You can’t build any kind of organization if you’re not going to surround yourself with people who have experience and skill base beyond your own.
- Howard Schultz
Notable Quotables
It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow through.
- Zig Ziglar
I believe that one of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.
- Oprah Winfrey
So the challenge, as you contemplate your next opportunity to be boring or remarkable, is to answer these two questions: (1) “If I get criticized for this, will I suffer any measurable impact? Will I lose my job, get hit upside the head with a softball bat, or lose important friendships?” If the only side effect of the criticism is that you will feel bad about the criticism, then you have to compare that bad feeling with the benefits you’ll get from actually doing something worth doing. Being remarkable is exciting, fun, profitable, and great for your career. Feeling bad wears off. And then, once you’ve compared the bad feeling and the benefits, and you’ve sold yourself on taking the remarkable path, answer this one: (2) How can I create something that critics will criticize?
- Seth Godin
I didn’t like the way it looked in white trousers, and I couldn’t find anything to work underneath them.
- Sara Blakely
If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings and put compensation as a carrier behind it you almost don’t have to manage them.
- Jack Welch
What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.
- Dave Thomas
Buoyant consumer confidence will continue to underpin retial spending and hence rental growth for shopping centres. The office market is expected to perform well on the back of tight supply being met by keen demand from companies looking for expansion opportunities.
- Lee Shau Kee
Pacifists become militants. Freedom fighters become tyrants. Blessings become curses. Help becomes hindrance. More becomes less.
- Timothy Ferriss
A goal without real consequences is wishful thinking. Good follow-through doesn’t depend on the right intentions. It depends on the right incentives.
- Timothy Ferriss
I get great satisfaction from both business and philanthropy.
- Donald Bren
Make today worth remembering.
- Zig Ziglar
Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don’t have investments in.
- Ben Horowitz
The real benefit of having goals is what you become by reaching them.
- Zig Ziglar
Music plays a very important role in my life. I’m a frustrated musician. I play the drums.
- Ronald Perelman
A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn’t dramatic.
- Ray Dalio
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.
- Peter Thiel
I came from a Hindi medium school… the principal felt that I would not fit into an English medium college. Though I was top in my class in school, and I got admission in other colleges, but I really wanted to study in St. Xavier’s.
- Lakshmi Mittal
Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.
- Peter Thiel
Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.
- Bill Gates
We will be one of the most productive residential developers in China in the next few years.
- Lee Shau Kee
Our brand at Netflix is really focused on movies and TV shows.
- Reed Hastings
your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor.
- Dale Carnegie
Ideas are cheap. The difficult part is finding the team to execute them.
- Raymond Kwok
No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.
- Peter Drucker
Leadership is hard to train on.
- Ben Horowitz
We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.
- Jerry Seinfeld
There is a real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment.
- Norman Vincent Peale
Always deliver more than expected.
- Larry Page
Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I’d try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, ‘This is the end.’ I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.
- Rupert Murdoch
I will not talk to God about how big my problems are. I will talk to my problems about how big my God is. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
Young people in China and Hong Kong are the future of the motherland.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
- Dale Carnegie
Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.
- Bill Gates
Just because you don’t announce your plan doesn’t mean you don’t have one.
- Herb Kelleher
What is not started will never get finished
- Johann Wolf gang von Goethe
Frank Wells 1888 instruction to his agents: The most polite and gentlemanly treatment of all customers, however insignificant in their business, is insisted upon. Proper respect must be shown to all – let them be men, women or children, rich or poor, white or black – it must not be forgotten, that the company is dependent on these people for its business.
- Frank Wells
If you’re not one or two in the market, you don’t make money. The market leaders make the money.
- Jack Welch
A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.
- Winston Churchill
For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
- Bill Gates
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
I like to live in the past. I don’t think people are going to get much fun in the future.
- Winston Churchill
The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world.
- Richard Branson
Just like Mark Snider told the Board of Elections within a couple hours of when he first became aware of it… first of all, Mike and I didn’t even know anything about this till March 16, … Second of all, nobody benefited from this in any way, shape or form whatsoever.
- Michael Ward
People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.
- Bill Gates
Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.
- Winston Churchill
A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.
- Richard Branson
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
- Henry Ford
A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.
- Bill Gates
If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.
- Reid Hoffman
My worry about the New York Times is that it’s got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we’d love to challenge it.
- Rupert Murdoch
Treat your life like a game.
- Ray Dalio
Investing in courage and determination was an easy decision for me.
- Ben Horowitz
Too often, we have tended to fall into a trap of creating plain hamburgers.
- Tadashi Yanai
Definiteness of purpose is the starting point from which one must begin. He recognized, too that definiteness of purpose of takes on animation, life, and power when backed by a burning desire to translate that purpose into its material equivalent. – Napoleon Hill (on leadership and vision)
- Napoleon Hill
Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.
- Russell Simmons
But this “spray and pray” approach usually produces an entire portfolio of flops, with no hits at all. This is because venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.
- Peter Thiel
We are consolidating our position as one of the leading technology companies in the automotive industry. Research and development expenditure of another 6 percent of our sales or around €2.1 billion is fueling our capacity for innovation. There are very few companies in the industry that are able to operate in these dimensions.
- Elmar Degenhart
The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.
- Michael Bloomberg
Tesla is becoming a real car company.
- Elon Musk
If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.
- Rupert Murdoch
When an entrepreneur has an object in his line of vision, he should dismiss all other considerations from his mind, abandon all other activities, and charge directly at that object, continuing to charge until the object has been secured.
- Paul Johnson
For many people, extended reading sessions on an LCD display cause eyestrain.
- Jeff Bezos
[Medco] had a different culture with respect to spending money. I believe health care demands that we be as frugal as possible and pay money for things that matter. We’re pretty frugal. Everybody has the same size offices. Everybody has the same size cube. There are no perks.
- George Paz
While 9:00 to 5:00 and what happens in the job is important… what happens from 5:00 – 9:00 while you’re off the job is INFINITELY more important.
- Zig Ziglar
Making money from money is like aerobatics.
- Alisher Usmanov
If you do not believe in your product or service enough to offer it to your own family and friends, then you should question the value of what you are selling.
- Zig Ziglar
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
However, for equity to create commitment rather than conflict, you must allocate it very carefully. Giving everyone equal shares is usually a mistake: every individual has different talents and responsibilities as well as different opportunity costs, so equal amounts will seem arbitrary and unfair from the start. On the other hand, granting different amounts up front is just as sure to seem unfair. Resentment at this stage can kill a company, but there’s no ownership formula to perfectly avoid it.
- Peter Thiel
I understood the importance of hiring for strength rather than for lack of weakness, and I understood the meaning of “fit.”
- Ben Horowitz
We can schedule for it. Thursday, April 3rd, 3:05…start something. We can train for it, plan for it, announce it, and even hire for it. If initiating is as essential to the modern organization as it appears, we better be doing all of that and more.
- Seth Godin
You may have made a lot of wrong choices, but you’ve also made a lot of choices that were right. Focus on your good qualities. Focus on your victories. Get off the treadmill of guilt.
- Joel Olsteen
The older I get, the better I understand that every day is a gift.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m a strange mixture of my mother’s curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother’s father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.
- Rupert Murdoch
When people write checks, they are depleting an asset. And when people are using credit cards, they are increasing their liabilities. In other words, credit cards make it so much easier to get deeper and deeper into debt by increasing your monthly liabilties.
- Robert Kiyosaki
We can be certain that cities around the world will compete for the jobs that the next revival of the financial services industry will bring.
- Michael Bloomberg
If you want success, if you want wisdom, if you want to be prosperous and healthy, you’re going to have to do more than meditate and believe; you must boldly declare words of faith and victory over yourself and your family.
- Joel Olsteen
If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.
- Jack Welch
You may think there is a lot wrong with you, but there is also a lot right with you.
- Joel Olsteen
Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple—many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.
- Timothy Ferriss
Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
- Steve Jobs
But what do average people do? The exact opposite. If they don’t like a thing, they bawl out their subordinates; if they do like it, they say nothing.
- Dale Carnegie
After it is all over, the religion of man is his most important possession.
- John D. Rockefeller
Poker is a game where you don’t have to have the best hand to win. Poker is really reading other people and reading human emotion, which certainly comes into play in business.
- Charles Ergen
If you ask me what I worry about every morning when I wake up, it’s that I don’t understand future mainstream Internet users’ habits.
- Ma Huateng
Save your first bucket of gold… then use it for investments.
- Lee Shau Kee
Dreams are extremely important. You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.
- George Lucas
Many marriages would be better if the husband and wife clearly understood that they’re on the same side.
- Zig Ziglar
Two men looked out from prison bars, One saw the mud, the other saw the stars.
- Dale Carnegie
I seek constantly to improve my manners and graces, for they are the sugar to which all are attracted.
- Og Mandino
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
- Warren Buffett
I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.
- Sam Walton
That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity. —BERYL MARKHAM, West with the Night1
- James C. Collins
Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.
- Peter Drucker
G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. … We found that they don’t predict anything.
- Laszlo Bock
The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).
- Peter Thiel
Don’t become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific.
- Zig Ziglar
Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
- Colin Powell
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
Half the battle is selling music, not singing it. It’s the image, not what you sing.
- Rod Stewart
