You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don’t seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together.
- Henry Ford
Notable Quotables
I’m often asked how I define success. It’s an overused term, but I fundamentally view this elusive beast as a combination of two things – achievement and appreciation. One isn’t enough: Achievement without appreciation makes you ambitious but miserable. Appreciation without achievement makes you unambitious but happy.
- Timothy Ferriss
Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.
- Elon Musk
You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.
- Winston Churchill
The greatest thing about being a comedian is knowing other comedians. And you get to talk to them. Its the most fun.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.
- Elon Musk
My son is trying to be a sports writer, and my daughter is a college student. She wants to be a comedy writer, and she’s at film school. I discouraged both of them early on from getting involved in Starbucks. I didn’t think it would be fair; plus, they didn’t have any interest anyway.
- Howard Schultz
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
- John C. Maxwell
Each time they Tweet, it sparks interaction.
- Jack Dorsey
It’s all a risk. Always. That’s not true, actually. The only exception: it’s a certainty that there’s risk. The safer you play your plans for the future, the riskier it actually is. That’s because the world is certainly, definitely, and more than possibly changing.
- Seth Godin
Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.
- Ben Horowitz
Only 17 percent of us or our spouses ever attended a private elementary or private highschool. But 55 percent of our children are currently attending or have attended private schools.
- Thomas J Stanley
No matter what happens, always be yourself.
- Dale Carnegie
I have never met a geologist or leading scientist who believes adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will have any significant effect on climate change.
- Gina Rinehart
Managing a business, small or large, today requires an extremely disciplined, thoughtful approach with regard to the pressure that people are under.
- Howard Schultz
I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.
- Walt Disney
Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It’s fully synchronized with my office machine, so I have all the files I need. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form.
- Bill Gates
Take the first step in faith, you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.
- John F. Kennedy
Indeed, it is as important to learn how to receive a blessing as it is to be willing to give one.
- Joel Olsteen
Don’t be afraid to assert yourself, have confidence in your abilities, and don’t let the bastards get you down.
- Michael Bloomberg
Success doesn’t make you and failure doesn’t break you.
- Zig Ziglar
We’re extremely adroit at hiding our fear. Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we’re afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason.
- Seth Godin
It’s hard for me to imagine how a $50 million marketing campaign is ever appropriate for any business to launch an ideavirus. If you need to interrupt that many people, you’re doing something wrong.
- Seth Godin
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.
- Yoda
The challenge, it turns out, isn’t in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by.
- Seth Godin
If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you’ll be fired with enthusiasm.
- Vince Lombardi
More than trends, consumers need functionality. Everything needs an element of fashion, but that’s more like a spice.
- Tadashi Yanai
The Apple Stores’ sleek minimalist design and close control over the consumer experience, the omnipresent advertising campaigns, the price positioning as a maker of premium goods, and the lingering nimbus of Steve Jobs’s personal charisma all contribute to a perception that Apple offers products so good as to constitute a category of their own.
- Peter Thiel
The successful leader must plan his work, and work his plan. A leader who moves by guesswork, without practical, definite plans, is comparable to a ship without a rudder. Sooner or later he will land on the rocks.
- Napoleon Hill
Last year my wife got a Rolls-Royce.
- Russell Simmons
Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
- Ben Horowitz
Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs.
- Bill Gates
You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who cannot pay you back. Make a decision that you will live to give. Be on the lookout each day for somebody you can bless. Don’t’ live for yourself; learn to give yourself away, and your life will make a difference.
- John Bunyan
MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.
- Reid Hoffman
I told [John Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted ‘Mary had a little lamb’, etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly.
- Thomas Edison
The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.
- Bill Gates
We think we’re going to be especially strong in platform where we have our two platform brands: our database brand is the Oracle Database 12c, and our programming language brand is this thing called Java.
- Larry Ellison
Great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.
- Peter Thiel
The higher the level of leadership people want to reach, the greater the sacrifices they will have to make?
- John Maxwell
The bottom line is that you need to do follow-up or you will be mediocre.
- Chet Holmes
Anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble.
- Peter Thiel
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 most important thing to understand is that the job of a big company executive is very different from the job of a small company executive. When I was managing thousands of people at Hewlett-Packard after the sale of Opsware, there was an incredible number of incoming demands on my time. Everyone wanted a piece of me. Little companies wanted to partner with me or sell themselves to me, people in my organization needed approvals, other business units needed my help, customers wanted my attention, and so forth. As a result, I spent most of my time optimizing and tuning the existing business. Most of the work that I did was “incoming.” In fact, most skilled big company executives will tell you that if you have more than three new initiatives in a quarter, you are trying to do too much. As a result, big company executives tend to be interrupt-driven. In contrast, when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days of a company, you have to take eight to ten new initiatives a day or the company will stand still. There is no inertia that’s putting the company in motion. Without massive input from you, the company will stay at rest.
- Ben Horowitz
Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.
- Ray Kroc
Encouragement and hope are the two most powerful qualities any person can provide to others.
- Zig Ziglar
It was not her sex appeal but the obvious relish with which she devoured the hamburger that made my pulse begin to hammer with excitement.
- Ray Kroc
Hope is the power that gives a person the confidence to step out and try.
- Zig Ziglar
Optimism is the most important human trait, because it allows us to evolve our ideas, to improve our situation, and to hope for a better tomorrow.
- Seth Godin
War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
- Winston Churchill
Yes, I think it’s okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It’s okay to say to them, “You’re not going where I need to go, and there’s no way I’m going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I’m heading off. I’m betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.
- Seth Godin
All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.
- Brian Tracy
People don’t want lots and lots of single purpose devices. They do not want to have to learn how to set up something for photos, another thing for music, another thing for video.
- Bill Gates
God will lead you from where you are right now to where He wants to you to be, if you’ll let Him.
- George Foreman
Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.
- Andrew Carnegie
The bigger we get as a company, the more important it becomes for us to shift responsibility and authority toward the front lines, toward the department manager who’s stocking the shelves and talking to the customer. When we were much smaller, I probably wasn’t as quick to catch on to this idea as I do should have been. But as an avid student of management theory, back in the mid-seventies I started reading the work of W. Edwards Deming, the famous statistician who taught so much to the Japanese about improving their productivity and competitiveness.
- Sam Walton
He wants to do something amazing in your life. Get in agreement and say, God, this is for me today. I’m raising my expectations. I’m shaking off doubt, negativity, disappointments, self-pity, little dreams, and little goals, and God, I will make room for a flood of Your goodness.
- Joel Olsteen
It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than to apply them.
- Winston Churchill
I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.
- Elon Musk
Be a victor , not a victim.
- Joel Olsteen
There is a winner in you. You were created to be successful, to accomplish your goals, to leave your mark on this generation. You have greatness in you. The key is to get it out.
- Joel Olsteen
Experience has taught me,” says Sam Wood, that it is safest to drop, as quickly as possible, people who pretend to be what they aren’t.
- Dale Carnegie
Faith is easy. I think people complicate it.
- Joel Olsteen
One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.
- Ben Horowitz
Encourage yourself.
- Joel Olsteen
There’s very little advice in men’s magazines, because men don’t think there’s a lot they don’t know. Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, ‘I know what I’m doing, just show me somebody naked.’
- Jerry Seinfeld
Choose wise and Godly people to advise you.
- George Foreman
The story drives the mission.
- Jim Cathcart
Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.
- Walt Disney
It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.
- Reed Hastings
I will not talk to God about how big my problems are. I will talk to my problems about how big my God is. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.
- Joel Olsteen
People who couldn’t fit into this informal and entreprenual environment left or were asked to leave. I cut my losses quickly on bad hires that didn’t perform.
- Jack Welch
So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.
- Joel Olsteen
Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.
- Peter Thiel
I read Google News and use NetNewsWire to keep up with general and tech news.
- Steve Wozniak
K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.
- Bill Gates
Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.
- Timothy Ferriss
Expect more than others think possible.
- Howard Schultz
You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.
- Jeff Bezos
I actually thought that it would be a little confusing during the same period of your life to be in one meeting when you’re trying to make money, and then go to another meeting where you’re giving it away. I mean is it gonna erode your ability, you know, to make money? Are you gonna somehow get confused about what you’re trying to do?
- Bill Gates
If you ask me what I worry about every morning when I wake up, it’s that I don’t understand future mainstream Internet users’ habits.
- Ma Huateng
America’s leaders need to put their feet in the shoes of working Americans.
- Howard Schultz
Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
- Harry Truman
Capitalism will save us.
- Steve Forbes
2006, I started ‘WineLibrary TV.’ To build ‘WineLibrary TV,’ I started using Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter in 2008.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
So here we are.
- Seth Godin
We don’t want disruption where we just move things around from point a to point b. We want a direction, we want a purpose.
- Jack Dorsey
I would argue heavily that the time that has been allocated to social used to come from television, and people are benefitting from it. People who are saying, ‘Aw, you’re spending all your time on Facebook, or all your time on Twitter,’ I’d like to understand what the person used to do with that time.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
My motivation for all my companies has been to be involved in something that I thought would have a significant impact on the world.
- Elon Musk
Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market. That starts with asking yourself: what will the world look like 10 and 20 years from now, and how will my business fit in?
- Peter Thiel
You cannot expect victory and plan for defeat.
- Joel Olsteen
If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.
- Harvey Mackay
Yesterday ended last night. Today is a brand new day and it’s yours.
- Zig Ziglar
I will be liken to the rain drop which washes away the mountain; the ant that devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attemps, repeated will complete my undertaking.
- Og Mandino
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
- Confucius
The overall dynamic was net positive, unlike Napster’s negative-sum struggle with the U.S. recording industry. As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.
- Peter Thiel
I started the site when I was 19. I didn’t know much about business back then.
- Mark Zuckerberg
