“Trust me.” That’s what a CEO says every day to her employees. Trust me: This will be a good company. Trust me: This will be good for your career. Trust me: This will be good for your life. A layoff breaks that trust. In order to rebuild trust, you have to come clean.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
If you want to reach the top, don’t run over others. Likely, the only way you’ll reach the top is to be carried there by others.
- John C. Maxwell
Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.
- Peter Thiel
We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers. That is my new battle cry. Live and breathe Starbucks the way our customers do.
- Howard Schultz
Number one, cash is king… number two, communicate… number three, buy or bury the competition.
- Jack Welch
Sales is what you do in person, one on one. Marketing is sales done via a system. Most (Self-Employed) S quadrant businesspeople are very good at one-on-one sales. For them to make the transition to the B quadrant, they need to learn how to sell through a system which is called marketing.
- Robert Kiyosaki
This has been a very positive test for Kawasaki.
- Yoda
My father left me with a clear sense that the media was something different.
- Rupert Murdoch
Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.
- Warren Buffett
God’s desire is that we excel.
- Joel Olsteen
Wouldn’t it be great to be gifted? In fact… It turns out that choices lead to habits. Habits become talents. Talents are labeled gifts. You’re not born this way, you get this way.”
- Seth Godin
I spent a disproportionate amount of my time in a car in L.A. I’m 35 years old. If you add up the hours spent in cars, it would be years.
- Travis Kalanick
Set your target and keep trying until you reach it.
- Napoleon Hill
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
- Albert Schweitzer
Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.
- Henry Ford
Churchill: “Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?” Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course… “Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?”Socialite: “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!” Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price
- Winston Churchill
What a great thrill it will be for fans of all generations to see these NASCAR superheroes together again at Atlanta Motor Speedway. With 405 victories between them, each and every one played an integral role in making NASCAR the tremendous success it is today.
- Ed Clark
There’s a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There’s a lot of sex, you know, in art. There’s a lot of naked women and men, and there’s intrigue, there’s fakery. It’s a real microcosm of the larger world.
- Steve Martin
10% of Americans hold 73% of the country’s wealth.
- Robert Kiyosaki
If you learn late, you pass it on to people so they can learn early. It’s a step process.
- Russell Simmons
You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.
- Sam Walton
Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.
- Joel Olsteen
Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.
- Winston Churchill
You know, there is always times where you feel discouraged and things coming against you, but I don’t know if I ever wanted to throw in the towel.
- Joel Olsteen
Seeing his education soley in utilitarian terms, he studied hard, but showed no intellectual playfulness.
- Ron Chernow
Your business plan is fluid, not concrete. Once you a build plan, the market place validates what works and what does not. Be flexible and evolve your business strategy.
- David Nilssen
You cannot get into business for the fashion of it.
- Azim Premji
You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance.
- Peter Thiel
Don’t ally your personal interests with the development of the company.
- Wang Jianlin
Put all of your eggs in one basket, watch that basket.
- Andrew Carnegie
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
When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.
- Howard Schultz
My education was interrupted only by my schooling.
- Winston Churchill
The body is a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants.
- Thomas Edison
STARTUP THINKING New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.
- Peter Thiel
Video is emerging as the key strategic application in the service provider triple play bundle of consumer entertainment, communication and online services.
- John Chambers
So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.
- Thomas Edison
We’ve used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we’re running a federal deficit that’s 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It’s more stimulative than any policy we’ve followed since World War II.
- Warren Buffett
I will not lose, for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned so it evens up for me.
- Jay-Z
The Web provides a very easy way to immediately grasp what’s going on. It really offers the transparency, so you can see, especially with the search engine, how people are using Twitter at one glance. The phone doesn’t allow for that.
- Jack Dorsey
Use your life to serve the world, and you will find that it also serves you.
- Oprah Winfrey
I put forward a pretty general theory that financial markets are intrinsically unstable. That we really have a false picture when we think about markets tending towards equilibrium.
- George Soros
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
Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind.
- Winston Churchill
My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.
- Bill Gates
Inflation is taking up the poverty line, and poverty is not just economic but defined by way of health and education.
- Azim Premji
The ladder of success is never crowded at the top.
- Napoleon Hill
Everything in our society is so purposeful.
- Sara Blakely
Every time I find myself stressed out, it’s because I do things primarily driven by growth.
- Timothy Ferriss
Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.
- Andrew Carnegie
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.
- Winston Churchill
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
- Dale Carnegie
You need editors, not brand managers,who will push the envelope to make [a brand media property] go forward.
- Seth Godin
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
- Mark Twain
Hong Kong still offers the best value.
- Lee Shau Kee
Time is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it.
- Rick Warren
I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.
- Sergey Brin
You know, I start with the assumption that -or with, with the belief that this president has to succeed. We all have an enormous amount of capital invested in his success. His success is the country’s success.
- Michael Bloomberg
Businesses often forget the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can’t deliever good service from unhappy employees.
- Tony Hsieh
Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.
- Seth Godin
Don’t be intimidated as you design your pitch. The fact is that nobody will come to you at first. You must be the aggressor, or you will not be heard.
- Michael Levine
In the States, there’s ESPN3, and each country has different options, and other than premiere league football, there tends to be very little global content. And movie and TV rights are pretty broad content.
- Reed Hastings
The great thing is we’re going to have a lot of new facilities, where the others were 10 years old or older. That’s a plus for the fans. The new State Road 20 is going to open. That’s a huge addition for us, probably one of the biggest things that’s happened since we bought the track in 1990.
- Ed Clark
My role has been to pick good people and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.
- Sam Walton
you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.
- Dale Carnegie
Cherish your dreams as they are the children of your soul… –
- Napoleon Hill
A person’s life is over in 50, 100 years. But a company lives on through the people it is composed of, and SoftBank group has to survive even after I’m gone.
- Masayoshi Son
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
- Zig Ziglar
Ow, ow, OW! On my ear you are!
- Yoda
The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.
- John C. Maxwell
The industry growth is there, and it’s there probably for the next decade. So how well we execute will determine what role we play.
- John Chambers
Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.
- Sam Walton
I am so disturbed by kids who spend all day playing videogames.
- Larry Ellison
You might well remember that nothing can bring you success but yourself.
- Napoleon Hill
Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
We all know now that the 747 became the flagship jumbo jet of the airline industry, but the decision looks much different from the perspective of the late 1960s. Yet—and this is the key point—Boeing was willing to make the bold move in the face of the risks. As in Boeing’s case, the risks do not always come without pain.
- James C. Collins
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don’t know.
- Bill Gates
There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.
- Henry Ford
Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.
- Timothy Ferriss
[On Twitter] We believe that fundamentally we are building a utility.
- Jack Dorsey
There should be order if the development of the cyber world is to be sustainable.
- Ma Huateng
I’m going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.
- Bill Gates
If you can dream it, you can achieve it. You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
If there is a Swedish style, I cannot identify it.
- Stefan Persson
The lower and individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his potential.
- John Maxwell
Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation and I will be ruthless.
- Warren Buffett
Send out a cheerful, positive greeting, and most of the time you will get back a cheerful, positive greeting. It’s also true that if you send out a negative greeting, you will, in most cases, get back a negative greeting.
- Zig Ziglar
An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.
- Henry Ford
MARCH 1 Envision Your Dreams I counsel you to buy from me . . . salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. REVELATION 3:18 DO YOU LOOK UPON your life with eyes of faith? Think of it this way: when we close our eyes, we should see more than we do when we have our eyes open. See your whole family serving God. See yourself rising to new levels of effectiveness. See yourself stronger, healthier, and living a more abundant life. See God using you in.
- Joel Olsteen
Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.
- Peter Thiel
The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.
- Warren Buffett
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
Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.
- Joel Olsteen
There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.
- Jeff Bezos
Ethical decisions ensure that everyone’s best interests are protected. When in doubt, don’t.
- Harvey Mackay
Fortunately, problems are an everyday part of our life. Consider this: If there were no problems, most of us would be unemployed.
- Zig Ziglar
I haven’t failed,I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
- Zig Ziglar
It is impossible to divide the interest of a country and a company that works on its soil.
- Vagit Alekperov
I own my business. My business doesn’t own me.
- Cherie Ve Ard





