Uber is efficiency with elegance on top. That’s why I buy an iPhone instead of an average cell phone, why I go to a nice restaurant and pay a little bit more. It’s for the experience.
- Travis Kalanick
Notable Quotables
I care about our employees more than anybody in my company. I care about my kids, too, but that doesn’t mean I give them everything that they want.
- Charles Ergen
We remain confident about the market opportunity ahead of us over the next three to five years.
- John Chambers
Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel, or else terrorized into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine, which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing, cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. It must be in continual motion, grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men. Moreover it must be fed, not only with flesh but with oil.
- Winston Churchill
A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.
- Abraham Lincoln
Happiness does not depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.
- Dale Carnegie
Creating a sense of urgency around change initiatives is especially hard to do. Human nature seems to be hardwired to adhor change, and people will do everything in their power to resist it. I once heard this explained to another Pepsi consultant. His philosophy was that in order to drive change, you need to create what he called, the burning platform. This burning-platform image was an oil rig in the North Sea that has caught fire and the only way to save yourself is to jump into the frigid water and swim to the lifeboat. You know the jump might kill you, but you jump anyway, not because you think it might be a good idea, but because you had no choice. That’s creating a sense of urgency.
- David Novak
My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.
- Richard Branson
You don’t need a big close, as many sales reps believe. You risk losing your customer when you save all the good stuff for the end. Keep the customer actively involved throughout your presentation, and watch your results improve.
- Harvey Mackay
I was always fascinated by the decision-making process and the managerial process and just business in general.
- Ronald Perelman
[In January 2011] We take a cut of every transaction. So we charge 2.75 percent and 15 cents on the transaction. Which we then pay the credit card companies out of. So the user only has to pay that 2.75 percent. They don’t pay any credit card fees. They don’t have to have a setup charged. They don’t have to pay for the hardware or even the software.
- Jack Dorsey
All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
- Peter Thiel
I’m Phil Knight, and I don’t believe in advertising.
- Phil Knight
You cannot consistently perform in a manner which is inconsistent with the way you see yourself.
- Zig Ziglar
I don’t know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.
- Reed Hastings
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
- Thomas Edison
The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
- Peter Thiel
New information makes new and fresh ideas possible.
- Zig Ziglar
I’m a lad of the ‘60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war, but it was a number of years before I had the profile, the financial resources and the time to do more.
- Richard Branson
If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.
- Steve Wozniak
I am a former sabre fencer and fenced as part of the Uzbek republic team.
- Alisher Usmanov
Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.
- Ben Horowitz
If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores. That’s the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart’s success.
- Sam Walton
When you walk in God’s favor, His blessings will chase you down and overtake you.
- Joel Olsteen
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
- Winston Churchill
I think I may not be able to retire.
- Tadashi Yanai
In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
- Clayton M. Christensen
It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
- Jerry Seinfeld
When sales people don’t know what to do, they talk. The ordinary salesperson vomits the presentation onto the Buyer’s desktop.
- Jerry Vass
But Governments and peoples do not always take rational decisions. Sometimes they take mad decisions, or one set of people get control who compel all others to obey and aid them in folly.
- Winston Churchill
Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field
- Peter Thiel
Every morning brings new potential, but if you dwell on the misfortunes of the day before, you tend to overlook tremendous opportunities.
- Harvey Mackay
Most salespeople won’t stop talking long enough to let the Buyer make a decision.
- Jerry Vass
Our favorite holding period is forever.
- Warren Buffett
I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.
- John C. Maxwell
Life is too short to be small.
- Benjamin Disraeli
It is better to act too quickly than it is to wait too long.
- Jack Welch
You can win more friends with your ears than with your mouth. People who feel like they’re being listened to feel accepted and appreciated. They feel like they’re being taken seriously and what they say really matters.
- Harvey Mackay
Hold on to that new, enlarge vision of victory that God has given you. Start expecting things to change in your favor. Dare to boldly declare that you are standing strong against the forces of darkness.
- Joel Olsteen
If failure is not an option, then neither is success.
- Seth Godin
The first ten minutes of sorting through clothing was like choosing which child of mine should live or die.
- Timothy Ferriss
I DECLARE I will live victoriously. I was created in the image of God. I have the DNA of a winner. I am wearing a crown of favor. Royal blood flows through my veins. I am the head, never the tail, above never beneath. I will live with purpose, passion, and praise, knowing that I was destined to live in victory. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
But at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.
- Winston Churchill
We are in control of the one asset that we all give the most f#%ks about, and that is time.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Perhaps your quest to be part of building something great will not fall in your business life. But find it somewhere. If not in corporate life, then perhaps in making your church great. If not there, then perhaps a nonprofit, or a community organization, or a class you teach. Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.
- James C. Collins
Politics and government are certainly among the most important of practical human interests.
- P.T. Barnum
The key to high-quality communication is trust, and it’s hard to trust somebody that you don’t know.
- Ben Horowitz
I can’t read a computer screen and never use a calculator. It’s all in my head and by hand.
- Simon Reuben
You don’t have to fear defeat if you believe it may reveal powers that you didn’t know you possessed.
- Napoleon Hill
I had a terrible time hiring rich people. It sounds funny, but the problem is when things go wrong they can ask, ‘Why am I doing this?’ You don’t ever want anybody asking that question. You want them to say, ‘I know why I’m doing it, I need the money, let’s go’ or whatever it is that draws them.
- Ben Horowitz
It is going to be a little, if you will, laboratory for sustainability in businesses of small scale
- Larry Ellison
In the 1960s, if you were a blue collar worker or uneducated, and you had an injury on the job, the company basically dismissed you.
- Howard Schultz
The Group will be able to capture opportunities arising from the growth and integration of the two economies, and scale new heights in the years ahead.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Don’t criticize them, they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.
- Dale Carnegie
Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed and quality of those decisions.
- Ben Horowitz
Let’s think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it’s okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea… well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you’re not gonna get people coming up with ideas.”
- Elon Musk
The first key factor, I believe, is unity. If a family is not united, how then can we unite our colleagues? If we don’t love our brothers or our family, how then can we go ahead to love our colleagues. So our tradition really is about the human factor and talents, and we are dependent on the human factor. Therefore we have this corporate slogan – The markets of the world can belong to our corporation, and so can the world’s foremost human talents; The markets of the world belongs to us, and so are the world’s vast resources of raw materials. Similarly, if we can gain access to it, then the world’s financial funding belongs to us as well. Therefore, of foremost importance is access to human talents. Of course, a slogan is only something that we speak of. Of greater importance, is to truly have access to human talents. Towards that purpose, we must first be united and possess love. Our family is very united. And for the sake of the company, we innovated – we introduced western-style (corporate) culture into our company 30 years ago.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
We were old sinners – but when we came to Christ we are not sinners anymore.
- Joel Olsteen
I got into retailing because I wanted a real job.
- Sam Walton
Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
- Peter Thiel
Converting a decision into action requires answering several distinct questions: Who has to know of this decision? What action has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it? The first and the last of these are too often overlooked—with dire results.
- Peter Drucker
The main reason I write the daily observations is because I want to know where I’m wrong. So lots of times if somebody points something out it helps me, and I want to have a diversified bet of uncorrelated bets.
- Ray Dalio
I have ways of making money that you know nothing about…(if you’re firm won’t sell) you will stand alone, Your firm can never make any more money in Cleveland. No use trying to do business in competition with Standard Oil Company. If you do (continue to fight) it will end in your being wiped out.
- John D. Rockefeller
If you can dream it, then you can achieve it. You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.
- John D. Rockefeller
Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos’s founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books—those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock—also drew the most enthusiastic customers. Amazon became the dominant solution for anyone located far from a bookstore or seeking something unusual. Amazon then had two options: expand the number of people who read books, or expand to adjacent markets. They chose the latter, starting with the most similar markets: CDs, videos, and software. Amazon continued to add categories gradually until it had become the world’s general store. The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company’s scaling strategy.
- Peter Thiel
People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
- Timothy Ferriss
They are, therefore, not overly impressed by speed in decision-making. Rather they consider virtuosity in manipulating a great many variables a symptom of sloppy thinking. They want to know what the decision is all about and what the underlying realities are which it has to satisfy. They want impact rather than technique, they want to be sound rather than clever.
- Peter Drucker
1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization.
- Peter Thiel
Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.
- Marilyn vos Savant
By establishing a reputation as being a person who always renders more service and better service than that for which you are paid, you will benefit by comparison with those around you who do not render such service, and the contrast will be so noticeable that there will be keen competition for your services, no matter what your life-work may be.
- Napoleon Hill
You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.
- Jeff Bezos
Letting the other person feel that the idea is his or hers not only works in business and politics, it works in family life as well.
- Dale Carnegie
all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.
- Timothy Ferriss
Sometimes we look at gay being a bigger sin than being proud or not telling the truth. I don’t think God categorizes sins.
- Joel Olsteen
Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I’d put myself in the latter category. But I’d never call myself a normal designer of anything.
- Steve Wozniak
You must capture and keep the heart of the original and supremely able man before his brain can do its best.
- Andrew Carnegie
You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.
- John C. Maxwell
I would call lack of candor the biggest dirty little secret in business, basically blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got. It’s a killer.
- Jack Welch
Lack of Capital.
- Napoleon Hill
It isn’t until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are – not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within – that you can begin to take control.
- Oprah Winfrey
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
- John Wooden
Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.
- Zig Ziglar
Its obvious that we don’t know one millionth of one percent about anything.
- Thomas Edison
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
The danger of the Web is that you can go from idea to public announcement in under ten minutes.
- Seth Godin
The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: ‘Does your teacher use class time well?’ and, ‘When you’re confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?
- Bill Gates
No matter what happens, always be yourself.
- Dale Carnegie
A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing.
- Phil Knight
My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure
- Abraham Lincoln
A Carnegie or a Rockefeller or a James J. Hill or a Marshall Field accumulates a fortune through the applications of the same principles available to all of us, but we envy them and their wealth without ever thinking of studying their philosophy and applying it to ourselves. We look at a successful person in the hour of their triumph and wonder how they did it, but we overlook the importance of analyzing their methods. And we forget the price they had to pay in the careful, well-organized preparation that had to be made before they could reap the fruits of their efforts.
- Napoleon Hill
If you truly love what you are doing, why stop?
- Barry Schwartz
Direct results always come first. In the care and feeding of an organization, they play the role calories play in the nutrition of the human body.
- Peter Drucker
Successful people have fear, successful people have doubts, and successful people have worries. They just don’t let these feelings stop them.
- T. Harv Eker
Dell’s a company that has changed the IT landscape in making PCs and servers more affordable. There’s enormous opportunities to make IT more accessible to tens of millions of companies, kind of democratizing the ability for companies to gain access to IT.
- Michael Dell
It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
- Warren Buffett
The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity.
- Zig Ziglar
Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.
- Peter Drucker
Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually.
- George Soros
