Say ‘Hello’ in tones that bespeak how pleased you are to have the person call.
- Dale Carnegie
Notable Quotables
An employer has no business with a man’s personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance, and nothing else. Any attempt by an employer to go beyond this is usurpation. It is an immoral as well as illegal intrusion of privacy.
- Peter Drucker
I really don’t think in the past. I sit down with many friends at dinner, and they like to talk about the good old days. I’m respectful of the good old days, but I find myself spending very little time reminiscing. I’m really looking forward.
- Donald Bren
I don’t know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.
- Steve Ballmer
9 out of ten new businesses fail in the first five years.
- Robert Kiyosaki
In our day Capital, Business Ability, and Manual Labor are the legs of a three-legged stool. While the three legs stand sound and firm, the stool stands; but let any one of the three weaken and break, let it be pulled out or struck out, down goes the stool to the ground. And the stool is of no use until the third leg is restored.
- Andrew Carnegie
Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.
- Stephen R. Covey
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
- Warren Buffett
Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I’ve learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX.
- Peter Thiel
The Dip creates scarcity, scarcity creates value.
- Seth Godin
The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
- Winston Churchill
Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.
- Bill Gates
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.
- Winston Churchill
I was reading an article in the ‘New York Times;’ it talked about being in the zone, and being in the zone you’re so focused that time ceases to exist. It’s when you think, ‘Oh, I’ve been doing this for five hours and didn’t even know it.’ It’s the difference between hard work and going, ’12 o’clock, not moving.’
- Steve Martin
IQ is a commodity, data is a commodity. I’m far more interested in watching people interact at a restaurant with their smartphone. We can all read ‘Tech Crunch,’ ‘Ad Age.’ I would rather be living in the trenches. I would rather be going to Whole Foods in Columbus Circle to watch people shop with their smartphones.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.
- Timothy Ferriss
You need to take pride in what God has given you.
- Joel Olsteen
Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable
- Peter Thiel
Mr Churchill, to what do you attribute your success in life? Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down
- Winston Churchill
I like the word ‘autopilot’ more than I like the word ‘self-driving.’ ‘Self-driving’ sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. ‘Autopilot’ is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.
- Elon Musk
The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is “value” to the customer?), standardizing the “product,” designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.
- Peter Drucker
Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.
- Seth Godin
If you don’t love what you’re doing with unbridled passion and enthusiasm, you’re not going to succeed when you hit obstacles.
- Howard Schultz
I think what’s happening for me, it’s fun to see other things besides Facebook and Twitter take hold. The maturity of Tumblr as a real player is exciting. I think Pinterest has proved to be a major player. It’s fun to see Instagram become a major player. It’s fun to watch things like SnapChat, and Vine, try to vie to be the next thing.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The person who gets the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.
- Dale Carnegie
Southwest Airlines have been such a people-first model for me for so long that it was inspiring just to be physically in a place I already knew so much about. Yet I didn’t fully understand just how far they are willing to go to get the right people in the right seats until well after our best practices tour when someone I know applied for an entry level position with the company.
- David Novak
A good book can be both a window to the world and a mirror to one’s self. It is easier to build community and remain true to the brand when you have zealots instead of marketing mercaries.
- Radical Marketing
No one knows more about the way you think than you do.
- Seth Godin
I think of L.A. as truly the melting pot. It’s basically a mini-country unto itself.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put
- Winston Churchill
Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you will have even more to express gratitude for.
- Zig Ziglar
Mr. Morgan buys his partners. I grow my own.
- Andrew Carnegie
Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.
- Reed Hastings
Basically, our goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.
- Larry Page
If you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it.
- Peter Drucker
The future is already here—it is just unevenly distributed.
- William Gibson
To me, this is about preserving history and making it available to everyone
- Sergey Brin
I’m truly passionate about basketball. I’m not as passionate about baseball as I am about basketball, but I watch baseball and I watch football. I love sports in general.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
I’m constantly amazed that owners and managers of all businesses don’t train their people to call the person who pays by credit card by name. It definitely makes the customer feel good and will be a factor in bringing them back to your place of business.
- Zig Ziglar
I think failure is nothing more than life’s way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating. Most people attach failure to something not working out or how people perceive you. This way, it is about answering to yourself.
- Sara Blakely
You can make a positive out of the most negative if you work at it hard enough.
- Sam Walton
You don’t have to start from scratch to have a massive impact on the world.
- Jack Dorsey
The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.
- Winston Churchill
It is possible to know all there is to know about a subject—medicine, for example—but if you don’t have M.D. at the end of your name, few will listen. The M.D. is what I term a credibility indicator.” The so-called expert with the most credibility indicators, whether acronyms or affiliations, is often the most successful in the marketplace, even if other candidates have more in-depth knowledge. This is a matter of superior positioning, not deception.
- Timothy Ferriss
Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.
- Bill Gates
The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it’s a job.Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.I call the process of doing your art ‘the work.’ It’s possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that’s how you become a linchpin.The job is not the work.
- Seth Godin
Being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits.
- Peter Thiel
The work relationship has to be based on mutual respect. Psychological despotism is basically contemptuous—far more contemptuous than the traditional Theory X. It does not assume that people are lazy and resist work, but it assumes that the manager is healthy while everybody else is sick. It assumes that the manager is strong while everybody else is weak. It assumes that the manager knows while everybody else is ignorant. It assumes that the manager is right, whereas everybody else is stupid. These are the assumptions of foolish arrogance.
- Peter Drucker
An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.
- Elon Musk
We don’t know exactly how it will work. Advertisers want greater access, better accountability.
- Sergey Brin
It’s not Pinterest where people are putting up pins. You’re changing the way cities work, and that’s fundamentally a third rail. We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an as—hole named Taxi.
- Travis Kalanick
Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
- Peter Thiel
The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.
- Elon Musk
The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs. It’s no surprise that entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975. To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make things better just by sending out more checks.
- Peter Thiel
We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
There is an immeasurable distance between late and too late.
- Og Mandino
1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward.2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.
- Peter Thiel
What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.
- Elon Musk
I think faith is incredibly important because you will become overwhelmed with what’s happening and you will have waves of grief, but when you turn to your faith, I believe God will give you waves of grace to get through it.”- Joel Osteen
- Joel Olsteen
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that’s somewhat correct.
- Larry Page
The Group’s performance will continue to improve in future upon return of the local economy on an upward recovery track.
- Lee Shau Kee
Chinese people today have strong demand for culture, but we need effective supply, and China needs innovative cultural products.
- Wang Jianlin
What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We’ve termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.’
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
The New Rich ( NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.
- Timothy Ferriss
It’s not time,” “Take it easy,” “Wait and see,” “It’s someone else’s turn” – none of these stalls are appropriate for a leader in search of change. There’s a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late. The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.
- Seth Godin
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
In the 1950s, people welcomed big plans and asked whether they would work. Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris. You can still visit the Bay Model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today it’s just a tourist attraction: big plans for the future have become archaic curiosities.
- Peter Thiel
It’s important to be willing to make mistakes. The worst thing that can happen is you become memorable.
- Sara Blakely
We’ve only been wealthy in this country for 70 years. Who said we ought to have all this? Is it ordained?
- Jack Welch
Let go of yesterday. Let today be a new beginning and be the best that you can, and you’ll get to where God wants you to be.
- Joel Olsteen
On average, our total annual realized income is less than 7 percent of our wealth. In other words, we live on less than 7 percent of our wealth.
- Thomas J Stanley
The current (educational) structure, which seeks low-cost uniformity that meets minimum standards, is killing our economy, our culture, and us.
- Seth Godin
Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.
- Bill Gates
The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it.
- Winston Churchill
I’ve always been very happy. I’ve always been easy going and I’ve always been very encouraging, it’s just my personality.
- Joel Olsteen
The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.
- Michael Bloomberg
Linchpins are the essential building blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations. They don’t bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.
- Seth Godin
One day a friend came by the job site and asked them separately what they were doing. The first said, Aw, we’re just laying brick. We’ve been doing this for thirty years. It’s so boring. One brick on top of the other.” Then the friend asked the second bricklayer. He just lit up. Why, we’re building a magnificent skyscraper,” he said. This structure is going to stand tall for generations to come. I’m just so excited that I could be a part of it.” Each bricklayer’s happiness or lack of it was based on their perspective. You can be laying a brick or you can be building a beautiful skyscraper. The choice is up to you. You can go to work each day and just punch in on the clock and dread being there and do as little as possible. Or you can show up with enthusiasm and give it your best, knowing that you’re making the world a better place.
- Joel Olsteen
I know when one door closes God will open up another door. What was meant for my harm God will use to my advantage. I’m not only coming out, I will come out better off than I was before.
- Joel Olsteen
Life is not a dress rehearsal.
- Clay Clark
In order to become rich, you need to learn to build systems that can work without you. .
- Robert Kiyosaki
[In January 2011] I think Twitter is so unique that we must stay independent.
- Jack Dorsey
The first ten minutes of sorting through clothing was like choosing which child of mine should live or die.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you don’t believe in your product, or if you’re not consistent and regular in the way you promote it, the odds of succeeding go way down. The primary function of the marketing plan is to ensure that you have the resources and the where withal to do what it takes to make your product work.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
Tip #1 – Self-motivation is the key to success and will achieve powerful results.
- Jack Nadel
The world has changed – through technology, through wine-making techniques, the quality of wine is greater than it’s ever been. Whereas ten, fifteen years ago it was very easy to find lots of bad wine, it’s kind of hard now. The technology, the science – it’s like, are you kidding? We’re in the golden years of wine!
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Establish late-payment penalties as part of your terms and conditions and enforce them.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
- Mark Twain
-It is possible to vastly compress most learning. In a surprising number of cases, it is possible to do something in 1-10 months that is assumed to take 1-10 years.-The more you compress things, the more physical limiters become a bottleneck. All learning is physically limited. The brain is dependent on finite quantities of neurotransmitters, memories require REM and non-REM (NREM) sleep for consolidation, etc. The learning graph is not unlike the stress-recovery-hyperadaptation curves of weight training.-The more extreme your ambition, just as in sports, the more you need performance enhancement via unusual schedules, diet, drugs, etc.-Most important: due to the bipolar nature of the learning process, you can forecast setbacks. If you don’t, you increase the likelihood of losing morale and quitting before the inflection point.
- Timothy Ferriss
Exceptionally hard decisions can deplete your energy to the point at which you finally cave in. If you mentally crumble and degenerate into negative thinking, you’ll magnify the problem to the point where it can haunt you.
- John C. Maxwell
Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have.
- Thomas Edison
I try to create businesses that I think are not hurtful.
- Russell Simmons
Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. To know all is to forgive all.
- Dale Carnegie
Discontent is the first necessity of progress.
- Thomas Edison
Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all.
- Winston Churchill
The worse a situation becomes the less it takes to turn it around, the bigger the upside.
- George Soros
Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
- Winston Churchill
