
- Joel Olsteen
He spoke with more eloquence than wisdom.
- Winston Churchill
Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.
- John C. Maxwell
Be a victor , not a victim.
- Joel Olsteen
Because ideas have to be original only with regard to their adaptation to the problem at hand, I am always extremely interested in how others have used them….
- Thomas Edison
The sooner you accept the fact that you will have both successes and failures, the easier it will be to get your business and personal life headed in the right direction.
- Harvey Mackay
Life isn’t fair. It’s true, and you still have to deal with it. Whining about it rarely levels the playing field, but learning to rise above it is the ultimate reward.
- Harvey Mackay
Lay out what you’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
- David Novak
The good-will of a business which is losing money is not worth much.
- Ron Chernow
Saying yes makes you fail to meet expectations of theobligation.
- David Nilssen
I don’t feel under-taxed in any way at all.
- Jack Welch
In his rigidgly compartmentalized life, each hour was tightly budgeted, whether for business, religion, family or exercise. Perhaps those daily rituals helped him deal with the underlying tensions that might otherwise have become ungovernable, for although he tried to project to an air of unhurried calm, he was under terrific strain the surface, was constantly on edge. In one of his few admissions of weakness he recalled, for years on end I never had a solid night’s sleep, worrying about how it was to come out…I tossed about in bed night after night worrying over the outcome…All the fortune that I have made has not served to compensate for the anxiety of that period.
- Ron Chernow
Being excellent is hard. So when you have something hard to do, remember you are being excellent. Do you want to be remembered for being good or great?
- Lee Cockerell
Frank Wells 1888 instruction to his agents: The most polite and gentlemanly treatment of all customers, however insignificant in their business, is insisted upon. Proper respect must be shown to all – let them be men, women or children, rich or poor, white or black – it must not be forgotten, that the company is dependent on these people for its business.
- Frank Wells
I have never found a ship I wanted to go down with
- Jack Nadel
Don’t use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.
- Peter Thiel
I definitely believe that the so-called American decline is greatly exaggerated.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
God, You said Your favor is not for a season but for a lifetime.
- Joel Olsteen
I knew there was a way out. I knew there was another kind of life because I had read about it. I knew there were other places, and there was another way of being.
- Oprah Winfrey
The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.
- Seth Godin
The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.
- Winston Churchill
We learn by doing.
- Aristotle
Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.
- P.T. Barnum
Use every customer point of contact to weave stories about who you are and what your brand stands for.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Anyone would fight for things that matter, true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter
- Peter Thiel
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
Our underwear used to just be cotton, but we wanted to see if we could create something out of synthetics.
- Tadashi Yanai
It’s just not right that so many things don’t work when they should. I don’t think that will change for a long time.
- Steve Wozniak
You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success.
- Zig Ziglar
It is expected that Mainland China’s entry to the World Trade Organisation will materialise in the near future and the country will see further growth in its economy unfolding at a faster pace.
- Lee Shau Kee
The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.
- Ray Kroc
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
- Henry David Thoreau
I want to change history, do something important in my life, and influence individuals like we have with millions of small businesses on Alibaba. Then they love and respect you because you made their life important.
- Jack Ma
Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.
- Dale Carnegie
War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war:
- Peter Thiel
Planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out.
- Peter Thiel
Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.
- Warren Buffett
Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support – a significant problem in the software industry.
- Bill Gates
Education comes from within, you get it by struggle and effort and thought.
- Napoleon Hill
When I started the diamond business, no black person, period, was in it to do what we’re trying to do to change the industry. So I like to do things that I see clearly that are in my, you know, scope. And then, I had to figure how I get talented or smart business people around me to execute. That’s what I have to do.
- Russell Simmons
Always try to learn from other peoples mistakes, not your own – It is much cheaper that way!
- Donald Trump
I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.
- Ben Horowitz
The U.S. couldn’t even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They’ll be killing each other again in less than a year. I’m sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.
- Bill Gates
Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.
- Ben Horowitz
