People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.
- Zig Ziglar
Notable Quotables
By my count, more business leaders have failed and derailed because of arrogance than any other character flaw.
- Harvey Mackay
Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them.
- W. Clement Stone
Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
- Peter Drucker
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.
- Walt Disney
Success-minded people have no trouble at all following proven instructions. We all would be happy to follow a map if the map came with a guarantee. There is no guarantee, though. There are no maps. They’ve all been taken, and their value is not what it used to be, because your competitors have maps, too. The opportunity lies in pursuing your curiosity instead. Curiosity is not allergic to failure. Curiosity drives us to the haunted house because the thrills lie in what we don’t expect, not in what’s safe. Curiosity can start us down the path to shipping, to bringing things to the world, to examining them, refining them, and repeating the process again (and again).
- Seth Godin
Help young people. Help small guys. Because small guys will be big. Young people will have the seeds you bury in their minds, and when they grow up, they will change the world.
- Jack Ma
This is indicative of how quickly CEO caution can put the foot on the brake.
- John Chambers
Start believing today that things are going to change for the better. Your best days are still out in front of you.
- Joel Olsteen
Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not “making friends and influencing people”, that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
- Peter Drucker
As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible.
- Peter Thiel
The goal is to get the buyer to like and trust you.
- Clay Clark
Getting things straight in your head is a major achievement because there’s so much clutter out there. You’ve got to push aside the static to really hear the music.
- Stephen Wynn
All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me – consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.
- Donald Trump
Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.
- Ben Horowitz
It’s not enough to do good things. You have to let people know what you’re doing.
- Phil Knight
Witchcraft is one of the most baseless, absurd, disgusting and silly of all the humbugs.
- P.T. Barnum
The typical project design time for a large company like IBM – and they keep track of this – is a little over four years.
- Bill Gates
This proves our strategy is working in terms of the convergence of voice, video and data.
- John Chambers
HE RICH DON’T WORK FOR MONEY The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.
- Robert Kiyosaki
All was there—the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit ofthe world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.
- Winston Churchill
Stick with the Dips that are likely to pan out, and quit the Cul-de-Sacs to focus your resources.
- Seth Godin
If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.
- Ray Kroc
You don’t have to fear defeat if you believe it may reveal powers that you didn’t know you possessed.
- Napoleon Hill
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
- Warren Buffett
To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.
- Henry Ford
The most impressive person I’ve ever met? Elaine Wynn is no slouch. She’s a much better person than me. But I’ve got her. Finders keepers, losers weepers. And it’s been forty-seven years.
- Stephen Wynn
It’s better to have a hundred people that love you, than a million people that sort of like you.
- Paul Graham
If you give, you will be blessed.
- Joel Olsteen
The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.
- Bill Gates
The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.
- Michael Dell
If your offering itself isn’t remarkable, then it’s invisible — no matter how much you spend on well-crafted advertising.
- Seth Godin
Perhaps your quest to be part of building something great will not fall in your business life. But find it somewhere. If not in corporate life, then perhaps in making your church great. If not there, then perhaps a nonprofit, or a community organization, or a class you teach. Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.
- James C. Collins
I come back to the same thing: We’ve got the greatest pipeline in the company’s history in the next 12 months, and we’ve had the most amazing financial results possible over the last five years, and we’re predicting being back at double-digit revenue growth in fiscal year ’06.
- Steve Ballmer
Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
What did I do that was right—and in what way could I have improved my performance? What lessons can I learn from that experience?
- Dale Carnegie
The response to the Starbucks brand has been phenomenal in our international markets.
- Howard Schultz
I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.
- Jack Welch
Good communication is a give-and-take proposition. Don’t think of your pitch as a short speech, after which you get a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
- Michael Levine
It’s a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.
- Steve Martin
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes… but no plans.
- Peter Drucker
They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level Dwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings have need of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to the Weather.
- Dale Carnegie
There are only two kinds of employees that I’ve run across in 30 years. There are ones that get results, and ones that make excuses. If you’re in that second camp, you’re not going to like Dish.
- Charles Ergen
I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I’ve become. If I had, I’d have done it a lot earlier.
- Oprah Winfrey
My general attitude to life is to enjoy every minute of every day. I never do anything with a feeling of, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to do this today.’
- Richard Branson
In Germany they had no kings. They developed them in Britain from leaders who claimed descent from the ancient gods.
- Winston Churchill
Nobody wanted to believe Jack Ma.
- Jack Ma
Remain close to government and away from politics. It means deal more with the authorities. And less with individuals.
- Wang Jianlin
The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application.
- Larry Ellison
Communications and the exchange of value – they’re both foundational, essential things to our civilization. When you simplify those, when you get down to the essence, you fix so many things.
- Jack Dorsey
People are using Windows PCs more than they watch TV now.
- Bill Gates
We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
If I hadn’t given my money away, I’d have had more than anyone else on the planet.
- Bill Gates
IT’S SAID that you can only live life forward and understand it backward.
- Jack Welch
All successful people ‘think on paper.’
- Brian Tracy
The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs. It’s no surprise that entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975. To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make things better just by sending out more checks.
- Peter Thiel
Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.
- John C. Maxwell
We’re introducing separate rooms with double beds in all our planes so people can actually go with their partner and have a proper night’s sleep.
- Richard Branson
This notion that it is up to each person to innovate in some way flies in the face of the industrial age, but you know what, the industrial age is over.
- Seth Godin
If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.
- Seth Godin
The uncertainty and importance of the present reduce the past and future to comparative insignificance, and clear the mind of minor worries. And when all is over, memories remain which few men do not hold precious.
- Winston Churchill
We have to find our way back to a definite future.
- Peter Thiel
Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards- the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.
- Walt Disney
Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Failure is an event not a person.
- Zig Ziglar
My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we’ve had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.
- Bill Gates
I think many start-ups make mistakes because they are focusing on things that are farther ahead, and they haven’t done the work that has built the foundation to support it.
- Howard Schultz
Pick a movement. Pick something you believe in. Pick something you want to have an impact in and then question every single thing and be a founder, and be an entrepreneur inside those organizations and inside that movement.
- Jack Dorsey
For a while… to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don’t want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen… I don’t want to divide the very people I am trying to reach.
- Joel Olsteen
Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted.
- Ray Dalio
The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.
- Thomas Edison
Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!
- Steve Wozniak
Great CEOs build exceptional strategies for gathering the required information continuously. They embed their quest for intelligence into all of their daily actions from staff meetings to customer meetings to one-on-ones. Winning strategies are built on comprehensive knowledge gathered in every interaction the CEO has with an employee, a customer, a partner, or an investor.
- Ben Horowitz
Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one—and not necessarily the primary one.
- James C. Collins
People who are using it to sell things on Craigslist to holding garage sales – campaigns – the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign both used Square to raise funds.
- Jack Dorsey
Culture drives great results.
- Jack Welch
FATHER FORGETS W. Livingston Larned Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into 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. At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, ‘Goodbye, Daddy!’ and I frowned, and said in reply, ‘Hold your shoulders back!’ Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive – and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father! Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. ‘What is it you want?’ I snapped. You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs. Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding – this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years. And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed! It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: ‘He is nothing but a boy – a little boy!’ I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much. Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. ‘To know all is to forgive.
- Dale Carnegie
I am both pleased but astonished by the fact that mankind has not yet begun to use all the means and devices that are available for destruction. I hope that such weapons are never manufactured in quantity.
- Thomas Edison
That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
- Steve Jobs
Chambers have numerous committees and serving on one of them provides numerous networking opportunities as well as professional leadership development.
- American Business Magazine
Much like us, our customers are rigorously working to improve their profitability and capacity for innovation. For us, this means doing everything possible when it comes to efficiency, effectiveness, and innovations – and all that on the basis of the highest quality. After all, quality creates trust – and trust creates orders. In short, we need to constantly become better and better at the high level we are already operating at.
- Elmar Degenhart
You must have a vision and not just a vision but you must have a plan that would make you fulfil that vision.
- Aliko Dangote
What one does easily, one does well.
- Andrew Carnegie
Even if you don’t have the perfect idea to begin with, you can likely adapt.
- Victoria Ransom
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Real leaders don’t care [about receiving credit]. If it’s about your mission, about spreading the faith, about seeing something happen, not only do you not care about credit, you actually want other people to take credit…There’s no record of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi whining about credit. Credit isn’t the point. Change is.
- Seth Godin
If you’re going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don’t work.
- Seth Godin
I’m not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.
- Rupert Murdoch
mean that you can’t do anything else but pray. But it does mean that you are always ready and willing to go before God with any concern or praise. Nothing is too small or too big for prayer. Prayer is simply opening your heart and connecting with God. It’s taking His promises and applying them to your life. Prayer processes the plan of God. You should bathe your life in prayer. Pray for wisdom, peace, and patience. Pray for your relationships, your job, and your children. Pray for your country and leaders. Pray with others, knowing that when two or more are gathered in His name, He is there.
- Joel Olsteen
At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study.
- Ben Horowitz
Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.
- Peter Drucker
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
It was always a challenge for me to prove that a Russian financial investor can be as successful in the West as back at home in Russia.
- Alisher Usmanov
As a cure for worrying, work is far better than whiskey. I always found that, if I began to worry, the best thing I could do was focus upon doing something useful and then work very hard at it. Soon, I would forget what was troubling me.
- Thomas Edison
The internet population is going up and up. I am confident that this will be a huge market.
- Robin Li
Walking in circles Dr. Jan Souman, of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, studied what happens to us when we have no map, no compass, no way to determine landmarks. I’m not talking about a metaphor—he researched what happens to people lost in the woods or stumbling around the Sahara, with no north star, no setting sun to guide them. It turns out we walk in circles. Try as we might to walk in a straight line, to get out of the forest or the desert, we end up back where we started. Our instincts aren’t enough. In the words of Dr. Souman, “Don’t trust your senses because even though you might think you are walking in a straight line when you’re not.” Human nature is to need a map. If you’re brave enough to draw one, people will follow.
- Seth Godin
The truth is that finding happiness in what you do every day is so imperative.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
It’s not sufficient that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
- Larry Ellison
