But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.
- Timothy Ferriss
Notable Quotables
I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817–1862)
- Timothy Ferriss
Schools have figured this out. They need shortcuts in order to successfully process millions of students a year, and they’ve discovered that fear is a great shortcut on the way to teaching compliance.
- Seth Godin
Nobody is actually a natural C.E.O.
- Ben Horowitz
Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it’s digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules – not just for governments but for private companies.
- Bill Gates
Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.
- Peter Thiel
God, I’m not going to look at what I don’t have. I’m looking unto you. I know in my weakness, you show up the strongest.
- Joel Olsteen
Ironically, the biggest obstacle to putting a training program in place is the perception that it will take too much time. Keep in mind that there is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company. Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat. Furthermore, it’s not that hard to create basic training courses.
- Ben Horowitz
A decade and a half ago an ‘Esquire’ magazine reporter, noting our advertising played up the heros as aspects of great atheletes asked the question, who is your hero? My answer was simple. My college track coach and partner, Bill Bowerman. He had won four national championships, coached more sub four minute milers than anyone when he retired. He was the 1972 Olympic coach yet he insisted he was not a track coach. He was a professor of competitive response.
- Phil Knight
A man without a smiling face must not open a shop.
- Dale Carnegie
I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.
- Elon Musk
As you begin changing your thinking, start immediately to change your behavior. Begin to act the part of the person you would like to become. Take action on your behavior. Too many people want to feel, then take action. This never works.
- John C. Maxwell
It is one thing to see the forward path and another to be able to take it. But it is better to have an ambitious plan than none at all.
- Winston Churchill
The general upward trend in residential property prices seems to be continuing, with the luxury end of the residential market poised to show better performance in particular.
- Lee Shau Kee
If I’d had some set idea of a finish line, don’t you think I would have crossed it years ago?
- Bill Gates
If you don’t change the direction you are going, then you’re likely to end up where you’re heading…
- John C. Maxwell
I am more of a creative person. I recognize that about myself, which is why I hired my weaknesses early on. I think if most founders don’t relinquish some control, then we hold back the development of our companies.
- Sara Blakely
Whatever you accept your employees will expect.
- Clifton Taulbert
Churchill was in the lavatory in the House of Commons and his secretary knocked on the door and said: Excuse me Prime Minister, but the Lord Privy Seal wishes to speak to you. After a pause Churchill replied: Tell His Lordship: I’m sealed on The Privy and can only deal with one shit at a time.
- Winston Churchill
We must … balance the fact that innovation inside the network is just as important as innovation in services and devices connected to the Internet. Broadband Internet access service providers should remain free to engage in pro-competitive network management techniques to alleviate congestion, ameliorate capacity constraints, and enable new services.
- John Chambers
I want people to learn what democracy means.
- Jack Ma
Sports is like rock ‘n’ roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.
- Phil Knight
To integrate the new information into your existing network, you need to do three things: prioritize, organize and follow up on your contacts. You will follow your own inclinations, preferences and criteria for accomplishing each of these tasks, but the end result of your efforts should always be to strengthen, extend and enhance the effectiveness of your network of contacts.
- Ivan Misner
Good and great are seldom in the same man.
- Winston Churchill
The best way to predict the Future is with a Great, Unique Abilities Team
- Terry Powell
Opportunity is often missed because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas Edison
A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things.
- Yoda
The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it does exist.
- Zig Ziglar
Encouragement to others is something everyone can give. Somebody needs what you have to give. It may not be your money, it may be your time. It may be your listening ear. It may be your arms to encourage. It may be your smile to uplift. Who knows?
- Joel Olsteen
The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we’re a long, long ways from that.
- Larry Page
There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
- Timothy Ferriss
1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
- Timothy Ferriss
Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.
- John F. Kennedy
Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.
- John D. Rockefeller
A lot of churches have not moved with the times.
- Joel Olsteen
We are very happy to be reporting that our pro-forma earnings passed the $1 billion mark for the first time.
- John Chambers
Then he fell on his knees and cried out, Lord do not hold this sin against them. When he said this, he fell asleep (he died).
- Acts 7:60
I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture – I’d write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
- Reid Hoffman
What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 million years. It’s about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it’s something that people have wanted forever.
- Seth Godin
Where you start is not as important as where you finish.
- Zig Ziglar
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
India has the potential to be our biggest market in Asia, bigger than China, in as much as two to five years.
- John Chambers
We’ve got to lift our game tremendously. We’ll sell our business news and information in print, we’ll sell it to anyone who’s got a cable system, and we’ll sell it on the Web.
- Rupert Murdoch
I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.
- Joel Olsteen
Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?
- Winston Churchill
The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I loved to make people laugh in high school, and then I found I loved being on stage in front of people. I’m sure that’s some kind of ego trip or a way to overcome shyness. I was very kind of shy and reserved, so there’s a way to be on stage and be performing and balance your life out.
- Steve Martin
When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.
- Rupert Murdoch
our skills and talent, but above all, be tenacious. See yourself as victorious–which means never giving up
- Donald Trump
You shouldn’t do things differently just because they’re different. They need to be… better.
- Elon Musk
I mean we all need a second chance sometimes.
- Joel Olsteen
Being productive gives people a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that loafing never can.
- Zig Ziglar
In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.
- John C. Maxwell
Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up.
- Sam Walton
The minute there’s a map, there is no art. Paint by numbers is not art. Paint by numbers is a mechanical activity.
- Seth Godin
In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.
- Jeff Bezos
‘We are interested in others when they are interested in us.
- Publilius Syrus
I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.
- Ben Horowitz
Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose…
- Thomas Edison
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
- Winston Churchill
We want Google to be the third half of your brain.
- Sergey Brin
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
- Warren Buffett
I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.
- Bill Gates
In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come.
- Peter Thiel
I believe God, Jesus, died that we not just go to Heaven but that we excel in this life. I never think you make money your goal… God wants you to excel. Just keep Him in first place, and God will open up doors you never dreamed of.
- Joel Olsteen
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 read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
- Bill Gates
I wasn’t prepared for this big room with clattering typewriters and teletype printers. You could hardly hear yourself think.
- Ray Kroc
This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
- Winston Churchill
Sometimes what works 40 years ago doesn’t work today.
- Joel Olsteen
We asked ourselves what we wanted this company to stand for. We didn’t want to just sell shoes. I wasn’t even into shoes – but I was pasionate about customer service.
- Tony Hsieh
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?
- Peter Thiel
A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.
- James C. Collins
This shows you are never too old to get surprised.
- Jack Welch
Great vision without great people is irrelevant.
- Jim Collins
Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.
- Winston Churchill
Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.
- Seth Godin
Certainly, we continue to bring in new people. We’ll hire, net new, over 4,000 people this year, and attract great people into the company. I’m very bullish about the employee base and what it can accomplish.
- Steve Ballmer
Broadcast TV is like the landline of 20 years ago.
- Reed Hastings
It truly levels the playing field and puts all the emphasis on the content. And all the emphasis on the merit of the idea.
- Jack Dorsey
Your story needs to move people’s spirits and build their goodwill, so that when you finally do ask them to buy from you, they feel like you’ve given them so much it would be almost rude to refuse.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Most comedies are really hard to write, or to watch, because you kind of generally know what’s coming.
- Steve Martin
I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.
- Herbert Bayard Swope
People don’t believe what you tell them.They rarely believe what you show them.They often believe what their friends tell them.They always believe what they tell themselves.
- Seth Godin
I don’t know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.
- Reed Hastings
Separate performance from people.
- David Robinson
For any Silicon Valley company, the most important thing is the company. And any great founders need to get out of the way of the company. We presented a spark with an idea.
- Jack Dorsey
Newspaper readership is still growing in India.
- Bill Gates
Reckless he is. Matters are worse.
- Yoda
Quejarse es estúpido. Actúa u olvídalo.
- Stefan Sagmeister
He was contradicting everything he’d taught us about not running sick and making it worse. I knew it was just to make me acknowledge that his word was law, no matter how arbitrary. But that didn’t make it any easier to take. I was so mad I ran a personal record.
- Phil Knight
Our business is about technology, yes. But it’s also about operations and customer relationships.
- Michael Dell
I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.
- Bill Gates
The techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist.
- Clayton M. Christensen
You can change everything about your business by changing your thinking about your business.
- Zig Ziglar
My main purpose in life is to make enough money to create ever more inventions…. The dove is my emblem…. I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it…. I am proud of the fact that I have never invented weapons to kill….
- Thomas Edison
God will not pour fresh, creative ideas and blessing into old attitudes.
- Joel Olsteen
I guarantee you it will not be anyone from the outside.
- Jack Welch
[On the Nike logo] I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.
- Phil Knight
