Connectors understand the necessity of creating value for others. If you want to be in the middle of the action, you must seek ways to enhance the lives of those surrounding you. The best connectors I know are extremely generous with introductions where they make sense. One of my favorite questions is, What are you most excited about right now? From that answer, I know who I can hook that person up with.
- Forbes
Notable Quotables
We saw that a thousand results weren’t necessarily as useful as 10 good ones.
- Sergey Brin
Most people have ‘one way’ brains—they acquire information and do nothing. Guerillas have ‘two way’ brains—they obtain relevant information and act on it.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
I remember one time I didn’t want to spend any money on motels so we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor of one of our guys’ houses. His furniture hadn’t gotten there yet.
- Sam Walton
The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
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
Key to helping poor is to not be poor.
- Abraham Lincoln
There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything and an optimist who says, Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway. Either way, nothing happens.
- Yvon Chouinard
I think we are living in a time where the consumer has lots of choices, whether it’s coffee, newspapers or whatever it is. And there is parity in the market place, and as a result of that, the consumer is beginning to make decisions, not just on what things cost and the convenience of it.
- Howard Schultz
A half-billion-dollar subsidy was unthinkable in the mid-2000s. It’s unthinkable today. There was only one moment where that was possible, and Tesla played it perfectly.
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The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.
- Seth Godin
People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
- Timothy Ferriss
How do leaders serve their people? They may pay good wages and treat employees with respect.
- John C. Maxwell
It’s what we wrestle with every single day. The intersection of comfort, danger, and safety. The balancing act between vulnerability and shame. The opportunity (or the risk) to do art. The willingness to take responsibility for caring enough to make a difference and to have a point of view.
- Seth Godin
The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don’t count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.
- Mukesh Ambani
If you have a reputation as a big, stiff bureaucracy, you’re stuck.
- Jack Welch
Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical.
- Howard Schultz
Leadership must wake up every day with the mission of Finding a Better Way Every Day…There are no modest revolutions…GE was a place where the people got up everyday to searching for a better way.
- Jack Welch
Buddha said: ‘Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love,’ and a misunderstanding is never ended by an argument but by tact, diplomacy, conciliation and a sympathetic desire to see the other person’s viewpoint.
- Dale Carnegie
You will never fulfill your destiny doing work you despise.
- John C. Maxwell
The more you complain about your problems, the more problems you will have to complain about.
- Zig Ziglar
If your thinking is limited, then your life is going to be limited.
- Joel Olsteen
We can make the world a better place, one butt at a time
- Sara Blakely
While there’s always room for improvement, … we were very pleased with our results in what is a seasonally-challenging quarter.
- John Chambers
Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.
- Henry Ford
What is the 20% of my belongings that I use 80% of the time? Eliminate the other 80% in clothing, magazines, books, and all else. Be ruthless – you can always repurchase things you can’t live without.
- Timothy Ferriss
Think of social media as the Internet. I can’t think of anyone betting against the Internet in 2012.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
My mother taught me something at a young age – she said ‘you are the company you keep’. To define yourself by some label or some level of resources – that’s pretty shallow.
- Howard Schultz
It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.
- Larry Page
Cupcakes The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor. The third time, you might improvise and screw up. Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can. At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen. Others merely plod along. They’re cooks, not chefs. A cook follows a recipe. A chef invents one. We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs.
- Seth Godin
The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it’s so easy to be motivated.
- Jeff Bezos
War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war:
- Peter Thiel
The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.
- Bill Gates
SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail.
- Bill Gates
Accessible design is good design.
- Steve Ballmer
THE MOST CONTENTIOUS question in business is whether success comes from luck or skill.
- Peter Thiel
Delegating doesn’t mean passing off work you don’t enjoy, but letting your employees stretch their skills and judgment.
- Harvey Mackay
Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.
- Steve Jobs
Flaming enthusiasm, backed by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.
- Dale Carnegie
Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellow the warm sunshine of praise.
- Dale Carnegie
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The problem with common sense is that it’s not really that common. – David Novak CEO of Yum! Brands
- David Novak
[In June 2011] We’re focused on building a product and a business. Going public is an instrument and tool to help sustain the company. In the future, there may be an IPO, but I don’t know what the timing is.
- Jack Dorsey
In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Artists, actors, people like that, they live in a very strange bubble of their own. They’re mollycoddled; they’re highly privileged.
- Stephen Wynn
If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!
- Michael Gerber
Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
- Winston Churchill
My father left me with a clear sense that the media was something different.
- Rupert Murdoch
Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so love the people who treat you right, forget about the ones who don’t, and believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.
- Harvey Mackay
Don’t save it all for the end. There is every reason not to.
- Timothy Ferriss
Use technology to remind people that we are really human and civilization is meant to connect together. Civilization is meant to be easy, and the technology to completely disappear. And should be easy to pick up.
- Jack Dorsey
I definitely think there’s some way to understand how people emotionally feel about somebody, but I don’t think data collects it. They’re not going to click your bit.ly link or click your TweetMeme retweet every time.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
In a position to be more accommodating. There are some lights at the end of the tunnel. If political leaders in Europe can put things in order, things will be better. These days, much relies on politics.
- Lee Shau Kee
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
- Socrates
The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.)
- James C. Collins
All of the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind.
- Winston Churchill
We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.
- Walt Disney
You’re either remarkable or invisible.
- Seth Godin
Last I looked – and I’m not a candidate – but last time I checked reading about the Constitution, the Electoral College has nothing to do with parties, has absolutely nothing to do with parties. It’s most states are winners take all.
- Michael Bloomberg
The Interros strategy toward various assets generally depends on the stage of their development and level of their maturity.
- Vladimir Potanin
Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract failure.
- Timothy Ferriss
When you’re doing hard work, getting rejected, failing, working it out—this is a dumb time to make a situational decision about whether it’s time for a nap or a day off or a coffee break. Zig Ziglar taught me this twenty years ago. Make your schedule before you start. Don’t allow setbacks or blocks or anxiety to push you to say, “hey, maybe I should check my e-mail for a while, or you know, I could use a nap.” If you do that, the lizard brain will soon be trained to use that escape hatch again and again.
- Seth Godin
In Russia, or anywhere, people don’t like rich people. Yeah, OK, I have money, but the question is how I use it. It’s not easy, believe me; it’s not easy.
- Viktor Vekselberg
The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether he would tolerate a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. Madden answered, “If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you’ll be so late you’ll miss the game, so you can’t do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you’ll have a player that’s so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.
- Ben Horowitz
I think every Internet user likes personalization.
- Ma Huateng
The goal is to be able to live your life the way Michael Jordan played basketball, or Marvin Gaye sang a song. To be able to feel the way you feel when you laugh at a joke, but to feel that way all the time.
- Russell Simmons
The question you should be asking isn’t, What do I want? or What are my goals? but What would excite me?
- Timothy Ferriss
If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it.
- Peter Thiel
The worst way of flying, I think, is standby. It never works. That’s why they call it standby. You end up standing there going, ‘Bye!’
- Jerry Seinfeld
The majority of people begin to drift as soon as they meet with opposition, and not one out of ten thousand (people) will keep on trying after failing two or three times.
- Napoleon Hill
So at that stage you might as well keep growing, to get the advantages of scale.
- Sergey Brin
Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.
- P.T. Barnum
The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see the future is.
- Yoda
More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.
- Peter Drucker
We cannot become what we need by remaining what we are.
- John C. Maxwell
Plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure.
- Peter Drucker
If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.
- Elon Musk
If you can’t be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can.
- Seth Godin
Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.
- Bill Gates
My biggest hobby is hanging out with my family and kids.
- Joel Olsteen
I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That’s where the fun is.
- Donald Trump
Capitalism will save us.
- Steve Forbes
If you sell business-to-business, get a letter off to your client within an hour or two of your meeting…Start with something personal from the meeting and include a compliment.
- Chet Holmes
Success comes to those who have an entire mountain of gold that they continually mine, not those who find one nugget and try to live on it for fifty years.
- John C. Maxwell
I try to speak in everyday language. I feel like God has gifted me to take Bible principles and make them practical.
- Joel Olsteen
The lizard isn’t listening and the lizard doesn’t care.
- Seth Godin
I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I’m working at it.
- Steve Martin
Diligence is the mother of good luck.
- Benjamin Franklin
How much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes?
- Peter Thiel
If you pay people peanuts, you will get monkeys.
- Andy Pearson
But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you’re confident that you’ll catch a bird flying by. It’s an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn’t come by, but a few times it does.
- Reed Hastings
Everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it? Even if you don’t consciously agree with that statement, your brain sure does.
- Seth Godin
Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.
- George Soros
What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people – ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.
- Larry Ellison
Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you.
- James C. Collins
More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.
- Napoleon Hill
Money isn’t everything… but it ranks right up there with oxygen.
- Zig Ziglar
I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.
- Donald Trump
Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.
- Bill Gates
