Notable Quotables

I hate how many people think “glass half-empty” when their glass is really four-fifths full. I’m grateful when I have one drop in the glass because I know exactly what to do with it.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

- Viktor E. Frankl

The beauty of this deal is bringing a clinical expertise. Medco had developed therapeutic resource centers, where they got their pharmacist to have specialties in things like diabetes, heart problems and asthma. Express Scripts took a different approach. We tried to understand why people do what they do with behavioral economics, which is: What drives human behaviors? What drives people to do what they did? By combining those two pieces, we get that much stronger.

- George Paz

The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.

- Peter Thiel

Take the first step in faith, you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Do not swallow anything Satan is trying to ram down your throat. Jesus comes first.

- Joel Olsteen

The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.

- James C. Collins

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

- Elon Musk

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.

- Winston Churchill

The Mastermind principle consists of an alliance of two or more minds working in perfect harmony for the attainment of a common definite objective. Success does not come without the cooperation of others.

- Napoleon Hill

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

- Winston Churchill

If I complain about a traffic jam, I have no one to blame but myself.

- Stephen Wynn

You need editors, not brand managers,who will push the envelope to make [a brand media property] go forward.

- Seth Godin

Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money, non-monopolists can’t.

- Peter Thiel

We believe that according the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.’

- Warren Buffett

I had a feeling once about Mathematics – that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me – the Byss and Abyss. I saw – as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor’s Show – a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.

- Winston Churchill

The goal is to be able to live your life the way Michael Jordan played basketball, or Marvin Gaye sang a song. To be able to feel the way you feel when you laugh at a joke, but to feel that way all the time.

- Russell Simmons

Since we happened to be good at shoes, we thought we could be successful with casual shoes. But we got our brains beat out.

- Phil Knight

Sales is a simple conversation where I ask you questions and I relate to your answers.

- Bryan Smith

We don’t have the luxury of time. We spend more because of how we live, but it’s important to be with our family and friends.

- Sara Blakely

Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers. And once they arrive at Goldman, they find that even inside finance, everything is indefinite. It’s still optimistic—you wouldn’t play in the markets if you expected to lose—but the fundamental tenet is that the market is random; you can’t know anything specific or substantive; diversification becomes supremely important.

- Peter Thiel

Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.

- Zig Ziglar

Teaching Fire a LessonFire is hot. That’s what it does. If you get burned by fire, you can be annoyed at yourself, but being angry at fire doesn’t do you much good. And trying to teach the fire a lesson so it won’t be hot next time is certainly not time well spent.Our inclination is to give fire a pass, because it’s not human. But human beings are similar, in that they’re not going to change any time soon either.

- Seth Godin

I’ve talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 had one thing in common: They all wanted validation…I would tell you that every single person you will ever meet shares that common desire.

- Oprah Winfrey

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I can walk through a hotel lobby and watch people at the desk and see what they’re doing. People don’t look at me. They don’t even know I’m there.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

- Thomas Edison

I’m addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.

- Larry Ellison

Social entrepreneurs aim to combine the best of both worlds and “do well by doing good.” Usually they end up doing neither.

- Peter Thiel

Embrace what you don’t know, especially in the beginning because what you don’t know can become your greatest asset. It ensures that you will be doing things absolutely differently from everybody else.

- Sara Blakely

The first four months of 2001 were extremely challenging, … This may be the fastest deceleration any company of our size has ever experienced.

- John Chambers

Good habits are as addictive as bad habits, and a lot more rewarding.

- Harvey Mackay

Establish a core value that drives the business and helps promote it in perpetuity.

- Ben Horowitz

I’d like to dial it back 5% or 10% and try to have a vacation that’s not just e-mail with a view.

- Elon Musk

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

- Seneca

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.

- Thomas Edison

Tolerance for failure is a very specific part of the excellent company culture—and that lesson comes directly from the top. Champions have to make lots of tries and consequently suffer some failures or the organization won’t learn.

- Michael Gerber/ Thomas J. Peters and Robert H

I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

- Timothy Ferriss

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

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure

- Abraham Lincoln

The greatest decision of all time, as far as any American citizen is concerned was reached in Philadelphia, July 4th 1776, when 56 men signed their names to a document, which they well knew would bring freedom to all Americans, or leave every one of the fifty-six hanging from the gallows. On July 4th 1776 Thomas Jefferson stood before the Assembly and fearlessly read the most momentus Decision ever placed upon paper.

- Napoleon Hill

The ballplayer who loses his head can’t keep his cool, is worse than no ballplayer at all.

- Lou Gehrig

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

- Bill Gates

If you can’t be a pine on the top of the hill.Be a scrub in the valley-but beThe best little scrub by the side of the rill;Be a bush, if you can’t be a tree.If you can’t be a bush, be a bit of the grass.If you can’t be a muskie, then just be a bass-But the liveliest bass in the lake!We can’t all be captains, we’ve got to be crew.There’s something for all of us here.There’s big work to do and there’s lesser to doAnd the task we must do is the near.If you can’t be a highway, then just be a trail,If you can’t be the sun, be a star;It isn’t by the size that you win or you fail-Be the best of whatever you are!

- Douglas Malloch

I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort.

- Sergey Brin

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

- Bill Gates

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

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.

- John D. Rockefeller

Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.

- Warren Buffett

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.

- Jim Rohn

I have lots of sources of information about what’s going on at the company. I think I have a pretty good pulse on where we are and what people are thinking.

- Steve Ballmer

Anytime you look at anything that’s considered artistic, there’s a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can’t exist without it.

- Steve Martin

I don’t think there’s a… boundary between digital media and print media. Every magazine is doing an online version.

- Bill Gates

The work relationship has to be based on mutual respect. Psychological despotism is basically contemptuous—far more contemptuous than the traditional Theory X. It does not assume that people are lazy and resist work, but it assumes that the manager is healthy while everybody else is sick. It assumes that the manager is strong while everybody else is weak. It assumes that the manager knows while everybody else is ignorant. It assumes that the manager is right, whereas everybody else is stupid. These are the assumptions of foolish arrogance.

- Peter Drucker

Future public education will require involvement and collaboration among various local, civic, private and nonprofit entities, a concept I like to refer to as ‘community entrepreneurship.’

- Donald Bren

People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast.

- Peter Thiel

There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

- Sam Walton

Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.

- Steve Jobs

Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even in purely financial terms.

- Peter Thiel

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

People are using Windows PCs more than they watch TV now.

- Bill Gates

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.

- Steve Jobs

It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.

- Winston Churchill

Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

Think of Internet on the TV like the Web browser. The amount of time you spend on the PC in the browser is just going to grow continuously.

- Reed Hastings

To properly value a business, you also have to discount those future cash flows to their present worth, since a given amount of money today is worth more than the same amount in the future.

- Peter Thiel

If everybody is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction.

- Sam Walton

The pent-up demand for the good life in China is extraordinary.

- Stephen Wynn

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.

- Andrew Carnegie

On Facebook, the definition of great content is not the content that makes the most sales, but the content that people most want to share with others.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.

- Peter Thiel

Part of being a winner is knowing when enough is enough. Sometimes you have to give up the fight and walk away, and move on to something that’s more productive.

- Donald Trump

This implies two very strange rules for VCs. First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. This is a scary rule, because it eliminates the vast majority of possible investments. (Even quite successful companies usually succeed on a more humble scale.) This leads to rule number two: because rule number one is so restrictive, there can’t be any other rules.

- Peter Thiel

Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.

- Napoleon Hill

When you walk in God’s favor, His blessings will chase you down and overtake you.

- Joel Olsteen

The main cause of depression is traceable directly to the world-wide habit of trying to REAP without sowing.

- Napoleon Hill

To be awake is to be fully present, no noise, just you and God. Most of us only have seconds of full consciousness. To live in a state of Samadhi – that’s what we’re here for.

- Russell Simmons

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

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

- Seth Godin

My favorite museums are things like the Frick Museum in New York and the Huntington Hartford in Pasadena where it’s someone’s home that you walk through.

- Larry Ellison

Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.

- Sergey Brin

Journalists should think of themselves as outside the Establishment, and owners can’t be too worried about what they’re told at their country clubs.

- Rupert Murdoch

Access to play should be a kid’s inalienable right.

- Phil Knight

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It’s very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

- Jeff Bezos

Value and purpose are about understanding the specific benefits you will help people receive if they receive what you have for them.

- Zig Ziglar

Computers already have enough power to outperform people in activities we used to think of as distinctively human. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Jeopardy!’s best-ever contestant, Ken Jennings, succumbed to IBM’s Watson in 2011. And Google’s self-driving cars are already on California roads today. Dale Earnhardt Jr. needn’t feel threatened by them, but the Guardian worries (on behalf of the millions of chauffeurs and cabbies in the world) that self-driving cars “could drive the next wave of unemployment.

- Peter Thiel

If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.

- Seth Godin

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