The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure, but to build one that is worthy of enduring.
- Jim Collins
Notable Quotables
To me, the idea and expectation that the day is slowly and surely coming when we will be able to honestly say we are our brother’s keeper and not his oppressor is very beautiful .
- Thomas Edison
If somebody’s going on your board, and you’re going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.
- Ben Horowitz
People really criticize professional athletes going into the Olympics. People don’t like change. A bunch of people don’t like the Olympics now because we’ve added skateboarding… We’re modernizing the sport.
- Larry Ellison
You learn how to be book smart in school, but you better not forget that you also need to be street smart.
- Harvey Mackay
The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.
- Warren Buffett
The best teacher is very interactive.
- Bill Gates
Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
- Ben Horowitz
Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.
- Peter Thiel
Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world. China is the only country afraid that it won’t.
- Peter Thiel
It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others.
- Dale Carnegie
Trust your instincts
- Estée Lauder
Whenever you are speaking, both your passion for your business and your appearance will have a lasting impact on your audience.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Wrong Selection of Associates in Business
- Napoleon Hill
Entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.
- Peter Drucker
[On stopping working and focussing 100% on his company Nike] I was still teaching accounting, but the next year, I told Penny [married in 1968] if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I’m going to go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000. I said, that ‘s close enough.
- Phil Knight
You have enough people against you… be for yourself.
- Joel Olsteen
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.
- Winston Churchill
I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.
- Walt Disney
9 out of ten new businesses fail in the first five years.
- Robert Kiyosaki
My revenue was $4 million my first year in business, off of one $20 item.
- Sara Blakely
We’ve got to give people room to have a bad day.
- Joel Olsteen
Sometimes you need faith and victory spoken over your life. Words have created power. When you receive them into your spirit, they can ignite seeds of increase on the inside.
- Joel Olsteen
Yes, I think it’s okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It’s okay to say to them, “You’re not going where I need to go, and there’s no way I’m going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I’m heading off. I’m betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.
- Seth Godin
In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.
- Ray Dalio
Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines, the one who actually talk to the customer, are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble within it, you must listen to what your associates are telling you.
- Sam Walton
I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life.
- Steve Ballmer
Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t feel comfortable reading about in the newspaper the next day.
- Joel Olsteen
The main reason I write the daily observations is because I want to know where I’m wrong. So lots of times if somebody points something out it helps me, and I want to have a diversified bet of uncorrelated bets.
- Ray Dalio
Success is due to our stretching to the challenges of life. Failure comes when we shrink from them.
- John C. Maxwell
Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.
- Peter Thiel
We live in an age where everything is based on the short term.
- Howard Schultz
I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you’re an idiot.
- Steve Martin
Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.
- Napoleon Hill
We are continuing to see a number of signs that could be interpreted with the appropriate caveats as optimistic.
- John Chambers
You may be sitting around waiting for God to change your circumstances. Then you’re going to be happy, then your’re going to have a good attitude, then you’re going to give God praise. But God is waiting on you to get up on the inside. When you do your part, He’ll begin to change things and work supernaturally in your life.
- Joel Olsteen
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
- Winston Churchill
Regardless of what position people originally took, once the decision is made, everyone supports it. That’s why it is critical that no one hold anything back during the discussion.
- Patrick M. Lencioni
Proposition 19 already is a winner no matter what happens on election day. The mere fact of its being on the ballot has elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy in ways I could not have imagined a year ago.
- George Soros
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
Does it make sense to go to college, or should I instead be a plumber?
- Michael Bloomberg
The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.
- Henry Ford
I feel like money makes you more of who you already are.
- Sara Blakely
Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?
- Michael Bloomberg
A great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position.
- John C. Maxwell
Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.
- Peter Drucker
Lack of Concentration Of Effort.
- Napoleon Hill
Service is the key to everything in life.
- Russell Simmons
Build a culture that rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.
- Ben Horowitz
It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.
- Dale Carnegie
From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce.
- Thomas Edison
Le Reve’ may be one of the three best pictures Pablo Picasso ever painted.
- Stephen Wynn
Customers are the reason we open our doors every day, and keep the machines humming all night long. Customers determine what we eat, where we live, whether we stay in business.
- Harvey Mackay
It’s absolutely a necessary and inevitable evolution in retailing (of Wal-Mart putting small stores out of business), as inevitable as the replacement of the buggy by the car, and the dissappearance of the buggy whip makers. The small stores (and DJs) were destined to dissappear, at least in the numbers they once existed., because the whole thing is driven by customers, who are free to choose where to shop.
- Sam Walton
My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.
- Bill Gates
My priorities are; Family, Church, Business.
- Terry Fischer
Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.
- Seth Godin
So here we are.
- Seth Godin
We will as ever continue to pursue growth opportunities that will further enhance our ability to capitalize on the investment opportunities and to face the challenges ahead.
- Cheng Yu-tung
From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldn’t. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect.
- Peter Thiel
I used to believe that a good product sold itself.
- Phil Knight
The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.
- Bill Gates
The body is a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants.
- Thomas Edison
It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them. The first month cost perhaps $200 more than if I had been micromanaging.
- Timothy Ferriss
Experience has proven that the best educated people are often those who are known as self-made, or self-educated. It takes more than a college degree to make one a person of education. Any person who is educated is one who has learned to get whatever he wants in life without violating the rights of others. Education consists no so much of knowledge, but of knowledge effectively and peristently applied. Men are paid nor merely for tha they know, but more particulary for what they do with that which they know.
- Napoleon Hill
I was the night foreman of a galvanizing factory, which is hot and smelly and dirty and miserable.
- Ronald Perelman
Most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.
- Peter Thiel
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.
- Ray Kroc
Differentiation (rating and evaluating people) Develops Great Organizations. Differentiation is hard, anybody who finds it easy doesn’t belong in the organization, and anyone who can’t do it falls in the same category…It is important for companies to continually remove the bottom 10 percent of their employees anually.
- Jack Welch
The thorough man of business knows that only by years of patient, unremitting attention to affairs can he earn his reward, which is the result, not of chance, but of well-devised means for the attainment to ends.
- Andrew Carnegie
Someday, man will harness the rise and fall of the tides, imprison the power of the sun, and release atomic power.
- Thomas Edison
Success doesn’t make you and failure doesn’t break you.
- Zig Ziglar
Here is the salient fact which distinguishes the English Revolution from all others: that those who wielded irresistible physical force were throughout convinced that it could give them no security. Nothing is more characteristic of the English people than their instinctive reverence even in rebellion for law and tradition. Deep in the nature of the men who had broken the King’s power was the conviction that law in his name was the sole foundation on which they could build.
- Winston Churchill
Some city-council people are really awesome, but most are uninspired. I meet with them as little as possible.
- Travis Kalanick
I got into retailing because I wanted a real job.
- Sam Walton
It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don’t think it’s possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.
- Elon Musk
The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether he would tolerate a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. Madden answered, “If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you’ll be so late you’ll miss the game, so you can’t do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you’ll have a player that’s so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.
- Ben Horowitz
Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.
- Dale Carnegie
I built a steel plant from the grassroots, so I learned all the nuts and bolts. When there was a problem, I would be able to guide them, though I am not a technical person.
- Lakshmi Mittal
Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans.
- Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles
I refused to do a lot on mobile Internet until around 2009. But because we didn’t start early, it took us some time to figure out what’s the important thing, what’s the most relevant thing for Baidu.
- Robin Li
Sometimes God gives instructions that go against conventional wisdom, such as treating people kindly when they’re hateful. Who really wants to do that? Instructions like that my not always make sense, so that’s why I need to trust and obey the One who inspired them.
- George Foreman
It’s easier for investors and bosses to spend time and money going after a proven market, even though proven markets are the hardest to break into.
- Seth Godin
Success is one thing — but impact is another.
- Ray Lewis
Make the decision and say, I’m not letting that worry in. I’m done being upset when my plans don’t work out. I’m not letting that stress in.” Negative thoughts will still come to your mind, but you don’t have to let them into your spirit.
- Joel Olsteen
MARCH 25 From Glory to Glory But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. 2 CORINTHIANS 3:18 KJV THE SCRIPTURE SAYS we are God’s workmanship” (Ephesians 2:10), which implies that you are a work in progress.” Throughout our lives, God is continually shaping us into the people He wants us to be. The key to future success is to not be discouraged about your past or present while you are in the process of being completed.” God loves you unconditionally. You may not understand everything you are going through right now. But hold your head high, knowing that God is in control and He has a great plan and purpose for your life. Your dreams may not have turned out exactly as you’d hoped, but the Bible says that God’s ways are better and higher than our ways.
- Joel Olsteen
I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things. I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.
- Elon Musk
Life’s too short” is repeated often enough to be a cliche, but this time it’s true. You don’t have enough time to be both unhappy and mediocre. It’s not just pointless, it’s painful. Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
- Seth Godin
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
- Timothy Ferriss
The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.
- Peter Thiel
The reason I was able to grow my business was that every day, after producing 30 minutes of wine television, I spent 15 hours a day replying to every single person’s e-mail and every single person’s Twitter @ reply.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
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
It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path at Dell. There’s always an opportunity to make a difference.
- Michael Dell
Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.
- Peter Thiel
You weren’t created to simply exist, to endure, or to go through the motions; you were created to be really alive.
- Joel Olsteen
Sunseeker is well placed to take full advantage of opportunities in China, one of the world’s fastest growing luxury yacht markets.
- Wang Jianlin
Bordeaux would be naive not to recognize that Robert Parker was driving the brand equity. If the next generation doesn’t care about Chateau Pichon-Lalande, then you have a problem.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.
- Dave Ramsey