I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
I’ve always wanted to be a businessman. No other ambitions, I just wanted to be in business, even when I was a child in Fujian province, south China.
- Henry Sy
No man has a right to expect to succeed in life unless he understands his business, and nobody can understand his business thoroughly unless he learns it by personal application and experience.
- P.T. Barnum
What has sustained us through these years? Trust. Dedication. Discipline.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Any jerk can have short-term earnings. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the company sinks five years later.
- Jack Welch
Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.
- Bill Gates
We need to reinvent food at Starbucks. Less could be more.
- Howard Schultz
Concentrate all of your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought into focus.
- Alexander Graham Bell
The hardest thing about starting a company and running a company is, there’s just so many expectations on you, and there are so many people who have things that they want you to do. It’s a lot like life about that.
- Ben Horowitz
The Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is.
- Michael Gerber
Service is the key to everything in life.
- Russell Simmons
One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That’s why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.
- Ben Horowitz
Mentorship is a pain free way to learn.
- Paul Pressey
Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation…. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward!
- Thomas Edison
It’s been a long career, and I’ve made some mistakes along the way.
- Rupert Murdoch
Sweden is famous for many things – but not fashion.
- Stefan Persson
The most common cause of fear of old age is associated with the possibility of poverty.
- Napoleon Hill
The regulatory systems in place disincentive innovation. It’s intense to fight the red tape.
- Travis Kalanick
The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.
- Dale Carnegie
That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity. —BERYL MARKHAM, West with the Night1
- James C. Collins
It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product. If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.
- Peter Thiel
Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.
- Henry Ford
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
Desire is created when something happens in your life that suddenly changes the way you see yourself in relationship to your future.
- Zig Ziglar
War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
- Winston Churchill
It’s not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobiles one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.
- George Washington Carver
The people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don’t know.
- Seth Godin
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
- Winston Churchill
Failure is a great teacher, and I have been its student on more than one occasion. – CEO David Novak of Yum! Brands
- David Novak
$1,000,000 in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows.
- Timothy Ferriss
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
- Elon Musk
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
With comedy, you have no place to go but more comedy, so you’re never off the hook.
- Steve Martin
Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.
- Sam Walton
Now that we had a name, we had to have a trademark for the side of the shoe. It was 1971, and Ford had spent $2 million getting a trademark. We didn’t have $2 million, so I went by the graphic arts department at Portland State, and there was a woman there saying, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get enough money for the dress for this prom,’ And I said, ‘I have a job for you.’ I paid her $2 an hour, and she spent 17 and a half hours. So $35 and she came up with what is now the swoosh.
- Phil Knight
Our business is diversified across many sectors, be it supermarkets or finance. We can invest in many areas.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
In absorbing companies, Rockefeller was secretive and asked them to continue operating under their original names and not divulge their Standard Oil Ownership. They were instructed to retain their original stationary, keep secret accounts, and not allude on paper to their Cleveland connection.
- Ron Chernow
I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.
- Bill Gates
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
- Peter Drucker
It is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.
- Winston Churchill
What’s interesting about Twitter and the influencers that someone follows – like, say, Shaquille O’Neal – is that they see someone who is using the exact same tools that they have access to, and I think that inspires this hope to be able to really engage with someone like him.
- Jack Dorsey
Entrepreneurial skills and ability for sheer hard work will help Hong Kong re-orient its economy for future growth through a broad variety of strong and promising businesses.
- Cheng Yu-tung
We are the most powerful nation on earth. No external power, no terrorist organization, can defeat us. But we can defeat ourselves by getting caught in a quagmire.
- George Soros
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
It encourages you to focus on your work and the generosity that comes from interacting with (and helping) your community.
- Seth Godin
Advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away, it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later.
- Peter Thiel
When you are the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you are basically saying, ‘I’m right and everyone else is wrong.’ That’s a very unpleasant position to be in. It’s at once exhilaration and the same time an invitation to be attacked.
- Larry Ellison
What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away.
- Jack Dorsey
There’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap.
- Ben Horowitz
You can make a positive out of the most negative if you work at it hard enough.
- Sam Walton
It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.
- Winston Churchill
Dreams grow if you grow.
- Zig Ziglar
Be helpful. When you see a person without a smile, give him one of yours.
- Zig Ziglar
You don’t inherit cancer, you actually get it.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
And I think the more money you put in people’s hands, the more they will spend. And if they don’t spend it, they invest it. And investing it is another way of creating jobs. It puts money into mutual funds or other kinds of banks that can go out and make loans, and we need to do that.
- Michael Bloomberg
Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.
- Peter Drucker
What I would say to young entrepreneurs is there’s so many moments in your life where you have these dreams, and people are trying to protect you, and they say, perhaps, friends, family, parents sometimes, they don’t agree with it, they think, ‘This is just too high of a hurdle.’ And I don’t agree with that.
- Howard Schultz
It’s not going out to people who aren’t going to go shopping. You’ve already got the people who are shopping.
- Jack Taylor
The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.
- Seth Godin
Mind you, I got this reduction without saying a word about what I wanted. I talked all the time about what the other person wanted and how he could get it.
- Dale Carnegie
“Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.”
- Sam Walton
Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
- Dale Carnegie
The number of residential units which have been booked in the financial statements of the Group in the period under review totalled 5,800 and amounted to approximately HK$14 billion in aggregate value.
- Lee Shau Kee
If you want to understand what drives Cisco, look at our approach to customers. The manner in which we serve our customers defines our company values and demonstrates our priorities. Cisco is proud to be honored with this important certification that recognizes the foundation of our culture — the importance that we place on ensuring our customers are successful with Cisco technology.
- John Chambers
We, in short, propose to tax luxuries, monopolies, and superfluities, but we scrupulously avoid taxing the necessaries of life.
- Winston Churchill
The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
- Winston Churchill
If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?
- John Wooden
Gentlemen, I’ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I’ve developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.
- Ben Horowitz
The seed of a bamboo tree is planted, fertilized and watered. Nothing happens for the first year. There´s no sign of growth. Not even a hint. The same thing happens – or doesn´t happen – the second year. And then the third year. The tree is carefully watered and fertilized each year, but nothing shows. No growth. No anything. For eight years it can continue. Eight years! Then – after the eight years of fertilizing and watering have passed, with nothing to show for it – the bamboo tree suddently sprouts and grows thirty feet in three months!
- Zig Ziglar
We’ve been able to go deep rather than broad.
- Jack Dorsey
People can get information – on entertainment, politics, finance – much easier than before. That will change the way people do business, the way people live.
- Robin Li
The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit… a reputation, character.
- John D. Rockefeller
The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
- Ben Horowitz
Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.What makes someone an artist? I don’t think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren’t artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.That’s why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That’s why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He’s an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn’t care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it’s important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does.Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
- Seth Godin
Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.
- Winston Churchill
It’s true that charisma can make a person stand out for a moment, but character sets a person apart for a lifetime.
- John C. Maxwell
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
Weak desires bring weak results.
- Napoleon Hill
When people come to Twitter and they want to express something in the world, the technology fades away. It’s them writing a simple message and them knowing that people are going to see it.
- Jack Dorsey
You need to be better not bitter.
- Nate Waters
The cost of praising someone is nil – but every psychological study shows the payoff is huge.
- Harvey Mackay
Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.
- Bill Gates
MAY 13 Guard Against Pessimism For the Kingdom of God is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. ROMANS 14:17 NLT I HEARD A STORY ABOUT TWO FARMERS. When the rain fell, one farmer said, Thank You, Lord, for watering our crops.” But the other farmer said, Yeah, but if the rain keeps up, it’s going to rot the roots.” When the sun came out, the positive farmer said, Thank You, Lord, that our crops are getting the vitamins and minerals they need. We’ll have a wonderful harvest this year.” But the negative farmer said, Yeah, but if it keeps up, it’s going to scorch those plants. We’re never going to make a living.” Don’t you know people who are always focused on the negative? Be sure to guard against their negative attitudes infecting your thinking! Stay focused on the positive things in life.
- Joel Olsteen
1. What is our mission?2. Who is our customer?3. What does the customer value?4. What are our results?5. What is our plan?
- Peter Drucker
If the employees come first, then they’re happy….A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy, so they keep coming back, which pleases the shareholders. It’s not one of the enduring green mysteries of all time, it is just the way it works.
- Herb Kelleher
There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
- Sam Walton
Now that we have run out of money we have to think.
- Winston Churchill
The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.
- Bill Gates
No company should depend on one person no matter how that person is smart or genius, whether it’s Apple or News Corp, or Citibank or any other company in the world.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.
- John C. Maxwell
One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice.
- Seth Godin
I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
- Winston Churchill
Every breakthrough business idea begins with solving a common problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. I discovered a big one when I took apart an IBM PC. I made two interesting discoveries: The components were all manufactured by other companies, and the system that retailed for $3,000 cost about $600 in parts.
- Michael Dell
What most people know but don’t realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn’t there, we’d be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.
- Elon Musk
Everything begins with a decision. Then, we have to manage that decision for the rest of your life.
- John C. Maxwell
This is a strange Christmas Eve,”Churchill told the the crowd of several hundred gathered at the mansion’s garden.”Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and with the most terrible weapons which science can devise the nations advance upon each other.
- Winston Churchill
If this market transition truly evolves the way that I think it’s most likely to, the worst decision you could make is not to move.
- John Chambers
For get this quite clear, every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to decide between you [Charles de Gaulle] and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.
- Winston Churchill
Don’t romance Wall Street. You don’t want investors who are only concerned about the quarter, or who are working on their exit strategy from day one. You want shareholders to own you forever. If we have no trading at all, I consider that a tremendous accomplishment.
- Warren Buffett
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
