We have the best flat land, you can grow anything in the cheapest possible way; turning Nigeria around is not really that difficult. Nigeria is really the best place to invest, it is one of the places to make money; all over the world it (Nigeria) is the best kept secret actually in terms of investment.
- Aliko Dangote
Notable Quotables
Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.
- Mary Kay Ash
The life of a startup is full of ups and downs, an emotional roller coaster ride that you can’t quite imagine if you’ve spent your whole career in a corporation.
- Harvey Mackay
Dreamline Questions:What are you good at?What could you be the best at?What makes you happy?What excites you?What makes you feel accomplished and good about yourself?What are you most proud of having accomplished in your life? Can you repeat this or further develop it?What do you enjoy sharing or experiencing with other people?
- Timothy Ferriss
If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge.
- Dale Carnegie
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
- Winston Churchill
All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.
- Peter Thiel
If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Sports is like rock ‘n’ roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.
- Phil Knight
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.
- Bill Gates
Never forget, the real secret of giving advice is this: Once you’ve given it, don’t concern yourself with whether it is followed or not, and refrain from saying ‘I told you so.’
- Harvey Mackay
I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.
- Bill Gates
I will everyday as just a blow from my blade against a mighty oak…strike until it falls quote.
- Og Mandino
Effort is grossly underrated.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Starting isn’t like that. Starting something is not an event; it’s a series of events. You decide to walk to Cleveland. So you take a first step in the right direction. That’s starting. You spend the rest of the day walking toward Cleveland, one step at a time, picking your feet up and putting them down. At the end of the day, twenty miles later, you stop at a hotel. And what happens the next morning? Either you quit the project or you start again, walking to Cleveland. In fact, every step is a new beginning. Sure, you’re closer than you were yesterday or last week, but you’re still…
- Seth Godin
A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.
- John Shedd
I work hard, I eat fishballs and noodles. I drink coffee and tea from a street vendor. I am quite casual about personal wealth, life hasn’t changed at all.
- Lui Che Woo
To be willing to do new things you don’t think you’ll like requires you to prefer the unknown. Not just to tolerate it, but to prefer it. One way to achieve that is to set out to experience things you’re sure you won’t like. To have conversations that are frightening. Becoming generous beyond measure, just to see what happens. And most of all, setting out to fail. Failing helps you see how far is too far, failing helps remind you that failing isn’t fatal, and most of all, failing opens you up to succeeding.
- Seth Godin
If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
- Elon Musk
Believe that you will succeed — and you will.
- Dale Carnegie
Energy is the essence of life. Every day you decide how you’re going to use it by knowing what you want and what it takes to reach that goal, and by maintaining focus.
- Oprah Winfrey
I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.
- Elon Musk
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
Tesla is becoming a real car company.
- Elon Musk
Really, truly, try to figure out what your palate is all about. If you’ve determined that you don’t like dirty old stinky wine – old-world flavors – you probably like new-world fruit bombs. Stick to Shirazes and California Cabernets or Zinfandels.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
A bigger business is like a cruise ship: There are lots of amenities and you can go a lot further, but it’s harder to turn quickly.
- Tony Hsieh
More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.
- Peter Drucker
Play the game for more than you can afford to lose . . . only then will you learn the game.
- Zig Ziglar
Bell took the opposite approach, building multiple restaurants in a single neighborhood to eliminate the competition. It’s a strategy that’s widely used today by many companies like Starbuck’s, Barnes & Noble, and many others, and it worked for Bell.
- David Novak
You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.
- Warren Buffett
There is an immeasurable distance between late and too late.
- Og Mandino
Cooperativeness in conversation is achieved when you show that you consider the other person’s ideas and feelings as important as your own.
- Dale Carnegie
There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.
- Jeff Bezos
A great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future. Investors expect Twitter will be able to capture monopoly profits over the next decade, while newspapers’ monopoly days are over.
- Peter Thiel
I have many children, as you seek you may find that this the last one till he must die before he must reach the becoming of mankind. Many men have failed but i have surpassed their expectation of being a Jedi master.
- Yoda
When you make a TV show, they always say you’re a guest in someone’s home. Online, you’re a guest in someone’s face. So that’s why I try to make it sound and look and feel very inviting and attractive, because I know that I’m in your face.
- Jerry Seinfeld
The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.
- Warren Buffett
In the game of life, before you get anything out, you must put something in!
- Zig Ziglar
A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.
- Winston Churchill
In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we’d go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father’s televised service for 17 years.
- Joel Olsteen
God made you a masterpiece – be blessed, secure, disciplined and equipped.
- Joel Olsteen
I don’t know how you can justify leaving any engagement behind in the social Web of 2011.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
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
We’re taking these steps because of the continuing slowdown in the U.S. economy and initial signs of a slowdown expanding to other parts of the world.
- John Chambers
Many people say the privatisation was unfair: that is true – it was unfair. That is a fact: some people became rich and others did not. Unfair does not mean illegal, but it was inevitably unfair.
- Vladimir Potanin
When enough people care about autism or diabetes or global warming, it helps everyone, even if only a tiny fraction actively participate.
- Seth Godin
Most people believe that results matter. The idea that results matter is one that you have to keep letting go of. And most of the time, I believe it.
- Russell Simmons
The secret of your success is found in your daily routine
- John Maxwell
Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.
- Bill Gates
I think it’s quite great to set yourself a big challenge, and then you’ve got another reason for keeping fit.
- Richard Branson
A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.
- Steve Martin
Stop doing things that waste time. Don’t replace time with your family or things that you need to do. I needed to put together two fantasy teams this weekend because that’s something I enjoy, but I did stop playing Nintendo Wii for hours on end.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.
- Bill Gates
Practice is simply preparation for success.
- Zig Ziglar
It was a big momentum deal, so when the bottom comes out from under it, you have to go back to the well and start the whole thing.
- Travis Kalanick
Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth…. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.
- Viktor E. Frankl
You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.
- Larry Ellison
Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.
- Sam Walton
You can change your world by changing your words… Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.
- Joel Olsteen
This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all.
- Peter Thiel
They have done great things within what you would call established American sports. Freddy has the potential to bring soccer almost for the first time into the public’s consciousness. Soccer in the United States isn’t really part of the culture. What it needs, I think, is a superhero, and he clearly could be it. Now, that’s putting a lot of pressure on him, but the kid’s got all the potential to do that.
- Phil Knight
Okay, let’s talk about cartoon labels for half a second – some people think anything with a dog or a car or a colorful alien is garbage, which is not true. Look at Big Moose Red. It’s, like, a $6 wine with a cheesy label, and it’s actually a solid wine.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
We had been kicked out of one bank… The second, it was touch and go…
- Phil Knight
Dios ve el valor que usted tiene, y sabe en lo que le está convirtiendo. A veces nos miramos a nosotros mismos y pensamos: Tengo muchas imperfecciones. Tengo mal genio. Tengo un problema con mi boca. No soy tan disciplinado”. Vemos el barro, pero Dios ve la hermosa taza. La buena noticia es que usted no es un producto terminado. Dios sigue obrando, y si trabaja usted con Dios y le permite eliminar esas impurezas, Él hará más con su vida de lo que usted nunca soñó.
- Joel Olsteen
It’s not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it’s a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.
- Elon Musk
Every person has a longing to be significant, to make a contribution, to be a part of something noble and purposeful.
- John C. Maxwell
I’ve been blessed to find people who are smarter than I am, and they help me to execute the vision I have.
- Russell Simmons
On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better.
- Reed Hastings
After all, a man’s Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action. Without work there is no play.
- Winston Churchill
Nowhere are the benefits of closer economic ties more pronounced than in Mainland China and Hong Kong. The two places have their own advantages. One has the manpower, natural resources and manufacturing might, while the other has the management skills and marketing know-how.
- Cheng Yu-tung
This is a learning in the business life that first of all you need to have commitment, dedication and passion for what you are doing.
- Lakshmi Mittal
Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos’s founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books—those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock—also drew the most enthusiastic customers. Amazon became the dominant solution for anyone located far from a bookstore or seeking something unusual. Amazon then had two options: expand the number of people who read books, or expand to adjacent markets. They chose the latter, starting with the most similar markets: CDs, videos, and software. Amazon continued to add categories gradually until it had become the world’s general store. The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company’s scaling strategy.
- Peter Thiel
A lot of people quit looking for work as soon as they find a job.
- Zig Ziglar
I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.
- Elon Musk
Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars. Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait. The grip of your hand, the irresistible surge of will and energy to execute your ideas.
- Henry Ford
I think that the act of teaching is the most gratifying and rewarding of all human endeavors.
- David Novak
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly–until you can learn to do it well.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s vital that you accept yourself and learn to be happy with who God made you to be. If you want to truly enjoy your life, you must be at peace with yourself.
- Joel Olsteen
The person who knows one thing and does it better than anyone else, even if it only be the art of raising lentils, receives the crown he merits. If he raises all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor of mankind and its rewarded as such.
- Og Mandino
Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.
- Bill Gates
I think there is probably no better person to aspire to emulate than Steve Jobs and what he has done at Apple in terms of his leadership, his innovation, not settling for mediocrity.
- Howard Schultz
Good leaders know that one secret to success is to staff their weaknesses.
- John Maxwell
For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary.
- Peter Thiel
It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not.
- Bill Gates
There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.
- Ben Horowitz
I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.
- Sam Walton
Satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels.
- Rupert Murdoch
We’re totally legal, like totally legal, and the government is telling us to shut down. And you can either do what they say or you can fight for what you believe.
- Travis Kalanick
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
When I was at Kingsoft, I was under pressure and worked hard, but the results were not satisfactory.
- Lei Jun
As it happened, we did extraordinarily well with our Newport Wal-Mart, and it wasn’t too long before the old Ben Franklin store I had run on Front Street had to close its doors. You can’t say we ran that guy – the landlord’s son – out of business. His customers were the ones who shut him down. They voted with their feet. Quite a few smaller stores have gone out of business during the time of Wal-Mart’s growth. Some people have tried to turn it into this big controversy, sort of a Save the Small-Town Merchants deal, like they were whales or whooping cranes of something that has the right to be protected…If you become a large-scale success it’s Katie bar the door. Suddenly, you make a very convenient villian because everybody seems to love shooting at who’s on top.
- Sam Walton
I’ve got the greatest job in the world. There’s no other job in government where cause and effect is so tightly coupled where you can make a difference every day in so many different ways and in so many different people’s lives. It’s a great challenge.
- Michael Bloomberg
We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.
- Peter Drucker
Rockefeller’s supreme insight was that he could solve the oil industry’s problems by solving the railroad’s problems at the same time, creating a double cartel in oil and rails. One of Rockefeller’s strength in bargaining situations was that he figured out what he wanted and what the other party wanted and then crafted mutually advanteous terms. Instead of ruining the railroads, Rockefeller tried to help them prosper, albeit in away that fortified his own position.
- Ron Chernow
Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It’s just cultural. People just don’t want to do it.
- Jack Welch
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
The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.
- Jerry Seinfeld
The future of gambling is as an entertainment business.
- Lui Che Woo
He had all the attributes of a perfect man, and, in my opinion, no finer personality ever existed.
- Thomas Edison
It’s amazing how people will give when you don’t ask. Many of them send money because they believe in the message.
- Joel Olsteen
