Notable Quotables

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

If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.

- Dale Carnegie

Get ready, get ready, get ready, to get ready.

- T.D Jakes

The Silver Spoon, the best-selling Italian cookbook of the last 50 years.

- Timothy Ferriss

Use what you have to run toward your best – that’s how I now live my life.

- Oprah Winfrey

Abe Lincoln once remarked that most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

- Dale Carnegie

The real problem when working with a consultant, a therapist or a coach isn’t that we don’t know what to do. The real problem is that we don’t want to change our mind.

- Seth Godin

The first complaint we hear from everyone is: ‘Why would I want to join this stupid useless thing and know what my brother’s eating for lunch?’ But that really misses the point because Twitter is fundamentally recipient-controlled – you choose to listen and you choose to leave. But you also choose what to put down and what to share.

- Jack Dorsey

[In January 2011] I think the important thing for Twitter is that it works on any technology.

- Jack Dorsey

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.

- Oscar Wilde

I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.

- Andrew Carnegie

The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitable of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

- Timothy Ferriss

You can build a successful career, regardless of your field of endeavor, by the dozens of little things you do on and off the job.

- Zig Ziglar

It never hurts a fool to appear before an audience, for his capacity is not a capacity for feeling.

- Dale Carnegie

Who am I winning for? Am I winning for Oracle shareholders or is it simply a matter of personal vanity? I’ll admit to it. Mea culpa. An awful lot of it is personal vanity.

- Larry Ellison

In my banjo show with the Steep Canyon Rangers, I do do comedy during that show. It’d be absurd just to stand there mute and play 25 banjo songs.

- Steve Martin

The main cause of depression is traceable directly to the world-wide habit of trying to REAP without sowing.

- Napoleon Hill

Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.

- Timothy Ferriss

It is a well known fact that Henry Ford began his business career under the handicap of poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance. It is an equally well known fact that, within the inconceivably short period of ten years, Mr. Ford mastered these three handicaps, and that within twenty-five years he made himself one of the richest men in America. Connect with this fact, the additional knowledge that Mr. Ford’s most rapid strides became noticeable, from the time he became a personal friend of Thomas A. Edison, and you will begin to understand what the influence of one mind upon another can accomplish.

- Napoleon Hill

Many times, we miss out on God’s best because we give up too soon. We don’t realize how close we are to victory.

- Joel Olsteen

If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you’ll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job.

- Seth Godin

The successful leader must plan his work, and work his plan. A leader who moves by guesswork, without practical, definite plans, is comparable to a ship without a rudder. Sooner or later he will land on the rocks.

- Andrew Carnegie

you don’t need to understand any of the biology, just as you don’t need to understand radiation to use a microwave oven.

- Timothy Ferriss

[On someone with a new idea.] The first thing is to draw it out, program it, play with it and get other people playing with it so you can get feedback right away… Once you get that feedback you know if it’s something you should pursue and give more of your attention to, or if it’s something you should put on the shelf for another da

- Jack Dorsey

Once you start doing only what you’ve already proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.

- Jerry Seinfeld

As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.

- Donald Trump

The real opportunity for success lies within the person and not in the job.

- Zig Ziglar

It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word ‘pessimist’ was not in our vocabulary at that time. It’s a modern ‘invention’ which I believe we should ‘dis-invent.’

- Zig Ziglar

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

- Bill Gates

If they really don’t want to buy the flats, I’ll take their deposits.

- Lee Shau Kee

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

At the point when adding people into the company feels like more work than the work that you can offload to the new employees, the defensive lineman has run around you and you probably need to start giving ground grudgingly.

- Ben Horowitz

“Everyone will think it’s stupid!””Everyone says it’s impossible.”Guess what? Everyone works in the balloon factory and everyone is wrong.

- Seth Godin

I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument— and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.

- Dale Carnegie

There are two paths people can take. They can either play now and pay later, or pay now and play later. Regardless of the choice, one thing is certain. Life will demand a payment.

- John C. Maxwell

If it’s not meeting a need, turn it into a seed. Remember, we will reap what we sow. When you do good for other people, that’s when God is going to make sure that His abundant blessings overtake you.

- Joel Olsteen

Where I get my energy is: ‘How can I make it better?’

- Sara Blakely

I’m not looking for a legacy, and you’ll never shut up the critics. I’ve been around 50 years. When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.

- Rupert Murdoch

Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.

- Jeff Bezos

Every noteworthy achievement met with some sort of temporary setback before success came.

- Napoleon Hill

I took up an offer for me to lose 30 pounds in 30 days. It worked. I lost 30 days!

- Zig Ziglar

My saddlebags are why Spanx exist! Now that I have a baby I also have a muffin top.

- Sara Blakely

Most competitors quit long before they’ve created something that makes it to the top.

- Seth Godin

It turns out that all Netflix streaming peak on Saturday night can fit inside a single fiber optic, which is the size of one human hair.

- Reed Hastings

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

- Antoine de Saint-Exup

Creating ideas that spread and connecting the disconnected are the two pillars of our new society, and both of them require the posture of the artist.

- Seth Godin

Everybody was writing about computers and electronics, but all I really knew about was running. It’s what I’ve chosen to do with my life.

- Phil Knight

By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: ‘John, I’d love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I’ve got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said ‘no’ yesterday. Gotta run!

- Timothy Ferriss

The jet stream is a very strong force and pushing a balloon into it is like pushing up against a brick wall, but once we got into it, we found that, remarkably, the balloon went whatever speed the wind went.

- Richard Branson

If any of my competitors were drowning, I’d stick a hose in their mouth

- Ray Kroc

When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.

- Jerry Seinfeld

If you and I go around grumbling about ingratitude, who is to blame? Is it human nature—or is it our ignorance of human nature? Let’s not expect gratitude. Then, if we get some occasionally, it will come as a delightful surprise. If we don’t get it, we won’t be disturbed. Here is the first point I am trying to make in this chapter: It is natural for people to forget to be grateful; so, if we go around expecting gratitude, we are headed straight for a lot of heartaches.

- Dale Carnegie

Some think that it is cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10 percent of our people. It isn’t. It’s just the opposite. What I think is brutal and false kindness is keeping people around who aren’t going to grow and prosper. There’s no cruelty like waiting and telling people late into their careers that they don’t belong – just when the options are limited and they’re putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages.

- Jack Welch

Initiative and starting are about neither of these. They are about “let’s see” and “try.” If there’s no clear right answer, perhaps the thing you ought to do is something new. Something new is often the right path when the world is complicated.

- Seth Godin

The man who does more than he is paid for will soon be paid for more than he does.

- Napoleon Hill

Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.

- Winston Churchill

the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19

- James C. Collins

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

- Aristotle

With comedy, you have no place to go but more comedy, so you’re never off the hook.

- Steve Martin

The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

- Bill Gates

I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.

- Bill Gates

Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum. The second person to install a urinal wasn’t an artist, he was a plumber.

- Seth Godin

I have this system where if I buy three or four new things, I give away three or four things. Sometimes, it’s a very painful system, but shopping is even better when you know that someone else who needs it will be getting. Keep the clothing karma going, I say.

- Sara Blakely

Don’t waste your time trying to win people over that can never be won over.

- Joel Olsteen

It’s not the situation, but whether we react negative or respond positive to the situation that is important.

- Zig Ziglar

I wanted to be a sailor, I wanted to sail the world, to navigate it.

- Jack Dorsey

2006, I started ‘WineLibrary TV.’ To build ‘WineLibrary TV,’ I started using Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter in 2008.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I support Democrats and Republicans. And I’m telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.

- Stephen Wynn

The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.

- Peter Thiel

On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, ‘What God do you pray to?’ What beliefs do you hold?’

- Michael Bloomberg

We could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture.

- Phil Knight

You can abuse me, you can strike me, so long as you let me have my own.

- Ron Chernow

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth.

- Stephen Wynn

When you acknowledge God, He will go before you and make the crooked places straight.

- Joel Olsteen

Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.

- Seth Godin

You may have made a lot of wrong choices, but you’ve also made a lot of choices that were right. Focus on your good qualities. Focus on your victories. Get off the treadmill of guilt.

- Joel Olsteen

Frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

- Jeff Bezos

The global economy has experienced considerable slowdown in recent times. However there has been one notable exception: China.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful’.

- Warren Buffett

I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.’ Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.

- Larry Ellison

Look at Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. They have all entered many sectors, and actually, in many of those sectors, they weren’t as early as Tencent.

- Ma Huateng

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