Notable Quotables

Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.

- William Feather

The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.

- Henry Ford

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software.” We had dreams about the impact it could have.

- Bill Gates

School districts in the US don’t adopt technology very quickly.

- Reed Hastings

Disruptive companies often pick fights they can’t win.

- Peter Thiel

A plan is always successful if the plan is good.

- Zig Ziglar

The annals of business are filled with stories of companies that thought they had it made and could milk their enterprises without having to bother about improving their products or services. It’s amazing how fast they found their markets disappearing.

- Harvey Mackay

If you talk about Cabernet and Merlot-based value between $10 and $25, I will tell you that Bordeaux is the best value in the world.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I think the move by Mr. Greenspan was welcomed by everyone here.

- Jack Welch

There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?

- Warren Buffett

Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.

- Jack Ma

[On working at Nike for 48 years] In those 48 years, I have never had a promotion. but it had its other benefits.

- Phil Knight

We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.

- Peter Thiel

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

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

The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it does exist.

- Zig Ziglar

Too often, that solution is nothing more than adding another layer. What you should be doing is going to the source of the problem to fix it, and sometimes that requires shooting the culprit,

- Sam Walton

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

- Bill Gates

The right quote can inspire people to change their ways.

- Zig Ziglar

I never hid my thoughts or feelings. During a business meeting I could get so emotionally charged and involved that I’d stammer out what others might consider to be outrageous things like, My six year old could do better than that! Or Don’t Walter Cronkite me!

- Solutions

You won’t get anything unless you have the vision to imagine it.

- John Lennon

We have more than six and one-half times the level of wealth of our non-millionaire neighbors, but, in our neighborhood, these non-millionaires outnumber us better than three to one. Could it be that they have chosen to trade wealth for acquiring high-status material possessions?

- The Millionaire Next Door

When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal. And it has nothing to do with money. I mean, you buy clothes with money, and cars. But I really wanted to work with people I enjoyed working with, who I admired and liked.

- Larry Ellison

If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

- Bill Gates

There are some people that can get things done, and it seems there are others who just can’t. That’s why we move heaven and earth to retain our stars and the main reason we manage out our lowest performers – the bottom 10% at least – each year.

- David Novak

PRINCIPLE 1 The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. PRINCIPLE 2 Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, You’re wrong.” PRINCIPLE 3 If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. PRINCIPLE 4 Begin in a friendly way. PRINCIPLE 5 Get the other person saying yes, yes” immediately. PRINCIPLE 6 Let the other person do a great deal of the talking. PRINCIPLE 7 Let the other person feel that the idea.

- Dale Carnegie

This is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com. Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and large markets.

- Jeff Bezos

I built a steel plant from the grassroots, so I learned all the nuts and bolts. When there was a problem, I would be able to guide them, though I am not a technical person.

- Lakshmi Mittal

Everything begins with a decision. Then, we have to manage that decision for the rest of your life.

- John C. Maxwell

Similar to all of you, we would like to see higher growth.

- John Chambers

People who add value to others do so intentionally. I say that because to add value, leaders must give of themselves, and that rarely occurs by accident.

- John C. Maxwell

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.

- Arthur Golden

(In reference to one of his first advertising sales mentors Howard Davis)… He was 6 foot 4 with silver hair…the quintessential advertising guy. He had a glass topped desk in his office because, as he put it, he like to be able to look down and see his Guccis while he worked. Howard taught me to get things done. He was very smart but he was also an animal. He exuded power and he could be very intimidating, and he knew how to use his power to get results while still managing to be a good guy. Howard’s personal style was very different from my own, but what he did teach me was how to create a sense of urgency, how to motivate performance by getting everyone’s heart pounding.

- David Novak

It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade – and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.

- George Soros

My popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.

- Dale Carnegie

When my sister and I came along, my father’s political life was completely over. He ran for president the year I was born. So that was the end of it. He had been congressman first, then governor, before all that. So when we came along, he was running the Dayton newspaper.

- Anne Cox Chambers

I have made the tough decisions, always with an eye toward the bottom line. Perhaps it’s time America was run like a business.

- Donald Trump

It is not so much that I am a blue-blooded oligarch: I just don’t feel like an oligarch.

- Vladimir Potanin

I still get real nervous when I go in front of more than two people.

- Phil Knight

Eventually I left City College in my senior year, just four or five credits short of a sociology degree. This really upset my father who thought that I was a fool. Over and over he lectured me that the only way for a black man to make it was to get a degree and a job. For a while there I felt like I was a failure in my father’s eyes, which hurt alot, but promoting felt right in my gut. I knew that to be a man I had to follow my heart. My mother was always more open to Danny, Joey and me pursuing a more non-traditional entrepreneurial way…Early in my promoting career I lost all the money I’d saved on a show in Harlem no one came to. I came out to Hollis and no one would help me. My father just wanted me to go back to school and told me so. What could I say? I had no money. Then my mother went back in the house and came with $2,000 in crisp $100 bills from her personal savings. It was that money that kept me afloat until Kurtis Blow broke and I entered the record business. That act of love and faith, which is what kept me in business at a key time, is my favorite memory of her.

- Russell Simmons

It’s different when you’re trying to turn something around, especially something that you built, at a time when so many constituents – the media, Wall Street, competitors, ex-employees – are all saying that Starbucks’s best days are behind it, and that Schultz is never going to be able to bring it back.

- Howard Schultz

Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.

- Sam Walton

Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see.

- Peter Thiel

I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.

- Andrew Carnegie

I don’t know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.

- Steve Ballmer

It took 23 years from Abraxane being conceived to us showing now with conclusiveness that it works in pancreatic cancer. We cannot afford as a society to wait another 23 years to make sure that the patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Dividers seek to make themselves look or feel better by making others feel worse. They damage relationships, fracture teams and organizations, and create havoc in people’s lives.”

- John C. Maxwell

It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.

- Elon Musk

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy–sun, wind and tide. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

- Thomas Edison

To a contrarian like me, constant advice not to do something almost always starts me quickly down the risky, unpopular path.

- Michael Bloomberg

Out that expending emotional labor, working without a map, and driving in the dark involve confronting fear and living with the pain of vulnerability. The artist comes to a détente with these emotions and, instead of fighting with them, dances with them. The linchpin connects as a result of the indispensable nature of her contribution. The artist, on the other hand, connects because that’s what art is. The artist touches part of what it means to be truly human and does that work again and again.

- Seth Godin

Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.

- Donald Trump

One who works their tail off because they hate working for other people so much, but who has no concept of what they are doing and who justifies their poverty when anyone more successful gives them advice by saying their business is different.

- Clay Clark

When people write checks, they are depleting an asset. And when people are using credit cards, they are increasing their liabilities. In other words, credit cards make it so much easier to get deeper and deeper into debt by increasing your monthly liabilties.

- Robert Kiyosaki

If you need 15 minutes in the sun to trigger a melanin response, 15 minutes is your MED for tanning. More than 15 minutes is redundant and will just result in burning and a forced break from the beach. During this forced break from the beach, let’s assume one week, someone else who heeded his natural 15-minute MED will be able to fit in four more tanning sessions. He is four shades darker, whereas you have returned to your pale pre-beach self.

- Timothy Ferriss

In life, you can blame a lot of people and you can wallow in self-pity, or you can pick yourself up and say, ‘Listen, I have to be responsible for myself.’

- Howard Schultz

We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

- Michael Bloomberg

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

- Bill Gates

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.

- Thomas J Watson

I am upset with the effect that both of these issues have had on the public,

- Michael Gerber

Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions. It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.

- Dale Carnegie

Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that’s really powerful.

- Reid Hoffman

The best way to be missed when you’re gone,Is to stand for something when you’re here.

- Seth Godin

Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don’t approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.

- Bill Gates

Acquiring Sunseeker deepens Wanda’s international influence and represents an important step forward for the development of the business.

- Wang Jianlin

We sold ‘Seinfeld’ all over the world but it was a very specific kind of show. In some countries it went down really well, in others they hated it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ we will fall, but ‘when.’ There are no exceptions.

- John C. Maxwell

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

- Steve Jobs

This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

- James C. Collins

I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.

- Steve Wozniak

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

Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.

- Peter Thiel

As one’s fortunes are reduced, one spirit must expand to fill the void.

- Winston Churchill

Steve Jobs’ ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.

- Bill Gates

Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You’re not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.

- Seth Godin

the world belongs to the man or woman who got up today and did something

- Jim Stovall

No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.

- Peter Drucker

Companies, exist and evolve over time and in fact they have multiple founding moments.

- Jack Dorsey

Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.

- Bill Gates

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

- Elon Musk

Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t feel comfortable reading about in the newspaper the next day.

- Joel Olsteen

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.

- Og Mandino

Remember that failure is an event, not a person.

- Zig Ziglar

When the pressure is on, great leaders are at the their best.

- Napoleon Hill

MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs. At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future. Note that there were many numbers as well as more qualitative goals that would have helped: Was our competitive win rate increasing or declining? Was customer satisfaction rising or falling? What did our own engineers think of the products? By managing the organization as though it were a black box, some divisions at HP optimized the present at the expense of their downstream competitiveness. The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company. It would have been better to take into account the white box. The white box goes beyond the numbers and gets into how the organization produced the numbers. It penalizes managers who sacrifice the future for the short term and rewards those who invest in the future even if that investment cannot be easily measured. CLOSING THOUGHT It is easy to see that there are many ways for leaders to be misinterpreted. To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors. Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create. Otherwise, the side-effect behaviors may be worse than the situation you were trying to fix.

- Ben Horowitz

Thank God for what He’s already done in your life. Thank Him for the victories in your past. Thank Him for how far He’s already brought you. And then take it one step further. Thank Him in advance for the victories He has planned ahead for you. Thank Him for the new doors He’s opening. Thank Him for the situations He’s turning around. Thank Him for the favor He has in your future. If you do that, you will feel a new joy rising up on the inside. You will feel your faith increase. You won’t have that victim mentality; you will have a victor mentality. One thing I’ve learned is you cannot praise and stay defeated at the same time. You cannot give God thanks and stay down and discouraged. Put on the Garment of Praise.

- Joel Olsteen

Sooner or later, you will see a China-based company that really has a global impact, and I think Baidu has a chance to become one of those companies. We should be able to compete on a global basis.

- Robin Li

If you want to build a dynasty, you need to always be focused on getting better and beating last year’s performance in everything you do. You want to eliminate peaks and valleys, what we call boom, splat, and go for a good steady incline.

- David Novak

Sometimes, “never let them see you sweat,” is truly bad advice. The work of an individual who cares often exposes the grit and determination and effort that it takes to be present.Perfecting your talk, refining your essay and polishing your service until all elements of you disappear might be obvious tactics, but they remove the thing we were looking for: you.

- Seth Godin

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