I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.
- Elon Musk
Notable Quotables
Do you know how many companies have wanted me to do an energy drink for them because I named my book ‘Crush It!’? It might be fun one day, but right now I think it would undermine the personal brand I’ve built.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.
- John F. Kennedy
She came up with what is now the Swoosh for $35 which is a pretty good bargain.
- Phil Knight
Some things are much easier to see in others than in yourself
- Ben Horowitz
When someone expresses some feeling, attitude or belief, our tendency is almost immediately to feel that’s right,” or that’s stupid,” that’s abnormal,” that’s unreasonable,” that’s incorrect,” that’s not nice.” Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of the statement is to the other person.
- Dale Carnegie
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
Cupcakes The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor. The third time, you might improvise and screw up. Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can. At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen. Others merely plod along. They’re cooks, not chefs. A cook follows a recipe. A chef invents one. We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs.
- Seth Godin
Strong is Vader. Mind what you have learned. Save you it can.
- Yoda
Worrying about the past or the future isn’t productive. When you start chastising yourself for past mistakes, or seeing disaster around every corner, stop and take a breath and ask yourself what you can do right now to succeed.
- Harvey Mackay
There’s different kinds of laughs. It’s like a baseball lineup: this guy’s your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we’re gonna win.
- Jerry Seinfeld
There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.
- Bill Gates
A narrow mind and a fat head invariably come on the same person.
- Zig Ziglar
If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.” He may be an excellent man. But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved. What the executive needs are criteria which enable him to work on the truly important, that is, on contributions and results, even though the criteria are not found in the flow of events.
- Peter Drucker
When you acknowledge God, He will go before you and make the crooked places straight.
- Joel Olsteen
Much of our strategic shift is providing production advances over the next 60 days in the Gulf Coast. This effort sets the stage for Gulf Coast growth in 2006, along with production growth in our East, West and Canada regions.
- Dan Dinges
Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship.
- Ben Horowitz
In boxing, you get hit, it’s painful, then you sit on the stool when the adrenaline is gone and you feel that pain. And then you fight the next round.
- Ben Horowitz
Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice – fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
- Sergey Brin
A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.
- Zig Ziglar
In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.
- Bill Gates
God wants you to succeed. He created you to live abundantly.
- Joel Olsteen
If we say it long enough eventually we’re going to reap a harvest. We’re going to get exactly what we’re saying.
- Joel Olsteen
I had a TV set and a typewriter and that made me think a computer should be laid out like a typewriter with a video screen.
- Steve Wozniak
1. Why is it foolish to launch a new business with millions of dollars in TV ads?2. Are the market leaders in every industry more vulnerable to sudden successes by the competition than ever before?3. Should book publishers issue the paperback edition of a book before the hardcover?4. What’s the single most important asset a company can create—and what is the simple thing that can kill it?5. Every ad needs to do one of two things to succeed…yet most ads do neither. What’s the right strategy?6. Does the Net create a dynamic that fundamentally changes the way everything is marketed?7. How can every business…big and small…use ideavirus marketing to succeed?
- Seth Godin
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.
- Bill Gates
I start where the last man left off.
- Thomas Edison
People have come to me over the years and said to me: ‘I admire the culture of Starbucks. Can you come give a speech and help us turn our culture around?’ I wish it were that easy. Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it’s based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.
- Howard Schultz
Basically, our goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.
- Larry Page
There’s an entire universe in every single tweet, and it all really depends on the content as far as how it’s going to spread.
- Jack Dorsey
Satan knows, if you are against YOURSELF you will never fulfill your destiny. :(
- Joel Olsteen
SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail.
- Bill Gates
the only way to influence people is to talk in terms of what the other person wants.
- Dale Carnegie
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
It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The little things in life frequently make the difference in success and failure.
- Zig Ziglar
Satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels.
- Rupert Murdoch
You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth.
- Winston Churchill
A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck.So the question is: Have you ever done that?
- Seth Godin
The idea is to have relationships where you make money and the other guy makes money, too. That’s how a business keeps its team together.
- Russell Simmons
There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.
- Jerry Seinfeld
The cold harsh reality is that we have to balance the budget.
- Michael Bloomberg
I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we’re not wise enough to see it.
- Oprah Winfrey
There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything and an optimist who says, Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway. Either way, nothing happens.
- Yvon Chouinard
The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.
- Bill Gates
Sure, ideas that spread, win, but ideas that don’t get spoken always fail.
- Seth Godin
Certainly there’s a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.
- Bill Gates
Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.
- Colin Powell
I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society. And I think talking in everyday terms and making sure people can understand it – I think that’s important.
- Joel Olsteen
We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.
- Winston Churchill
One of the first things you learn when you run an engineering organization is that a good quality assurance organization cannot build a high-quality product, but it can tell you when the development team builds a low quality product. Similarly, a high quality human resources organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done.
- Ben Horowitz
You don’t build a business –you build people– and then people build the business.
- Zig Ziglar
Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.
- Richard Branson
It’s not what you’ve got. It’s what you use that makes a difference.
- Zig Ziglar
One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War’.
- Winston Churchill
Seeds of discouragement cannot take root in a grateful heart.
- Joel Olsteen
Andy Andrews is the best speaker I have ever seen.
- Zig Ziglar
Reaching the top is a monumental achievement, but remaining there may be the most spectacular feat of all.
- John C. Maxwell
Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.
- Peter Thiel
When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: Try to bear lightly what needs must be. Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity.
- Dale Carnegie
The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I’ll never be hands-on on anything except software.
- Bill Gates
The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of. Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard.
- Bill Gates
When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation.
- Peter Thiel
I don’t spend any time thinking about my place in history, ever. If people say I changed things, it’s nice, and I take it – but if I could give it to a charity it would be useful. I really believe now that my only job in life is to achieve a state of comfort and happiness.
- Russell Simmons
Ideas are cheap. The difficult part is finding the team to execute them.
- Raymond Kwok
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
- Anais Nin
You don’t have to choose between your business and your life. Rather, if you do it right, you get your business and your life. In fact, we strongly believe that the only way to build a truly scalable business is by radically reducing its reliance on you, the owner, and supporting that rapid growth through systems, team and internal business controls.
- Jeff Hoffman
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater their power to harm us.
- Voltaire
Customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.
- Peter Thiel
Look – this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do – ultimately, you’re at the end.
- Ben Horowitz
The flexibility of Hong Kong businessmen should soon twist a way to success again.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure, but to build one that is worthy of enduring.
- Jim Collins
I’m not a tech guy. I’m looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people’s eyes.
- Jack Ma
Today, not starting is far, far worse than being wrong. If you start, you’ve got a shot at evolving and adjusting to turn your wrong into a right. But if you don’t start, you never get a chance.
- Seth Godin
Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.
- Seth Godin
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
- Benjamin Franklin
We’ve all been guilty at one point or another in our careers of boasting of perfect hindsight. It’s a terrible sin. If you don’t make sure your questions and concerns are acted upon, it doesn’t count.
- Jack Welch
To my mind, there is a solution which has to do with democracy, because democratic governments are subject to the will of the people. So, if the people will it, you can actually create international institutions through the democratic states.
- George Soros
The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline–a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.
- James C. Collins
When we try to drill and practice someone into subservient obedience, we’re stamping out the artist that lives within.
- Seth Godin
Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
- John F. Kennedy
Often, organizations need bold, grand gestures to galvanize people towards a new mission or refocus their attention.
- Howard Schultz
Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems.
- Sergey Brin
It all comes down to interest rates. As an investor, all you’re doing is putting up a lump-sump payment for a future cash flow.
- Ray Dalio
I like money, but it’s never been about the money.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I didn’t try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.
- Joel Olsteen
Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.
- Steve Wozniak
The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.
- Bill Gates
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
My strength is programming. I also think my biggest strength is simplification. That’s what I love doing.
- Jack Dorsey
Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.
- Brian Tracy
If you can’t fail, it doesn’t count.
- Seth Godin
I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.
- Lawrence Bossidy
There is a real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment.
- Norman Vincent Peale
Great organizations demand a high level of commitment by the people involved.
- Bill Gates
It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.
- Babe Ruth
The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which secures for the gifted artists a world-wide fame princes well might envy.
- P.T. Barnum
We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster – closed and forgotten within the first year.
- Walt Disney
