This approach appeals to the media’s innate curiosity.Whereas a fastball stresses logic over emotion, the curveball stresses emotion over logic.
- Michael Levine
Notable Quotables
I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.
- Charles Dickens
Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He’s always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.
- Steve Wozniak
It doesn’t matter how many people you offend, as long as you’re getting your message to your consumers. I say to those people who do not want to offend anybody: You are going to have a very, very difficult time having meaningful advertising.
- Phil Knight
My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.
- Winston Churchill
Every breakthrough business idea begins with solving a common problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. I discovered a big one when I took apart an IBM PC. I made two interesting discoveries: The components were all manufactured by other companies, and the system that retailed for $3,000 cost about $600 in parts.
- Michael Dell
Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans.
- Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles
I am very optimistic about china’s growth.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
- Bill Gates
The service leaders hire one out of 50 applicants, sometimes one out of 100, but they’re very, very careful. You can’t afford not to be extremely choosy when you hire.
- Harvey Mackay
I do not believe that people want to work hard enough and they want to find the quick Twitter, SEO. Anybody who’s obsessed with SEO has lost already, period. I believe that firmly.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.
- P.T. Barnum
Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market. That starts with asking yourself: what will the world look like 10 and 20 years from now, and how will my business fit in?
- Peter Thiel
Happiness does not depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.
- Dale Carnegie
Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.
- Bill Gates
Strive to be the very best you can be. Run the race against yourself and not the guy in the other lane. The reason I say that is, as long as you give it 110% you are going to succeed. But as long as you’re trying to beat the guy over there, you are worried about him; you’re not worrying about how you’ve got to perform
- Herschel Walker
The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.
- Peter Thiel
As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don’t get that.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Our road to success has included its shares of ups and downs, as we have had to cope with the often volatile nature of our chosen fields of specialisation. Yet, thanks to the strong foundations established by the dedication and hard work of our employees, we have always been able to weather the storms.
- Cheng Yu-tung
You cannot tailor make your situation in life, but you can tailor make your attitudes to those situations.
- Zig Ziglar
A record isn’t like a movie – you can get it together pretty fast.
- Steve Martin
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
Don’t treat your customers like a bunch of purses and wallets.
- Chris Brogan
Treasure the love you have received above all. It will survive long after your gold and good health have vanished.
- Og Mandino
Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.
- Seth Godin
But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.
- Peter Thiel
You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.
- Jim Rohn
The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
If they really don’t want to buy the flats, I’ll take their deposits.
- Lee Shau Kee
Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires.
- Seth Godin
A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate
- Seth Godin
While the uncertainties that the economic climate holds are a challenge for all companies, we are confident that by drawing from the strengths of our people, as well as on our core values of quality, initiative, trust and creativity, we will maintain our focus and strategic direction.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I believe great people to be those who know how they got where they are, and what they need to do to get where they’re going. Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives. Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future, in the present. They compare what they’ve done with what they intended to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference.
- Michael Gerber
You need to live every day like it could be your last.
- Joel Olsteen
One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.
- Dale Carnegie
I’ve never preached one sermon on money, on just finances. I want to stay away from it.
- Joel Olsteen
The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself.
- Peter Thiel
I had this very rich sense of how the metropolis was living and breathing.
- Jack Dorsey
The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively – I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook – it sounds trivial, but people matter.
- Reid Hoffman
Everything rises and falls on leadership.
- John C. Maxwell
The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.
- Peter Thiel
I’m not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I’m doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.
- George Soros
The stark differences between man and machine mean that gains from working with computers are much higher than gains from trade with other people. We don’t trade with computers any more than we trade with livestock or lamps. And that’s the point: computers are tools, not rivals.
- Peter Thiel
You hope that one or both of them win a race right before our race. I know that in the past, when Bill Elliott won it always boosted sales here.
- Ed Clark
When I was CEO, and I’d listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.
- Ben Horowitz
My revenue was $4 million my first year in business, off of one $20 item.
- Sara Blakely
Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.
- Thomas Edison
It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.
- Ronald Reagan
I learned that people don’t buy anything from unknown stores.
- Tadashi Yanai
In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It’s a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems. A brain, no matter how big, cannot solve a problem it doesn’t know about.
- Ben Horowitz
I don’t believe that government is good at picking technology, particularly technology that is changing. By the time you get it done and go through democracy, it’s so outdated.
- Michael Bloomberg
Make good decisions based on facts.
- David Novak
The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.
- Peter Drucker
The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage
- Warren Buffett
Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.
- Jeff Bezos
The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I’m making 22 minutes; I know there’s a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.
- Jerry Seinfeld
You have no ability, if you’re a financial institution and you’re threatened with criminal prosecution, you have no ability to negotiate.
- Warren Buffett
Politics are close to me, but there are different ways of participating in politics.
- Vagit Alekperov
The first thing I would do for anyone who’s trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.
- Timothy Ferriss
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.
- Wayne Gretzky
My own center, my Kingdom Center, which is the highest priced tower in Saudi Arabia, was vacated twice because of terrorist attacks, terrorist threats.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It’s a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we’ve come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.
- Larry Page
They don’t understand that Excellence isn’t about working extra hard to do what you’re told. It’s about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing.
- Seth Godin
Within the first year of launching my company, Spanx, I decided to go over to England and cold-call Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Selfridges the same way I had cold-called Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale’s here in the United States.
- Sara Blakely
It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.
- Walt Disney
Do what you want to do. Do what you like to do.
- Lei Jun
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
- John C. Maxwell
There is nothing in this world that can compare with the Christian fellowship, nothing that can satisfy but Christ.
- John D. Rockefeller
Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
- Warren Buffett
It is my practice to try to understand how valuable something is by trying to imagine myself without it.
- Herb Kelleher
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
- Elon Musk
We are the masters of our fate.
- Winston Churchill
Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.
- Jack Welch
You know, I start with the assumption that -or with, with the belief that this president has to succeed. We all have an enormous amount of capital invested in his success. His success is the country’s success.
- Michael Bloomberg
The profile of homebuyers in Hong Kong is becoming more diverse and a wider range of marketing channels is thus needed to promote the Group’s Hong Kong property projects.
- Lee Shau Kee
There are abundant business opportunities to bring about the recovery of the local economy.
- Lee Shau Kee
A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.
- Rosalynn Carter
My conclusion on Freewill and predestination- they are identical.
- Winston Churchill
The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.
- Bill Gates
I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the Government needed a dictator. Of course, it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up as dictators. What I now ask of you is military success and I will risk the dictatorship.
- Dale Carnegie
If we are growing we are always going to be outside our comfort zone.
- John C. Maxwell
Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Ideas… they have the power.
- Napoleon Hill
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
Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.
- Ben Horowitz
Just saying you are better than good won’t make it so. But, when you understand what it takes to live the better than good life, and you apply yourself, your life will truly be better than good.
- Zig Ziglar
You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success.
- Zig Ziglar
We cannot become what we need by remaining what we are.
- John C. Maxwell
Any time a company grows as fast as Wal-Mart has, pockets of duplication are going to build up, and there will be areas of the business which we may no longer need. No boss or employee really likes to dwell on such matters; it’s only human nature not to want to have your job, or the jobs of the people who work for you, eliminated. But it is absolutely the responsibility of a company’s top management to be thinking about this issue all the time – to ensure the sound future for the overall company.
- Sam Walton
Do not look like you are playing the fiddle while Rome is burning….stay focussed – Paraphrased from
- David Novak
Eventually, all companies are replaced.
- Bill Gates
Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: 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. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.
- Peter Thiel
When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.
- Thomas Edison
Post-9/11, we saw an immediate uptick in the amount of people in our stores, all over the country. People wanted that human connection. We are not going to fracture the Starbucks experience.
- Howard Schultz
Every single important thing we do is something we didn’t use to be good at, and in fact, might be something we used to fear.
- Seth Godin
Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract failure.
- Timothy Ferriss
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I think that any wealth creates a sense of trusteeship… it is characteristic of the new generation which has created wealth to have some amount of responsibility for it.
- Azim Premji
Never consider the possibility of failure. As long as you persist, you will be successful.
- Brian Tracy
