Selling is the highest paid profession in the world. Our leaders in business, politics, research and the arts are all great sales people or they have great sales people on their payrolls.
- Jerry Vass
Notable Quotables
People always underestimate Africa. If you want to follow what’s on ground, you would not want to invest in Nigeria; when you look at it from the patriotism point of view, you will ask yourself: how did those great countries become great?
- Aliko Dangote
I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
- Winston Churchill
We can consider 140 characters to be the full story, but it’s not. It’s just a caption. A headline for something broader.
- Jack Dorsey
Listening is just as important in one’s home life as in the world of business.
- Dale Carnegie
When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.
- Walt Disney
People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast.
- Peter Thiel
I think it’s a problem that we don’t have more companies like Facebook. It shouldn’t be the only company that’s doing this well.
- Peter Thiel
Back in high school, I really wanted to be a diesel mechanic. I was building pools and it was still working with my hands. I was installing the (reinforcement) bars, shaping the pools and then they’d bring the cement in. It was great. . . . Then I had my accident.
- Ed Clark
Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets
- Steve Jobs
It’s my view that solar energy may be the ultimate solution for energy for most of the world. I believe, based on what little I know about it, that there is a possibility of a breakthrough.
- Donald Bren
Marriot does not own the hotels, they market and run the real estate, they run the business
- John Kluken
We should be able to significantly improve health-care outcomes. The government is needing that. When you look at ACOs [accountable care organizations] and look at what the Obama administration is talking about, in trying to improve quality, that’s exactly what Express Scripts does.
- George Paz
In the years to come, that lure of partnership helped us attract a lot of good managers, but I don’t believe that we ever had one who bought more stock than Willard. And of course he feels pretty good about it today. – Sam Walton (on human resources, hiring, early history of Wal-Mart)
- Sam Walton
Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.
- Bill Gates
We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
- Bill Gates
If you can discipline yourself to read, you can free up two years of your life for the good stuff!
- Seth Godin
Your faith will help you overcome your obstacles.
- Joel Olsteen
Trust but Verify.
- Ronald Reagan
Strange as it sounds, great leaders gain authority by giving it away.
- Napoleon Hill
In the end, the customer doesn’t know, or care, if you are small or large as an organization. She or he only focuses on the garmenthanging on the rail in the store.
- Giorgio Armani
Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
- Ben Horowitz
Bad psychoanalysis would say I enjoyed pleasing people, working really hard and pleasing people, which is probably related to my father in some way. But I really liked working hard. When I worked at Disneyland, I’d do 12 hours straight and go home thrilled.
- Steve Martin
Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
- Winston Churchill
Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher than lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure.
- John C. Maxwell
No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn’t create that – society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Economic cycles are just like riding on a Ferris wheel.
- Cheng Yu-tung
My general attitude to life is to enjoy every minute of every day. I never do anything with a feeling of, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to do this today.’
- Richard Branson
We’re profitable and have the potential to be very profitable, … We generate cash from operations of over $1 billion per quarter. We have $19 billion in cash and equivalents in an industry that is in debt. We’ve gained more market share than we’ve ever gained in this last quarter. We’ve got the customer loyalty and strategy for where the industry’s going, which is combining networks for service providers and enterprises. So I’m very optimistic about our future if we execute right.
- John Chambers
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.
- Warren Buffett
[On stopping working and focussing 100% on his company Nike] I was still teaching accounting, but the next year, I told Penny [married in 1968] if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I’m going to go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000. I said, that ‘s close enough.
- Phil Knight
No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.
- Winston Churchill
What a man’s mind can create, man’s character can control.
- Thomas Edison
Nobody in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will ever object to your saying: ‘I may be wrong. Let’s examine the facts.
- Dale Carnegie
When you allow what someone says or does to upset you, you’re allowing that person to control you.
- Joel Olsteen
I think Yahoo is a great company, with great assets.
- Jack Ma
You cannot underestimate people’s ability to spot a soulless, bureaucratic tactic a million miles away. It’s a big reason why so many companies that have dipped a toe in social media waters have failed miserably.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
You can’t define what’s middle class, what is wealthy, what is poor.
- Michael Bloomberg
Substantial growth in GDP, rising wages, improved employment prospects and favourable bank mortgage terms have all resulted in a buoyant property market.
- Lee Shau Kee
Every single important thing we do is something we didn’t use to be good at, and in fact, might be something we used to fear.
- Seth Godin
The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.
- Elon Musk
When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.
- Howard Schultz
No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.
- Ben Horowitz
When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for people telling you that you are nuts.
- Larry Ellison
A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.
- Peter Drucker
Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you’re glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.
- Bill Gates
We’ll see how that evolves. Obviously, it doesn’t mean we’ll just be willing to do anything that’s requested of us.
- Sergey Brin
The thing that I’m going to focus on today is essentially the cloud that has been over Nike’s head over the last couple years.
- Phil Knight
I have the best job I could possibly have.
- Michael Bloomberg
I have worked at Nike and its predecessor company for 48 years. Some might call me a short timer.
- Phil Knight
MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.
- Winston Churchill
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?
- Peter Thiel
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
- John Wooden
After all God doesn’t want you to be an imitation of someone else. You should be the original you were created to be. There is an anointing on your life, an empowerment. Not to be somebody else, but to be you. If you let people squeeze you into their molds and you bow down to their pressure to try to please your critics, it not only takes away your uniqueness, but it also lessens the favor on your life.
- Joel Olsteen
Ideas… they have the power.
- Napoleon Hill
The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers’ needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager’s business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.
- Peter Drucker
I was lucky enough to co-found a business in college that ended up with 400 employees, and I launched 20 different projects while I was there – a project a week.
- Seth Godin
Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.
- Paula Poundstone
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
There was a moment when I was watching Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in ‘Badboys’ that I felt, you know, inspired. I don’t know if I was proud, because so many people do the work. Everyone’s part of a team that develops over the years and gives people chances. There have been some good moments watching people develop.
- Russell Simmons
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.
- Richard Branson
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
What is school for? If you’re not asking that, you’re wasting time and money.
- Seth Godin
We beat our expectations in the run up to Christmas and this time last year we had particularly high stock levels leading to a bigger clearance.
- Simon Wolfson
The economy is like a machine.
- Ray Dalio
Be there for your kids. Later, when you need them, they’ll be there for you.
- Zig Ziglar
Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.
- Steve Ballmer
Essentially, whoever is successful, whoever is going to do things that make a difference, is going to be talked about.
- Mukesh Ambani
Law of Credibility – Don’t say anything you can’t prove. Be able to prove anything you say.
- Jerry Vass
A wartime C.E.O. may not delegate. They make every decision based on the next product release. They may use a lot of profanity.
- Ben Horowitz
I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
What is closest to my heart is our education program.
- Henry Sy
When you’re green, your growing. When you’re ripe, you rot.
- Ray Kroc
Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate?
- Larry Page
The jack-of-all-trades seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.
- Napoleon Hill
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, and do more and become more, you are a leader.
- John Quincy Adams
Where is the love that will overlook a person’s faults?
- Joel Olsteen
We’ve always had a pretty competitive and pretty ferocious battle with British Airways… It’s lasted now about 14 years, and we’re very pleased to have survived it.
- Richard Branson
In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn’t been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A’s without taking a book home. I didn’t go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.
- Bill Gates
All marketers are storytellers. Only the losers are liars.
- Seth Godin
I don’t have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The minimum effective dose (MED) is defined simply: the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome.
- Timothy Ferriss
This the real world, homie, school finished They done stole your dreams, you dunno who did it.
- Kanye West
To me, job titles don’t matter. Everyone is in sales. It’s the only way we stay in business.
- Harvey Mackay
And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.
- Winston Churchill
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
What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Doing something different is what’s truly good for society—and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.
- Peter Thiel
Those who are blessed with the most talent don’t necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.
- Mary Kay Ash
[On the three keys to Twitter’s success.] The first lesson: Draw. The most important thing you can do with an idea: get it out of your head. Second lesson: Luck. Be able to recognize when luck is happening around you. Third lesson: iteration. Originally Twitter asked ‘What’s your status?’ Bonus fourth lesson: know when to stop. Sometimes put the idea away, that idea will often emerge later.
- Jack Dorsey
Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.
- Winston Churchill
The bible says no man can take your joy. That means no person can make you live with a negative attitude. No circumstance, no adversity can force you to live in despair. As Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of wheelchair-bound President Franklin D. Roosevelt, often said, ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
- Joel Olsteen
I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.
- Bill Gates
A true entrepreneur is someone who seeks to profitably solve a problem that the world has in exchange for enough monetary compensation to achieve their dreams.
- Clay Clark
I’ve always been interested in science – one of my favourite books is James Watson’s ‘Molecular Biology of the Gene.
- Bill Gates
It doesn’t matter how many people you offend, as long as you’re getting your message to your consumers. I say to those people who do not want to offend anybody: You are going to have a very, very difficult time having meaningful advertising.
- Phil Knight
of preparing for defeat, prepare for victory. Prepare for increase. Prepare for God’s favor. You have to set the tone at the start of each day.
- Joel Olsteen
Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.
- Henry Ford
Thank your opponents sincerely for their interest. Anyone who takes the time to disagree with you is interested in the same things you are. Think of them as people who really want to help you, and you may turn your opponents into friends.
- Dale Carnegie
