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
Notable Quotables
Look we gave this thing a good run. We both know it’s not working out. Let’s wrap this thing up.
- Jack Welch
By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.
- Bill Gates
People ask me what’s the most important function when you’re starting an organization or setting up the kind of culture and values that are going to endure. The discipline I believe so strongly in is H.R., and its the last discipline that gets funded.
- Howard Schultz
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. …
- Dale Carnegie
Letting the other person feel that the idea is his or hers not only works in business and politics, it works in family life as well.
- Dale Carnegie
If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it.
- Muhammad Ali
We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – and then they figured out where to drive it.
- James C. Collins
I would argue heavily that the time that has been allocated to social used to come from television, and people are benefitting from it. People who are saying, ‘Aw, you’re spending all your time on Facebook, or all your time on Twitter,’ I’d like to understand what the person used to do with that time.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The steel business is a local business. We do believe in the U.S. economy and would like to have a strong, balanced presence here.
- Alexei Mordashov
No question about it, alot of my attitude towards money stems from growing up during a pretty hardscrabble time in our country’s history: the Great Depression.
- Sam Walton
School districts in the US don’t adopt technology very quickly.
- Reed Hastings
My job is to help more people have jobs.
- Jack Ma
Heretics must believe. More than anyone else in an organization, it’s the person who’s challenging the status quo, the one who is daring to be great, who is truly present and not just punching a clock who must have confidence in her beliefs.Can you imagine Steve Jobs showing up for the paycheck? It’s nice to get paid. It’s essential to believe.
- Seth Godin
When you encourage others, you in the process are encouraged because you’re making a commitment and difference in that person’s life. Encouragement really does make a difference.
- Zig Ziglar
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.
- Henry Ford
Possession of Power That Was Not Acquired Through Self Effort.
- Napoleon Hill
We’re running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere… can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.
- Elon Musk
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
There are no traffic jams on the extra mile.
- Zig Ziglar
It partly depends on the currency regimes in place in the country.
- John Chambers
Apple has always leveraged technologies that the PC industry has driven to critical mass – the bus structures, the graphics cards, the peripherals, the connection networks, things like that – so they’re kind of in the PC ecosystem and kind of not.
- Bill Gates
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
- Socrates
We must not let our standards be determined by the gentlemen of the oposition.
- Winston Churchill
You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.
- John C. Maxwell
Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves – their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.
- Peter Drucker
So we really need jobs now. We have to take jobs away from other countries because other countries are taking our jobs. There is practically not a country that does business with the United States that isn’t making – let’s call it a very big profit. I mean China is going to make $300 billion on us at least this year.
- Donald Trump
If you’re a person struggling to eat and stay healthy, you might have heard about Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, but you’ll never have heard of Bill Gates.
- Bill Gates
It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.
- Winston Churchill
I have taken six companies public, and three of those are Fortune 1000 companies, but the key to my success has been my ability to sell other people on my dreams.
- Wayne Huizenga
The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.
- Jack Welch
Certainly there are times in all of our lives when bad things happen, or things don’t turn out as we had hoped. But that’s when we we must a decision that we’re going to be happy inspite of our circumstances.
- Joel Olsteen
Tip #17 – Perceived value is what sells. Real value is what repeats.
- Jack Nadel
$1,000,000 in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows.
- Timothy Ferriss
Winning ‘Motor Trend’ Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.
- Elon Musk
The Franchise Prototype is also the place where all assumptions are put to the test to see how well they work before becoming operational in the business.
- Michael Gerber
It’s only lonely at the top if you forget all the people you met along the way and fail to acknowledge their contributions to your success.
- Harvey Mackay
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
Effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible.
- Jack Welch
When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.
- Steve Martin
Among the world’s 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.
- Wang Jianlin
I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.
- Bill Gates
God, You said Your favor is not for a season but for a lifetime.
- Joel Olsteen
Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I just think that trusting God means we’re going to have unanswered questions, and God is so much bigger than us, we’re never going to understand them all.
- Joel Olsteen
Most of us don’t invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.
- Sam Walton
I’ve been to Disneyland, like, 10 times. I’m getting really tired of Disneyland.
- Elon Musk
F-E-A-R has two meanings: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise.’ The choice is yours.
- Zig Ziglar
Never forget, the real secret of giving advice is this: Once you’ve given it, don’t concern yourself with whether it is followed or not, and refrain from saying ‘I told you so.’
- Harvey Mackay
I don’t know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.
- Reed Hastings
I’m an HBO subscriber, and I watch a bunch of great shows on HBO.
- Reed Hastings
It’s quite complicated and sounds circular, but we’ve worked out a way of calculate a Web site’s importance.
- Larry Page
People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
- Timothy Ferriss
I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
- Bill Gates
What if there were no longer only two sides? Not just capital versus labor, but a third team, one that straddled elements of both? I think there’s a huge opportunity for a third kind of participant, a linchpin, and now there is an opportunity to change all the rules that we’ve lived with all our lives. There is a shortage of this third kind of worker, and that shortage means that the market needs you desperately. The con game is ending, at least for people passionate enough to do something about it.
- Seth Godin
Our customers call and e-mai us to say that’s how it feels when a Zappos box arrives. And that’s how we view this company.
- Tony Hsieh
As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
- Bill Gates
Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.
- Seth Godin
Even if you don’t have the perfect idea to begin with, you can likely adapt.
- Victoria Ransom
Trate siempre de que la otra persona se sienta importante.
- Dale Carnegie
Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it’s easier, it scales and it’s profitable. But people don’t like it – we want to be who we are, not who some marketer tells us to be.
- Seth Godin
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
If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.
- Winston Churchill
The ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.
- Jack Welch
Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense.
- Larry Page
The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn’t get bigger or heavier.
- Bill Gates
One of the great things about Lanai is that the weather is always fabulous. Always 82 degrees and sunny. The problem is that, like California now, Lanai needs more water.
- Larry Ellison
Oracle’s got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP’s got nothin’ but SuccessFactors until 2020.
- Larry Ellison
I would as soon leave my son a curse as the almighty dollar.
- Andrew Carnegie
People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.
- Walt Disney
The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.
- Seth Godin
Lady Nancy Astor: Winston, if you were my husband, I’d poison your tea. Churchill: Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.
- Winston Churchill
I try to help people with management stuff a lot.
- Ben Horowitz
The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
- Ralph Nader
By providing the systems that make the Internet work, Cisco is playing a major role in helping customers thrive in the explosive Internet economy. As a result, we are growing faster than all of our key competitors and have been the fastest growing and most profitable company in the history of the computer industry.
- John Chambers
I believe God wants you to have money to pay your bills, send your kids to college and do charity work and build orphanages. There’s the teaching that we’re supposed to be poor to show that we’re humble. I don’t buy that. I think we’re supposed to be leaders. We’re supposed to excel.
- Joel Olsteen
It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life. This is a nonstarter—nothing can justify that sacrifice.
- Timothy Ferriss
Me and my dad are the biggest promoters of an estate tax in the US. It’s not a popular position.
- Bill Gates
About HBO’s “Silicon Valley”: It’s a Good Show.
- Peter Thiel
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
- Jeff Bezos
We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we’re going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water.
- Larry Ellison
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.
- Zig Ziglar
Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.
- Peter Drucker
Always remember that nothing kills great ideas more than people with small ideas and limited imaginations.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I learned that a long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.
- Seth Godin
There are ways of fighting for your interests. I never do something in business that I wouldn’t do in life.
- Vladimir Potanin
For Roosevelt knew, as all leaders know, that the royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.
- Dale Carnegie
The internet population is going up and up. I am confident that this will be a huge market.
- Robin Li
Go as far as you can see. When you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.
- Zig Ziglar
Create a vision and personalize it. People need to say, I understand it, I’m excited about it, and I can make it happen.
- David Novak
Deadlines aren’t bad. They help you organize your time. They help you set priorities. They make you get going when you might not feel like it.
- Harvey Mackay
In those days he was wiser than he is now, he used to frequently take my advice.
- Winston Churchill
If somebody can do something 80 percent as good as you think you would have done it yourself, then you’ve got to let it go.
- Sara Blakely
If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or statement on any subject online, you’re going to polarize people. And without that polarity, there’s no discussion. Discussion is what I want, which means that I’m fine with the consequences.
- Timothy Ferriss
You may be at a crossroads in your life. You may have issues to deal with; people you need to forgive. You can go one of the two ways. You can ignore what you now know to be true and keep burying that bitterness in your life, pushing it deeper and allowing it to poison and contaminate you and those around you. Or you can make a much better choice by getting it out in the open and asking God to help you to totally forgive and let it all go.
- Joel Olsteen
If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.
- Harvey Mackay
Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.
- Reid Hoffman
Markets are designed to allow individuals to look after their private needs and to pursue profit. It’s really a great invention and I wouldn’t under-estimate the value of that, but they’re not designed to take care of social needs.
- George Soros
Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
- Mark Twain
