A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
Before you can be sure of your ability to transmute DESIRE into its monetary equivalent, you will require SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE of the service, merchandise or profession which you intend to offer in return for fortune.
- Napoleon Hill
Konosuke Matsushita was a visionary entrepreneur. He started working very young as a teenager, and he eventually created Panasonic to become a truly global company.
- Tadashi Yanai
Look, winning and losing can’t be quantified. They are states of mind, and losing happens only when you give up. Seen that way, then, the world can be filled with winners, and there is room for them all.
- Jack Welch
Go from me to we. This is the job of every leader.
- Magic Johnson and David Novak
I’m not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.
- Rupert Murdoch
The doctors actually told my family there was a five percent chance of me living.
- Ed Clark
The polar opposite business cliché warns that “the best product doesn’t always win.
- Peter Thiel
My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It’s their work that I’m supporting. So it’s not me doing it. But I can empower them. I can support them, and I can help them.
- George Soros
Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.
- Ben Horowitz
Most of the exercise I get is from standing and walking all day from one laboratory table to another. I derive more benefit and entertainment from this than some of my friends and competitors get from playing games like golf.
- Thomas Edison
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.
- Richard Branson
Count your blessings—not your troubles!
- Dale Carnegie
Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards- the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.
- Walt Disney
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
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
Do not look like you are playing the fiddle while Rome is burning….stay focussed – Paraphrased from
- David Novak
Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that’s associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to.
- Bill Gates
Remember happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have it depends solely on what you think.
- Dale Carnegie
I’ve changed my will to show my concern for animal rights.
- Stephen Wynn
Young men starting in life should avoid running into debt. There is scarcely anything that drags a person down like debt. It is a slavish position to get ill, yet we find many a young man, hardly out of his “teens,” running in debt. He meets a chum and says, “Look at this: I have got trusted for a new suit of clothes.” He seems to look upon the clothes as so much given to him; well, it frequently is so, but, if he succeeds in paying and then gets trusted again, he is adopting a habit which will keep him in poverty through life. Debt robs a man of his self-respect, and makes him almost despise himself.
- P.T. Barnum
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
Business in Russia was not being done like in the West, with contracts. In Russia, hundreds of millions of dollars were going forward and backward by word of mouth.
- David Reuben
What’s also missing is a sense of relationship. People suffer in isolation from one another. In a world without purpose, without meaningful values, what have we to share but our emptiness, the needy fragments of our superficial selves? As a result, most of us scramble about hungrily seeking distraction, in music, in television, in people, in drugs. And most of all we seek things. Things to wear and things to do. Things to fill the emptiness. Things to shore up our eroding sense of self. Things to which we can attach meaning, significance, life. We’ve fast become a world of things. And most people are being buried in the profusion. What most people need, then, is a place of community that has purpose, order, and meaning. A place in which being human is a prerequisite, but acting human is essential. A place where the generally disorganized thinking that pervades our culture becomes organized and clearly focused on a specific worthwhile result. A place where discipline and will become prized for what they are: the backbone of enterprise and action, of being what you are intentionally instead of accidentally. A place that replaces the home most of us have lost. That’s what a business can do; it can create a Game Worth Playing.
- Michael Gerber
The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing.
- Michael Gerber
You cannot expect to live a positive life if you hang with negative people.
- Joel Olsteen
Our goal is not to build a platform, it’s to be cross all of them.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Government isn’t that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you’ve got to have commercial companies do it.
- Elon Musk
My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked.
- Winston Churchill
That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.
- Bill Gates
Eventually, all companies are replaced.
- Bill Gates
If it didn’t happen in your life before, then you’re not paying attention you don’t think it’s possible. But almost all important events never happen in your life before.
- Ray Dalio
Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.
- Bill Gates
We all have done something unethical.
- John C. Maxwell
The battle is all over except the ‘shouting’ when one knows what is wanted and has made up his mind to get it, whatever the price may be.
- Napoleon Hill
Don’t be impatient. It’s not over until God says it’s over.
- Joel Olsteen
Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software.
- Larry Ellison
The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.
- Thomas Edison
The future of Windows is to let the computer see, listen and even learn.
- Bill Gates
I believe social responsibility begins with a strong, competitive company. Only a healthy enterprise can improve and enrich the lives of people and their communities.
- Jack Welch
Properly understood, technology is the one way for us to escape competition in a globalizing world. As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.
- Peter Thiel
You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that’s wrong with it and fix it. Seek negative feedback, particularly from friends.
- Elon Musk
Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.
- Napoleon Hill
McDonald’s is a people business, and that smile on that counter girl’s face when she takes your order is a vital part of our image.
- Ray Kroc
The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.
- Bill Gates
Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes – and most fools do – but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one’s mistakes.
- Dale Carnegie
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.
- Zig Ziglar
I learned that people don’t buy anything from unknown stores.
- Tadashi Yanai
Options – the ability to choose – is real power. This book is all about how to see and create those options with the least effort and cost. It just so happens, paradoxically, that you can make more money – a lot more money – by doing half of what you are doing now.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you want to build lifelong, loyal friendships, if you want to build trust, learn to protect your family members and friends even when they make mistakes.
- Joel Olsteen
Look we gave this thing a good run. We both know it’s not working out. Let’s wrap this thing up.
- Jack Welch
So sure, start with a slogan. But don’t bother wasting any time on it if you’re merely going for catchy. Aim for true instead.
- Seth Godin
A great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future. Investors expect Twitter will be able to capture monopoly profits over the next decade, while newspapers’ monopoly days are over.
- Peter Thiel
If you need 15 minutes in the sun to trigger a melanin response, 15 minutes is your MED for tanning. More than 15 minutes is redundant and will just result in burning and a forced break from the beach. During this forced break from the beach, let’s assume one week, someone else who heeded his natural 15-minute MED will be able to fit in four more tanning sessions. He is four shades darker, whereas you have returned to your pale pre-beach self.
- Timothy Ferriss
Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.
- Ben Horowitz
So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.
- Peter Drucker
With no clear picture of how you wish your life to be, how on earth are you going to live it? What is your Primary Aim? Where is the script to make your dreams come true? what is the first step to take and how do you measure your progress? How far have you gone and how close are you to getting to your goals?
- Michael Gerber
Since all of them overestimated the competition, no one even showed up.
- Timothy Ferriss
Every failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent benefit.
- Napoleon Hill
I never thought much about success early on. I only thought about being a comedian – or just being in show business, is really more accurate.
- Steve Martin
As a general thing, I have not ‘duped the world’ nor attempted to do so… I have generally given people the worth of their money twice told.
- P.T. Barnum
If you aim at nothing you will hit every time.
- Zig Ziglar
Tell them to grab on to the career that engages their brain and heart and soul and gives them meaning. Tell them that eventually, the money will come, and if it doesn’t, in time, they will find themselves rich with something money can’t buy. And that, obviously, would be happiness.
- Jack Welch
Windows is probably the most important product in the entire PC industry. Everything we do in terms of supporting touch, new hardware, accessibility has incredible impact.
- Bill Gates
If I prophesy my future I want to prophesy something good. I’m not saying what I feel. I’m not saying what it looks like in the real world. No, I’m saying what God says about me.
- Joel Olsteen
Being nice to people is just 20% of providing good customer service. The important part is designing systems that allow you to do the job right the first time. All the smiles in the world arent going to help you if your product or service is not what the customer wants. –
- Service Profit Chain
It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
History recalls the remarkable resilience of the territory’s people.
- Cheng Yu-tung
God, I’m not going to look at what I don’t have. I’m looking unto you. I know in my weakness, you show up the strongest.
- Joel Olsteen
We have built a company with a business mix and operating system that will allow us to deliver record results in any foreseeable economic climate, … We have just completed a very successful management transition and I’ve never been more confident about the company’s future.
- Jack Welch
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
- Timothy Ferriss
I don’t want people in China to have deep pockets but shallow minds.
- Jack Ma
AIDS itself is subject to incredible stigma.
- Bill Gates
I will take as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time.
- Timothy Ferriss
Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen.
- Winston Churchill
I’m a strange mixture of my mother’s curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother’s father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.
- Rupert Murdoch
Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo. The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec is.
- Seth Godin
Effectiveness must be learned.
- Peter Drucker
Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.
- Jeff Bezos
The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.
- Napoleon Hill
Leadership isn’t something that people hand to you. … [i]t’s a gradual process, one where you take responsibility years before you are given authority. And that’s something we can teach.
- Seth Godin
In the next decade, I see Spanx going worldwide. Everywhere. No butt left behind. It’s going to be all over the world and it’s going to be an aspirational brand that transcends categories. There’s so many things we can improve upon and make better.
- Sara Blakely
I like the idea that one thing leads to another. You can tweet something completely innocuous, and then find yourself going off on a tangent that’s inspired by a response.
- Steve Martin
He felt the Gettysburg Address was one of the greatest documents ever written, mainly because Lincoln had said so much with so few words.
- David Novak
You don’t have to fear defeat if you believe it may reveal powers that you didn’t know you possessed.
- Napoleon Hill
Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We’ll break out of it. It takes time.
- Warren Buffett
Life is too short to spend every day doing something you don’t love.
- Jack Welch
Market the change; be bold. Remember don’t be a bad ad, be a good one.
- David Novak
Disneyland is a show.
- Walt Disney
He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
- Winston Churchill
Modern society is based on a modern idea: get the work done by replaceable cogs, by individuals programmed to do what they’re told, follow instructions and work cheap. The attraction of this system is evident by how easily ordinary organizations replace ordinary employees, and how eagerly schools indoctrinate their students.
- Seth Godin
Good advertising should give the reader essential facts about the product or company advertised and should do so engagingly without trickery or hogwash.
- Leo Burnett
Everything that works in sales has been done already. Just keep track of the crap that you buy, or the awesome stuff that you buy, and decide what was the trigger, and then just sell to people like you. It’s really that easy – and that’s what I do.
- Timothy Ferriss
Unwavering courage based upon knowledge of self, and of one’s occupation. No follower wishes to be dominated by a leader who lacks self-confidence and courage. No intelligent follower will be dominated by such a leader very long.
- Napoleon Hill
An old battleax of a woman said to Winston Churchill, “If you were my husband I would put poison in your tea.” Churchill’s response, “Ma’am if you were my wife I would drink it.
- Winston Churchill
Time is more valuable than money, because time is irreplaceable.
- John C. Maxwell
Sam hired me in 1970 as a district manager in charge of new store openings. He had eighteen Wal-Marts and some variety stores doing about $31 million a year. I moved my family and as the van was unloading furniture into our rented house, they called from the office and said, Can you set up this new store in Missouri? My wife, who had three babies and a moving van to deal with, helped me find some clothes and I left. I didn’t see her again for two weeks. Then there was a managers’ meeting so I didn’t see her again for two more weeks. It would be safe to say that in those days we all worked a minimum of 16 hours a day.
- Jack Shewmaker
I actually do think you’re seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that’s a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what’s going on with them.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it.
- Jack Canfield
