Notable Quotables

Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple—many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.

- Timothy Ferriss

Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.

- Richard Branson

I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young.

- Bill Gates

My personal opinion is that I’m in the media too much. I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman. I would like to be without any extra visibility.

- Viktor Vekselberg

EBay is a great company. There are a lot of good assets and good customers, and the U.S. people love it.

- Jack Ma

In fact, stories only magnify the need to have something remarkable (and honest) to say.

- Seth Godin

What I’m trying to say is that for the average investor, what I would encourage them to do is to understand that there’s inflation and growth. It can go higher and lower and to have four different portfolios essentially that make up your entire portfolio that gets you balanced.

- Ray Dalio

The politics of partisanship and the resulting inaction and excuses have paralyzed decision-making, primarily at the federal level, and the big issues of the day are not being addressed, leaving our future in jeopardy.

- Michael Bloomberg

What options expensing will determine is job creation and job loss, … This is why we are debating it so strongly and I’m proud to champion it.

- John Chambers

Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.

- Dale Carnegie

All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.

- Jeff Bezos

Great companies that build an enduring brand have an emotional relationship with customers that has no barrier. And that emotional relationship is on the most important characteristic, which is trust.

- Howard Schultz

The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events – Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima – so it’s more visible.

- Bill Gates

We do not need to teach students to embrace the status quo.

- Seth Godin

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

- Thomas J Stanley

I’ve come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages. An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside,”

- James C. Collins

I think there’s a lot of merit in an international economy and global markets, but they’re not sufficient because markets don’t look after social needs.

- George Soros

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

We have the brand, and we have the fulfillment capability. Now we had to get the Net, and that’s the easiest part of the game,

- Jack Welch

I probably have about four or five cups of coffee a day. I make myself an espresso macchiato when I wake, which is a shot of espresso and just a dollop of steamed milk. Then, if I’m going to do some work at home, I would make myself a French press. It’s the best way to make conventional coffee.

- Howard Schultz

Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.

- Donald Trump

Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market.

- Peter Thiel

If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman.

- Phil Knight

The man who wavers in his decisions, shows that he is not sure of himself. He cannot lead others successfully.

- Napoleon Hill

If you can’t communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you’re giving up your potential.

- Warren Buffett

Bill Campbell developed an excellent methodology for measuring executives in a balanced way that will help you achieve this. He breaks performance down into four distinct areas.

- Ben Horowitz

I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don’t laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that’s not real laughter.

- Steve Martin

The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.

- Dale Carnegie

If you want to take the island, you have to burn the boats.

- David Nilssen

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

When we don’t forgive, we’re not hurting the other person. We’re not hurting the company that did us wrong. We’re not hurting God. We’re only hurting ourselves.

- Joel Olsteen

Starting means you’re going to finish. If it doesn’t ship, you’ve failed. You haven’t poked the box if the box doesn’t realize it’s been poked. To merely start without finishing is just boasting, or stalling, or a waste of time. I have no patience at all for people who believe they are doing their best work but are hiding it from the market. If you don’t ship, you actually haven’t started anything at all. At some point, your work has to intersect with the market. At some point, you need feedback as to whether or not it worked. Otherwise, it’s merely a hobby.

- Seth Godin

There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.

- Dale Carnegie

The Group sold an attributable HK$3,434.6 million worth of properties in Hong Kong as compared with HK$6,810.9 million for the year before. In light of the then cautious market sentiment, the Group decided to defer the launch of a few new developments…

- Lee Shau Kee

The way to become rich is to put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.

- Andrew Carnegie

For now, if the Hong Kong environment doesn’t change, then in the long term, investing in Hong Kong is best.

- Lee Shau Kee

I’m a catalyst for change. You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.

- Rupert Murdoch

Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.

- Elon Musk

I’m not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative.

- Steve Ballmer

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That’s a really, really, really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on-the-job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

- Ben Horowitz

So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.

- Peter Drucker

In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.

- Peter Thiel

When we try to drill and practice someone into subservient obedience, we’re stamping out the artist that lives within.

- Seth Godin

As our society gets more complex and our people get more complacent, the role of the jester is more vital than ever before. Please stop sitting around. We need you to make a ruckus.

- Seth Godin

My son is now an ‘entrepreneur.’ That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job

- Ted Turner

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

- Winston Churchill

The U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar, the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro.

- Peter Thiel

A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.

- Peter Drucker

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.

- Bill Gates

That’s just $30 for two tickets. Racing is a family sport and we strive to make our tickets affordable for any families that want to come watch a race.

- Ed Clark

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

- Elon Musk

The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.

- Jim Rohn

We are making these changes at a time when we are beginning to see signs that our business is stabilizing.

- John Chambers

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

- Winston Churchill

Music plays a very important role in my life. I’m a frustrated musician. I play the drums.

- Ronald Perelman

We are each responsible for our own life – no other person is or even can be.

- Oprah Winfrey

Don’t ally your personal interests with the development of the company.

- Wang Jianlin

At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress is globalization—taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere.

- Peter Thiel

Your real boss is the one who walks around under your hat.

- Napoleon Hill

Dinosaurs did not walk with humans. The evolutionary record says different. They gambled.

- Steve Martin

When you encourage others, you in the process are encouraged because you’re making a commitment and difference in that person’s life. Encouragement really does make a difference.

- Zig Ziglar

A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

- Peter Thiel

I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

- Elon Musk

The reason that I have Global Grind is to communicate ideas to people who might otherwise not be listening.

- Russell Simmons

We should remember the warning of the wise Grail knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: You must choose, but choose wisely, for as the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.Choose the highest-yield material and you can be an idiot and enjoy stunning success. Choose poorly and, as the Grail knight implied, you’re screwed no matter what. You’ll chase your own tail for years.

- Timothy Ferriss

I felt that it’s best just to be as transparent as possible.

- Rupert Murdoch

You read these management books that say, ‘These are the hard things about running a company.’ But those aren’t really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have to figure out a way not to go bankrupt.

- Ben Horowitz

Fascinatingly, as companies begin to struggle, the third category always seems to grow much faster than the first. In addition, the sudden wave of “semi-performance-related attrition” usually happens in companies that claim to have a “super-high talent bar.” How do all these superstar employees suddenly go from great to crap?

- Ben Horowitz

The only time I really become discouraged is when I think of all the things I would like to do and the little time I have in which to do them.

- Thomas Edison

I don’t yell at people, I don’t mistreat people. I don’t talk down to people, so no one else in this building, in this vicinity, has the right to do it.

- Oprah Winfrey

In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive.

- Bill Gates

Permission marketing turns strangers into friends and friends into loyal customers. It’s not just about entertainment – it’s about education. Permission marketing is curriculum marketing.

- Seth Godin

People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.

- Walt Disney

This is like the Six Sigma approach to quality. Six Sigma refers to the quest for continuous improvement, ultimately leading to 3.4 defects per million units. The problem is that once you’re heading down this road, there’s no room left for amazing improvements and remarkable innovations. Either you rolled ten strikes or you didn’t. Organizations that earn dramatic success always do it in markets where asymptotes don’t exist, or where they can be shattered. If you could figure out how to bowl 320, that would be amazing. Until that happens, pick a different sport if you want to be a linchpin.

- Seth Godin

I can’t afford to be indifferent to politics, but I don’t have personal ambitions.

- Vagit Alekperov

There’s pros and cons of a big church. Cons is I don’t get to know everybody, I don’t get to go to their ballgame, I don’t get to marry everybody, but the pros are you get all this community, 800 ushers come in to serve, getting there at 7 in the morning on their day off and coming in on Saturday to make all those wafers.

- Joel Olsteen

I was not an easy student, and I had to apply myself diligently to prepare my lessons, said Rockefeller, who described himself accurately as reliable but not brilliant.

- John D. Rockefeller

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

Even when change is elective, it will disorient you. You may go through anxiety. You will miss aspects of your former life. It doesn’t matter. The trick is to know in advance of making any big change that you’re going to be thrown off your feet by it. So you prepare for this inevitable disorientation and steady yourself to get through it. Then you take the challenge, make the change, and achieve your dream.

- Harvey Mackay

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

- Jerry Seinfeld

[In 1998] The Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime, and arbitrary abuse.

- Phil Knight

I believe that success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have.

- Timothy Ferriss

The Dip creates scarcity, scarcity creates value.

- Seth Godin

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

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

- Peter Drucker

Without promotion, something terrible happens… nothing!

- P.T. Barnum

If you can see the invisible, God will do the impossible.

- Joel Olsteen

Your business plan is fluid, not concrete. Once you a build plan, the market place validates what works and what does not. Be flexible and evolve your business strategy.

- David Nilssen

Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago? How did they work out? Didn’t you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn’t most of them turn out all right after all?

- Dale Carnegie

Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.

- Dale Carnegie

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