Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.
- Reid Hoffman
Notable Quotables
The most important thing to understand is that the job of a big company executive is very different from the job of a small company executive. When I was managing thousands of people at Hewlett-Packard after the sale of Opsware, there was an incredible number of incoming demands on my time. Everyone wanted a piece of me. Little companies wanted to partner with me or sell themselves to me, people in my organization needed approvals, other business units needed my help, customers wanted my attention, and so forth. As a result, I spent most of my time optimizing and tuning the existing business. Most of the work that I did was “incoming.” In fact, most skilled big company executives will tell you that if you have more than three new initiatives in a quarter, you are trying to do too much. As a result, big company executives tend to be interrupt-driven. In contrast, when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days of a company, you have to take eight to ten new initiatives a day or the company will stand still. There is no inertia that’s putting the company in motion. Without massive input from you, the company will stay at rest.
- Ben Horowitz
Happiness is a Choice.
- Joel Olsteen
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure.
- Colin Powell
In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.
- Reed Hastings
No matter how dark and gloomy it looks in your life right now, if you’ll release the weight of those burdens, you will see the sun break forth.
- Joel Olsteen
It will be disastrous when a leader or manager shows up with one attitude one day and treats people with a different attitude the next day.
- Zig Ziglar
Microsoft’s an important partner for Dell, an important company in the industry.
- Michael Dell
Underneath, you would surely see that the best care passionately about their people—about their growth and success. And you would see that they themselves are comfortable in their own skins. They’re real, filled with candor and integrity, optimism and humanity.
- Jack Welch
People have been indoctrinated so completely by their jobs that they don’t want to know how something works, they’re willing to accept that perhaps the laws of nature don’t work as they expect, and by the way, can I have the remote?
- Seth Godin
Backed by our conviction, we remain committed to investing wholeheartedly to improve the people’s living conditions, regardless of all uncertainties.
- Cheng Yu-tung
In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.
- Yoda
Paper money will suffer. I’d be in mortar, not paper (money). We are in a time when paper investments are riskier than in the past. There is also a great amount of sovereign risk.
- Lee Shau Kee
The Group is well positioned to meet the challenges ahead and will as ever continue to pursue higher growth.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work in a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
- Seth Godin
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
- Robert Frost
Russia is not a homogenous country, it’s a very fragmented country.
- Alexei Mordashov
He listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.
- Ron Chernow
Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.
- Bill Gates
I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The best way a mentor can prepare another leader is to expose him or her to other great people.
- John C. Maxwell
A lot of advertising has gotten worse. I think it’s kind of lost its nerve, to be honest with you. I feel like the advertising of the ’60s, they were nervier. You know why? Because there was less at stake.
- Jerry Seinfeld
An employer has no business with a man’s personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance, and nothing else. Any attempt by an employer to go beyond this is usurpation. It is an immoral as well as illegal intrusion of privacy.
- Peter Drucker
Look, I’m a passionate entrepreneur. I’m like fire and brimstone sometimes. And so there are times when I’ll go—I’ll get too into the weeds and too into the debate, because I’m so passionate about it.
- Travis Kalanick
I had a terrible time hiring rich people. It sounds funny, but the problem is when things go wrong they can ask, ‘Why am I doing this?’ You don’t ever want anybody asking that question. You want them to say, ‘I know why I’m doing it, I need the money, let’s go’ or whatever it is that draws them.
- Ben Horowitz
The breadth and maturity of our own businesses is allowing us to weather the prevailing storms.
- Cheng Yu-tung
most people go through college and learn to read Virgil and master the mysteries of calculus without ever discovering how their own minds function.
- Dale Carnegie
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
- Albert Einstein
Peter Drucker once observed that the drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.
- James C. Collins
I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.
- Mark Zuckerberg
There is no sale without the story, no knockout without the setup.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The chef that grew up with the grandma who cooks tends to always beat the chef that went to the culinary institute. It’s in the blood.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are … a different game you should play.
- Yoda
Exercise is better than any medicine I can take, exercise and sleep.
- Aliko Dangote
Great ideas originate in the muscles.
- Thomas Edison
If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.
- Elon Musk
Anger is a waste of energy. Steam which is used to blow off a safety valve would be better used to drive an engine.
- Winston Churchill
I’m getting better. I’m improving. My health is coming back,” those words began to create a new image on the inside. Before long, they started seeing themselves strong, healthy, and whole.
- Joel Olsteen
Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious—but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.
- James C. Collins
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
I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.
- Elon Musk
The main thing that’s missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics.
- Bill Gates
You may not realize initially how many other opportunities are wrapped up inside the first one. After you go through the first door, you’ll then discover more doors automatically opening behind that one. One door leads you to another door, which leads to another door, and so one. It’s like ten other boxes packed inside one box. The initial door that God opens is your access to more opportunities. But you must be willing to walk through the first one to get to the other good things God has for you.
- George Foreman
Some things are much easier to see in others than in yourself
- Ben Horowitz
Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.
- Bill Gates
Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism – and wars.
- Dale Carnegie
Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.
- Bill Gates
Fears are nothing more than states of mind.
- Napoleon Hill
High expectations are the key to everything.
- Sam Walton
Our goal all along was that fans would come in and wouldn’t notice any loss of amenities there for them, and I’m very comfortable that’s going to be the case.
- Ed Clark
In the years to come, that lure of partnership helped us attract a lot of good managers, but I don’t believe that we ever had one who bought more stock than Willard. And of course he feels pretty good about it today. – Sam Walton (on human resources, hiring, early history of Wal-Mart)
- Sam Walton
To make meetings less boring, leaders must look for legitimate reasons to provoke and uncover relevant, constructive ideological conflict.
- Patrick M. Lencioni
If you can dream it, you can achieve it. You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit… a reputation, character.
- John D. Rockefeller
To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.
- Ben Horowitz
lasting transformations from good to great follow a general pattern of buildup followed by breakthrough.
- James C. Collins
Keep it simple. Tell the truth. People can smell the truth.
- Stephen Wynn
Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher than lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure.
- John C. Maxwell
What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?
- Sam Walton
I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.
- Howard Schultz
I’m a geek.
- Bill Gates
The future of your organization depends on motivated human beings selflessly contributing unasked-for gifts of emotional labor.
- Seth Godin
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
- Oprah Winfrey
In order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done.
- Peter Thiel
The first Apple was just a culmination of my whole life.
- Steve Wozniak
You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.
- Harry Truman
What has sustained us through these years? Trust. Dedication. Discipline.
- Cheng Yu-tung
No man has a right to expect to succeed in life unless he understands his business, and nobody can understand his business thoroughly unless he learns it by personal application and experience.
- P.T. Barnum
Separate performance from people.
- David Robinson
I made a decision to write for my readers, not to try to find more readers for my writing.
- Seth Godin
There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.
- Simon Sinek
If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.
- Peter Thiel
“Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.”
- Sam Walton
Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
- Warren Buffett
There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.
- Jack Welch
No man is ever whipped, until he quits in his own mind…A winner never quits and quitter never wins. No follower of this philosphy can reasonably expect accumulate a fortune without experience temporary defeat.
- Napoleon Hill
Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.
- Rupert Murdoch
[On becoming in 1969 a full-time employee of his five year old company] There were nervous moments. Every time I brought a fresh letter of credit home and it said, ‘Mr. And Mrs. Knight guarantee liabilities to the tune of $300,000,’ Penny’d say, ‘We don’t have $300,000.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t care. Just sign the thing.’
- Phil Knight
If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.
- Winston Churchill
I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it’s something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn’t compute with our existing educational system.
- Peter Thiel
Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.
- Peter Thiel
How you see your future is much more important than what happened in your past.
- Zig Ziglar
When I hear Mitt Romney say that he believes that Jesus is the Son of God, that He’s the Christ, raised from the dead, that He’s his savior – that’s good enough for me.
- Joel Olsteen
You need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
- Ben Horowitz
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
- Winston Churchill
To connect with people in a group, connect with them as individuals.
- John Maxwell
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
- Steve Jobs
If you can see the invisible, God will do the impossible.
- Joel Olsteen
The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.
- Timothy Ferriss
All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school – my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.
- Mark Zuckerberg
e liked to call them idiots for making it too expensive. Well, one megabyte of RAM back then cost 10,000 of today’s dollars. He made a cheap one — but what he did was he made a really weak, lousy computer, to tell you truth, in the Macintosh, and still at a fairly high price. He made it by cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there. It was a lousy product. Every time we improved the Macintosh, year by year by year, it got closer to what the Lisa had been.
- Steve Wozniak
Comedy may be big business but it isn’t pretty.
- Steve Martin
When I used to play sports, I’d be the one cheering the team on, ‘Come on, we can beat these guys!’ That’s just in me.
- Joel Olsteen
The foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love and loyalty.
- Zig Ziglar
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
- Viktor E. Frankl
The most frightful of all spectacles is the strength of the civilization without its mercy.
- Winston Churchill
The question you should be asking isn’t, What do I want? or What are my goals? but What would excite me?
- Timothy Ferriss
Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.
- Napoleon Hill
Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.
- Winston Churchill
The basic principle is I command, and my employees carry it out immediately.
- Wang Jianlin
