Notable Quotables

Real entrepreneurs have what I call the three Ps (and, trust me, none of them stands for ‘permission’). Real entrepreneurs have a ‘passion’ for what they’re doing, a ‘problem’ that needs to be solved, and a ‘purpose’ that drives them forward.

- Michael Dell

If You Have A Lemon, Make A Lemonade That is what a great educator does. But the fool does the exact opposite. If he finds that life has handed him a lemon, he gives up and says: I’m beaten. It is fate. I haven’t got a chance. Then he proceeds to rail against the world and indulge in an orgy of selfpity. But when the wise man is handed a lemon, he says: What lesson can I learn from this misfortune? How can I improve my situation? How can I turn this lemon into a lemonade?

- Dale Carnegie

You shouldn’t do things differently just because they’re different. They need to be… better.

- Elon Musk

People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.

- Timothy Ferriss

STARTUP THINKING New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.

- Peter Thiel

Know your numbers’ is a fundamental precept of business.

- Bill Gates

Technological advance seemed to accelerate automatically, so the Boomers grew up with great expectations but few specific plans for how to fulfill them.

- Peter Thiel

Building companies involves creating great wealth. If that means I am an oligarch, OK, it’s fine. But if being an oligarch is about buying football clubs, it is not for me.

- Alexei Mordashov

People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet – how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.

- Jeff Bezos

Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.

- George Soros

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

- Robert Kennedy

If Alibaba cannot become a Microsoft or Wal-Mart, I will regret it for the rest of my life.

- Jack Ma

We often hear military experts inculcate the doctrine of giving priority to the decisive theatre. There is a lot in this. But in war this principle, like all others, is governed by facts and circumstances; otherwise strategy would be too easy. It would become a drill-book and not an art; it would depend upon rules and not on an instructed and fortunate judgment of the proportions of an ever-changing scene.

- Winston Churchill

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

The garden gleams with summer jewelry. We live vy simply—but with all the essentials of life well understood & well provided for—hot baths, cold champagne, new peas, & old brandy.

- Winston Churchill

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

- Elon Musk

We have to realize that our lives could be gone in a moment. There are no guarantees that we will be here at this time next year. Learn to live each day to the fullest. Don’t complain. Don’t focus on what’s wrong. Be grateful for the opportunity to experience each day.

- Joel Olsteen

Differentiation favors people who are energetic and extroverted and undervalues people who are shy and introverted, even if they are talented.

- Jack Welch

They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.

- Thomas Edison

Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.

- Ben Horowitz

I actually think that the economy has got some positives. It’s got the market. It’s got consumer confidence and it’s got banks throwing – I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world.

- Jack Welch

Churchill kept perspective on the crowds that gathered to hear him speak by conceding they would be twice as big if gathered to see him hanged.

- Winston Churchill

I am a tightwad. That’s one of the main reasons I completed a long questionnaire for a crispy $1 bill. Why else would I spend two or three hours being personally interviewed by these authors? They paid me $100, $200, or $250. Oh, they made me another offer–to donate in my name the money I earned for my interview to my favorite charity. But I told them, I am my favorite charity.

- Thomas J Stanley

The real problem when working with a consultant, a therapist or a coach isn’t that we don’t know what to do. The real problem is that we don’t want to change our mind.

- Seth Godin

Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game, because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win. Setting your own standards–and living up to them–is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put into it.

- Seth Godin

Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. Pick people who are interested in what you’re interested in.

- Russell Simmons

Every time you resist temptation you are winning for your children.

- Joel Olsteen

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

- Peter Drucker

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

- Seth Godin

I am going to enjoy some other things apart from business.

- Jack Ma

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

The growth of the company and the license that Starbucks has is to participate in other food and beverage opportunities. We have a global business… and in many parts of the world, tea is much, much bigger than coffee, and we’re going to bring tea and bring our capability and our understanding of what we’ve done for coffee to tea.

- Howard Schultz

Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that.

- Steve Ballmer

Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.

- Peter Drucker

Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.

- Ben Horowitz

[On stopping working and focussing 100% on his company Nike] I was still teaching accounting, but the next year, I told Penny [married in 1968] if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I’m going to go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000. I said, that ‘s close enough.

- Phil Knight

In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there’s such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.

- Bill Gates

Role play with yourself to answer questions to a cynic, optimist, and be able play devil’s advocate.

- Maurice Kanbar

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

Movies always are open to being remade because times change so much, and the tempo of movies changes. I think of it like a James Bond. They can have different actors play the same role… I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘We want to remake ‘The Jerk’ with so and so.’ And I say, ‘Fine.’ It just doesn’t bother me. It’s an honor actually.

- Steve Martin

We are not in the business of iron ore. Whatever captive iron ore sources we have, we use it to make steel.

- Lakshmi Mittal

If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

- Bill Gates

I always say, ‘To have a big dream requires the same effort as having a small dream. Dream big!’

- Jorge Paulo Lemann

One challenge is the Peter Principle. Coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book of that name, the Peter Principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain being unable to earn further promotions.

- Ben Horowitz

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

- Henry Ford

You want your customers to value your service.

- Jeff Bezos

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

Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

- Bill Gates

Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

- Bill Gates

Investing in Chicago property is just Wanda’s first move into the U.S. real estate market.

- Wang Jianlin

If you look upon chronic diseases as an epidemic, and you see that the chronically ill are the poor, then you see that this issue of the uninsured is not really a moral but a financial obligation to change health care.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

TweetDeck is a very interesting client, because it presents a view that no other client in the world presents, which is this multicolumn, massive amounts of information in one pane. And people really, really enjoy that.

- Jack Dorsey

The overall dynamic was net positive, unlike Napster’s negative-sum struggle with the U.S. recording industry. As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.

- Peter Thiel

Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed, A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden of weeds.

- John D. Rockefeller

Vision is perhaps our greatest strength… it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.

- Li Ka-shing

You’ve got to visualize where you’re headed and be very clear about it. Take a polaroid picture of where you’re going to be in a few years

- Sara Blakely

With sustained recovery of the local economy, marked improvement in consumer spending and increasing tourist arrivals from Mainland China, these led to the expansion of certain local retail trades including cosmetics, audio-visual products and jewellery which in turn boosted the demand for retail shop spaces.

- Lee Shau Kee

People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.

- Mark Zuckerberg

If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them—not that they are working for you.

- Sam Walton

Well, the odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first attempt. All of us who are attempting to go around the world in balloons are effectively flying in experimental craft because these craft cannot be tested.

- Richard Branson

the expression one wears on one’s face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one’s back

- Dale Carnegie

Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless.

- James C. Collins

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment Would you capture it? Or just let it slip?

- Marshall Bruce Mathers III

To lead people, walk beside them. As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence … When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’

- Lao Tzu

There’s a wonderful saying that’s dead wrong. ‘Why did you climb the mountain?’ ‘I climbed the mountain because it was there.’ That’s utter nonsense…You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.

- Larry Ellison

Never blindside an employee by firing them without warning.

- Clay Clark

When I was growing up, I always knew I’d be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence.

- Sergey Brin

You don’t even really need a place. But you feel like you’re doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.

- Seth Godin

The invaders brought into Britain a principle common to all Germanic tribes, namely, the use of the money power to regulate all the legal relations of men. If there was any equality it was equality within each social grade. If there was liberty it was mainly liberty for the rich. If there were rights they were primarily the rights of property. There was no crime committed which could not be compounded by a money payment.

- Winston Churchill

Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence. A good product manager is the CEO of the product. Good product managers take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product.

- Ben Horowitz

The Net is not television. It is the finest direct-marketing mechanism in the history of mankind. It is direct mail with free stamps, and it allows you to create richer and deeper relationships than you’ve ever been able to create before.

- Seth Godin

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, ‘Boy, those were great old days.’ Well, you know, we’re living in the good old days.

- Joel Olsteen

I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.

- Steve Martin

We obviously are getting to be one of the largest players in the industry, so it’s hard to grow faster than that number, … But we’re very, very pleased with the last quarter results of 53 percent year-over-year. That’s on the upside, so I wouldn’t get too optimistic when it goes above 50 percent, just like we encouraged people two years ago, when it went below 30 percent growth for us, not to get too pessimistic.

- John Chambers

I know Bo Xilai well. But our relationship was based on our work, we didn’t have a personal relationship.

- Wang Jianlin

The things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.

- Ben Horowitz

You must not ever think that anything is common sense.

- Clay Clark

Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.

- Peter Drucker

Fatigue makes fools of us all. It robs you of your skills and your judgment, and it blinds you to creative solutions. It’s the best-conditioned athlete, not the most talented, who generally wins when the going gets tough.

- Harvey Mackay

Facing reality sounds simple, but it isn’t. I found it hard to get people to see a situation for what it is and not for what it was, or what they hoped it would be.

- Jack Welch

Abe Lincoln once remarked that most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

- Dale Carnegie

In a position to be more accommodating. There are some lights at the end of the tunnel. If political leaders in Europe can put things in order, things will be better. These days, much relies on politics.

- Lee Shau Kee

Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.

- Steven Spielberg

Daimler uses Tesla’s battery packs, Mercedes-Benz uses a Tesla powertrain, Toyota uses a Tesla motor. General Motors has even created a task force to track Tesla’s next moves.

- Peter Thiel

If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.

- Ben Horowitz

Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

- Winston Churchill

An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople. In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups: 1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes. This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. 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. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

- Peter Thiel

You don’t have to choose between your business and your life. Rather, if you do it right, you get your business and your life. In fact, we strongly believe that the only way to build a truly scalable business is by radically reducing its reliance on you, the owner, and supporting that rapid growth through systems, team and internal business controls.

- Jeff Hoffman

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