Most often I am only interested in an idea if it’s going to get hundreds of millions of users. That’s the scale that I am always trying to play to.
- Reid Hoffman
Notable Quotables
More than trends, consumers need functionality. Everything needs an element of fashion, but that’s more like a spice.
- Tadashi Yanai
If you think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself.
- Woodrow Wilson
I think our main real estate effort should be directed at getting out in front of expansion and letting the population build out to us.
- Sam Walton
To my mind the old masters are not art, their value is in their scarcity.
- Thomas Edison
Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.
- George Soros
Winning friends begins with friendliness.
- Dale Carnegie
Our mail product, Hotmail, is the market leader globally.
- Steve Ballmer
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
The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
- Winston Churchill
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
- Mark Twain
Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in.
- Seth Godin
I already told you that it is 100% outside buyers.
- Lee Shau Kee
Always have something to say. The man who has something to say and who is known never to speak unless he has, is sure to be listened to.
- Dale Carnegie
The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.
- Phil Knight
Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.
- Joel Olsteen
Much to learn you still have…my old padawan… This is just the beginning!
- Yoda
We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.
- Winston Churchill
It’s about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it’s Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it’s going to be, ‘Storyteller.’
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I really believed that I said then, and I still do. But we figured out a way to grow, and stay profitable, and there was no logical place to stop. The way I approached managing the business, I always tried to maintain a sense of hands-on, personal supervision – usually flying around to take a look at our stores on a regular basis. But from the very beginning, even on my paper routes in college, I have also been a delegator, trying to hire the best possible people to manage the stores. That’s been the case since back in Newport….We’re big now. We’re really big. That’s not something I like to focus on. I always wanted to be the best retailer in the world, not necessarily the biggest…(being big poses opportunities), but being big also poses big dangers. It has ruined many a fine company – including some giant retailers – who started out strong and got bloated or out of touch or were slow to react to the needs of their customers. Here’s the point: the biggest Wal-Mart gets, the more essential it is that we think small. Because that is exactly how we have become a big corporation.
- Sam Walton
Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we’re going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.
- Elon Musk
Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.
- Henry Ford
You think Yoda stops teaching, just because his student does not want to hear? A teacher Yoda is. Yoda teaches like drunkards drink, like killers kill.
- Yoda
When you simplify… When you get down to the essence, you fix so many things.
- Jack Dorsey
I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.
- John D. Rockefeller
Laughter is America’s most important export.
- Walt Disney
In fact, technology has been the story of human progress from as long back as we know. In 100 years people will look back on now and say, ‘That was the Internet Age.’ And computers will be seen as a mere ingredient to the Internet Age.
- Reed Hastings
Sales were limited by how many shoes we had, shoes were limited by how many dollars we had to order them.
- Phil Knight
You always hear the phrase, money doesn’t buy you happiness. But I always in the back of my mind figured a lot of money will buy you a little bit of happiness. But it’s not really true. I got a new car because the old one’s lease expired.
- Sergey Brin
When I was 7, I came up with the idea of ‘charm socks.’ My mom would take me to buy bags of plastic charms, we would sew them on frilly white socks, and I sold them at school.
- Sara Blakely
Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Accordingly, a ‘genius’ is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework.
- Thomas Edison
A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.
- Winston Churchill
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
Journalists should think of themselves as outside the Establishment, and owners can’t be too worried about what they’re told at their country clubs.
- Rupert Murdoch
“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
Document in writing every agreement or important conversation with suppliers and customers.
- Jack Nadel
Yeah, well I think anyone who likes fast cars will love the Tesla. And it has fantastic handling by the way. I mean this car will crush a Porsche on the track, just crush it. So if you like fast cars, you’ll love this car. And then oh, by the way, it happens to be electric and it’s twice the efficiency of a Prius.
- Elon Musk
The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That’s approaching evil.
- Jeff Bezos
The only time to buy these is on a day with no ‘y’ in it.
- Warren Buffett
Save your first bucket of gold… then use it for investments.
- Lee Shau Kee
Accessible design is good design.
- Steve Ballmer
In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will.
- Bill Gates
In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there’s such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.
- Bill Gates
Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.
- Ray Dalio
I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.
- Larry Ellison
Stopped they must be; on this all depends. Only a fully-trained Jedi Knight, with the Force as his ally, will conquer Vader and his Emperor.
- Yoda
I tell my employees that we’re in the service business, and it’s incidental that we fly airplanes.
- Herb Kelleher
Not only was the casual shoe effort a failure, but it was diluting our trademark and hurting us in running.
- Phil Knight
This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
- James C. Collins
Don’t become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific.
- Zig Ziglar
I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same – they give the exact same advice. It’s like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.
- Ben Horowitz
Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have.
- Thomas Edison
In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly–until you can learn to do it well.
- Zig Ziglar
People are basically the same the world over. Everybody wants the same things – to be happy, to be healthy, to be at least reasonably prosperous, and to be secure. They want friends, peace of mind, good family relationships, and hope that tomorrow is going to be even better than today.
- Zig Ziglar
In the face of challenging economic and market conditions of the past 12 months, our diversified portfolio of multiple earnings streams has served us well.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Ridiculous yachts and private planes and big limousines wont make people enjoy life more, and it sends out terrible messages to the people who work for them. It would be so much better if that money was spent in Africa and its about getting a balance.
- Richard Branson
I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.
- Michael Jordan
If we are growing we are always going to be outside our comfort zone.
- John C. Maxwell
Weak desires bring weak results.
- Napoleon Hill
I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It’s hard to memorize objectives, but it’s easy to remember a story.
- Ben Horowitz
We have more than six and one-half times the level of wealth of our non-millionaire neighbors, but, in our neighborhood, these nonmillionaires outnumber us better than three to one. Could it be that they have chosen to trade wealth for acquiring high-status material possessions?
- Thomas J Stanley
There’s pros and cons of a big church. Cons is I don’t get to know everybody, I don’t get to go to their ballgame, I don’t get to marry everybody, but the pros are you get all this community, 800 ushers come in to serve, getting there at 7 in the morning on their day off and coming in on Saturday to make all those wafers.
- Joel Olsteen
The freedom of the new kind of work (which most of us do, most of the time) is that the tasks are vague and difficult to measure. We can waste an hour surfing the ’Net because no one knows if surfing the ’Net is going to help us make progress or connections. This freedom is great, because it means no one is looking over your shoulder; no one is using a stopwatch on you. This freedom is a pox, because it’s an opening for the resistance. Freedom like this makes it easy to hide, easy to find excuses, easy to do very little.
- Seth Godin
Increasingly, the Chinese will own a lot more of the world because they will be converting their dollar reserves and U.S. government bonds into real assets.
- George Soros
They don’t call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I’m no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.
- Larry Ellison
It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.
- Babe Ruth
Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitate to get in the way if you’re moving.
- Timothy Ferriss
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.
- Sam Walton
I am a self-made brat.
- Stephen Wynn
Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.
- Walt Disney
The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitable of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.
- Timothy Ferriss
Remember: There is a direct correlation between an increased sphere of comfort and getting what you want.
- Timothy Ferriss
When the pressure is on, great leaders are at the their best.
- Napoleon Hill
We made a disastrous move into casual shoes.
- Phil Knight
Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.
- Winston Churchill
Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.
- Larry Ellison
Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!
- Timothy Ferriss
In the old days, Hong Kong was undeveloped, coming from a low base. Now it is on a high base, making it difficult to earn high multiples. We will certainly diversify out of Hong Kong and out of property. [On being asked where?] I don’t know. I haven’t found it yet.
- Lee Shau Kee
The future of the world’s film industry is in China because we have 1.3 billion people.
- Wang Jianlin
The tragedy is that society (your school, your boss, your government, your family) keeps drumming the genius part out. The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability.
- Seth Godin
The one essential character trait of any leader is personal integrity.
- David Novak
Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.
- Og Mandino
Be more splendid, more extraordinary. Use every moment to fill yourself up.
- Oprah Winfrey
Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that’s what’s happening now.
- Reed Hastings
What you sow you reap. What you give.
- Zig Ziglar
It enjoys strong network effects from its content ecosystem: thousands of developers write software for Apple devices because that’s where hundreds of millions of users are, and those users stay on the platform because it’s where the apps are.
- Peter Thiel
You are closer than you think.
- Joel Olsteen
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
I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I’ve tried to really stress that.
- Larry Page
If somebody’s going on your board, and you’re going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.
- Ben Horowitz
We all need a check up from the neck up to avoid stinkin’ thinkin’ which ultimately leads to hardening of the attitude.
- Zig Ziglar
Always seek out the seed of triumph in every adversity.
- Og Mandino
Visionary companies are so clear about what they stand for and what they’re trying to achieve that they simply don’t have room for those unwilling or unable to fit their exacting standards.
- James C. Collins
I’m a big believer than a great bit is a great bit – if I go and see someone I love, like Robert Klein. I want to hear some classics and some new stuff. But a great stand-up bit takes a long time to really polish and perfect, and they’re beautiful things when they’re done.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and build self-confidence.
- Jack Welch
Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove we’ll settle for intense.
- Jeff Bezos
If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it.
- Muhammad Ali
We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren’t that many things people use twice a day.
- Larry Page
Victory is always possible for the person who refuses to stop fighting.
- Napoleon Hill
