Starting a company is a very tough thing. There’s a friend of mine, Bill Lee, whose phrase is ‘starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.’ So you should certainly expect that it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be harder than getting a job somewhere by a pretty good margin and the odds of you losing the money that you invested or your friends invested is pretty high. I mean, those are just the basic facts. So if you don’t mind things being really hard and high risk, then starting a company is a good idea. Otherwise, it’s probably unwise. It will certainly stress you out. So I think you have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.
- Elon Musk
Notable Quotables
There is no elevator to success…you have to take the stairs.
- Zig Ziglar
It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.
- John D. Rockefeller
In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn’t necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it.
- Seth Godin
I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a might oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today.
- Og Mandino
God can take what was meant for my harm and turn it around and use it to my advantage.
- Joel Olsteen
Men want to make women happy.
- Jerry Seinfeld
The protestor I think will speak up for the world’s poorest.
- Bill Gates
When nobody else celebrates you, learn to celebrate yourself. When nobody else compliments you, then compliment yourself. It’s not up to other people to keep you encouraged. It’s up to you. Encouragement should come from the inside.
- Joel Olsteen
What is Oracle? It’s people. We rely on our HR department to build this organization, to help find those people, to help grow those people.
- Larry Ellison
Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.
- Reed Hastings
God wants to bless us where we are.
- Joel Olsteen
The way to achieve happiness is to try for perfection that is impossible to achieve, and spend the rest of your life trying to achieve it.
- Winston Churchill
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
- Peter Drucker
The world got enamored with smartphones and tablets, but what’s interesting is those devices don’t do everything that needs to be done. Three-D printing, virtual-reality computing, robotics are all controlled by PCs.
- Michael Dell
While a definitely optimistic future would need engineers to design underwater cities and settlements in space, an indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers.
- Peter Thiel
I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.
- Elon Musk
Haiti should remind us all that there is an immediate need to invest in and promote long-term development projects that are sustainable, scalable, and proven to work.
- Bill Gates
Never allow anyone to get between you and your customers and suppliers.
- Jack Welch
If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.
- Warren Buffett
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
I’ve come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that’s as unique as a fingerprint – and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.
- Oprah Winfrey
An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.
- Elon Musk
The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.
- William Gibson
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
Don’t become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific.
- Zig Ziglar
The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.
- Seth Godin
Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.
- Peter Thiel
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
It’s been a long career, and I’ve made some mistakes along the way.
- Rupert Murdoch
Soon will I rest, yes, forever sleep. Earned it I have. Twilight is upon me, soon night must fall.
- Yoda
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
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
You create your own universe as you go along.
- Winston Churchill
There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.
- Bill Gates
Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.
- James C. Collins
The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.
- Peter Thiel
We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective.
- Peter Thiel
Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo. The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec is.
- Seth Godin
In order to lead a country or a company, you’ve got to get everybody on the same page and you’ve got to be able to have a vision of where you’re going. America can’t have a vision of health care for everybody, green economy, regulations – can’t have a bunch of piece-meal activities. It’s got to have a vision.
- Jack Welch
If values do not affect daily life, they are not values.
- Marty St. George
Although DJ Clay may never sleep, all of his dreams come true!
- Blake Fraley
The world’s major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.
- Tadashi Yanai
As an immigrant, I chose to live in America because it is one of the freest and most vibrant nations in the world. And as an immigrant, I feel an obligation to speak up for immigration policies that will keep America the most economically robust, creative and freedom-loving nation in the world.
- Rupert Murdoch
We just sort of factor all that information into the computer between the ears and come up with conclusions.
- Phil Knight
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
- Mahatma Gandhi
This may sound a bit naive, but I got here by believing in big dreams.
- Howard Schultz
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
My wealth is reflected in the price of Severstal, and the number of shares I have in my possession doesn’t have any impact on the company.
- Alexei Mordashov
In whatever you do, strive to be the best at it.
- Aliko Dangote
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
- Richard P. Feynman
About three million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
- Bill Gates
Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn’t.
- Ben Horowitz
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
Always deliver more than expected.
- Larry Page
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
- Socrates
When I hear Mitt Romney say that he believes that Jesus is the Son of God, that He’s the Christ, raised from the dead, that He’s his savior – that’s good enough for me.
- Joel Olsteen
You are closer than you think.
- Joel Olsteen
Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash. How’s that for incentive to be effective and efficient?
- Timothy Ferriss
We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.
- Ray Kroc
Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it’s taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, ‘Let’s get out the camera and get that shot.’ You just have that, and software helps you pick what you want.
- Bill Gates
I believe Success is achieved by ordinary people with Extraordinary Determination.
- Zig Ziglar
God always wants us to be growing.
- Joel Olsteen
A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa.
- Dale Carnegie
The great ambition should be to excel all others engaged in the same occupation.
- P.T. Barnum
You are at the top when: You have made friends with your past, are focused on the present, and are optimistic about your future.
- Zig Ziglar
The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.
- Dale Carnegie
EVERYBODY SELLS Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.
- Peter Thiel
When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this – you haven’t.
- Thomas Edison
Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
- Timothy Ferriss
You have no ability, if you’re a financial institution and you’re threatened with criminal prosecution, you have no ability to negotiate.
- Warren Buffett
We do not need to teach students to embrace the status quo.
- Seth Godin
Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.
- Bill Gates
When evaluating the results, we should not overlook the fact that there was, in some cases, very weak growth in Europe, Russia, and South America. There were also significant exchange rate fluctuations. In addition, the mild winter at the end of 2014 had a negative impact on the winter tire business in Europe. The driving force behind the sales development once again came from China and North America. In light of this, it is remarkable that profit after taxes of just under €2.4 billion or €11.88 per share could be achieved.
- Elmar Degenhart
Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.
- Peter Thiel
There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?
- Warren Buffett
The world of the 1990s and beyond will not belong to ‘managers’ or those who can make the numbers dance. The world will belong to passionate, driven leaders – people who not only have enormous amounts of energy but who can energize those whom they lead.
- Jack Welch
I seldom read anything that is not of a factual nature because I want to invest my time wisely in the things that will improve my life. Don’t misunderstand; there is nothing wrong with reading purely for the joy of it. Novels have their place, but biographies of famous men and women contain information that can change lives.
- Zig Ziglar
I am a fifty-seven-year-old male, married with three children. About 70 percent of us earn 80 percent or more of our household’s income.
- Thomas J Stanley
Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
- Ben Horowitz
We are the masters of our fate.
- Winston Churchill
Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are fit to be a teacher.
- Confucius
If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
- Elon Musk
In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.
- Elon Musk
I started thinking about joy. Everything in our society is so purposeful. Let’s bring joy back to the experience.
- Sara Blakely
Following a period of drastic market fluctuations in Asia during the summer months of the previous year, economies in the region gradually improved and stabilised during the financial year.
- Lee Shau Kee
innovation without discipline leads to disaster.
- James C. Collins
The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.
- Jeff Bezos
Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.
- Seth Godin
I’m a big supporter of President Obama.
- Russell Simmons
There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.
- Walt Disney
People’s favorite topic is themselves.
- Dale Carnegie
Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
- Peter Thiel
This book, then, is a product of the last fifteen years, as well as a product of the fifteen years that preceded them. It was almost exactly eight years before The E-Myth was published that I founded our company, E-Myth Worldwide, which has provided the fuel and experience for the point of view I have shared with those of you who have read The E-Myth, and with those.
- Michael Gerber
I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving.
- Steve Martin
If people like you they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you they’ll do business with you.
- Zig Ziglar
If your business is not a brand, it is just a commodity.
- Donald Trump
A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do.
- Seth Godin
The internet population is going up and up. I am confident that this will be a huge market.
- Robin Li
