Positive energy is the ability to get other people revved up. People who energize can inspire their team to take on the impossible and enjoy the hell out of doing it. In fact, people would arm wrestle for a chance to work with them.
- Jack Welch
Notable Quotables
The 1990s have a good image. We tend to remember them as a prosperous, optimistic decade that happened to end with the internet boom and bust. But many of those years were not as cheerful as our nostalgia holds. We’ve long since forgotten the global context for the 18 months of dot-com mania at decade’s end.
- Peter Thiel
In 20 years from now we will all be able to click and watch TV.
- Reed Hastings
Be frank. Reporters know when your story is all hype and no substance. Be honest with them.
- Michael Levine
I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.
- Winston Churchill
Be kind.
- Jack Dorsey
The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
- Peter Thiel
Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there.
- Timothy Ferriss
I believe if you keep your faith, you keep your trust, you keep the right attitude, if you’re grateful, you’ll see God open up new doors.
- Joel Olsteen
The warrior mentality, the very fight to survive, is truly what created our culture.
- Herb Kelleher
Most fears of rejection rest on the desire for approval from other people. Don’t base your self-esteem on their opinions.
- Harvey Mackay
A student of life considers the world a classroom.
- Harvey Mackay
Never, never, never give up.
- Winston Churchill
The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I’m making 22 minutes; I know there’s a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Keep it simple. Tell the truth. People can smell the truth.
- Stephen Wynn
Hard times may have held you down, but they will not last forever. When all is said and done, you will be better off than before.
- Joel Olsteen
When I used to play sports, I’d be the one cheering the team on, ‘Come on, we can beat these guys!’ That’s just in me.
- Joel Olsteen
[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
Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.
- Henry Ford
If you don’t have ambition, you should not be alive.
- Aliko Dangote
Where did your art go while you were tweeting?
- Seth Godin
I despise research. I think it’s a crutch.
- Howard Schultz
What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.
- Steve Martin
We all know far too many stories where the third generation just destroys everything that the first two have built up, and I certainly hope my family are different because I’ve worked too hard and my father has worked too hard for it to be given away.
- Gina Rinehart
The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.
- Walt Disney
It’s okay. Let your ego push you to be the initiator. But tell your ego that the best way to get something shipped is to let other people take the credit. The real win for you (and your ego) is seeing something get shipped, not in getting the credit when it does.
- Seth Godin
Desire is the ingredient that changes the hot water of mediocrity to the steam of outstanding success.
- Zig Ziglar
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
- Winston Churchill
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
We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas Edison
Make it just like a Mac.
- Bill Gates
One of the most powerful forms of communication that affects a business is one over which you have little control (after the conversation has already begun): The communication from your existing customers to your potential customers. At CASHFLOW Technologies, Inc. we attribute a large part of our success to our customers telling other people about us. The power of this word-of-mouth advertising is immeasurable.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.’ Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.
- Larry Ellison
I believe God gives you the grace to do what you need to do.
- Joel Olsteen
If all we do with these tools is teach compliance and consumption, that’s all we’re going to get. School can and must do more than train the factory workers of tomorrow.
- Seth Godin
I have asked thousands of business people to smile at someone every hour of the day for a week and then come to class and talk about the results.
- Dale Carnegie
The evidence is inarguable that Australia is becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export-oriented business. Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day. Such statistics make me worry for this country’s future. We are becoming a high-cost and high-risk nation for investment.
- Gina Rinehart
Most people have bosses who hire them to fill a slot in the work chart and to do what they are told. And most people who are doing what they are told feel safe, it feels reliable.
- Seth Godin
You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.
- Bill Gates
Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future..
- Yoda
You have to get all agreements in writing.
- Jack Nadel
Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Promise what no others can: the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people. You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.
- Peter Thiel
I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn’t turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book.
- Steve Martin
I just think that it’s strong and it’s important that we recognize what the Christmas season is about; it’s about the birth of our Savior, and there’s a lot of pressure today to be politically correct, but people are realizing, too, that you have to be open to express your faith what you want believe.
- Joel Olsteen
The worst day of a man’s life is when he sits down and begins thinking about how he can get something for nothing.
- Thomas Jefferson
In Riyadh, there’s going to be a huge project that will house at least 12,000 units with inhabitants of approximately 150,000 people. It’s like a city within a city.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Chaos in the midst of chaos isn’t funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.
- Steve Martin
The future of advertising is the Internet.
- Bill Gates
When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.
- Walt Disney
When an entrepreneur has an object in his line of vision, he should dismiss all other considerations from his mind, abandon all other activities, and charge directly at that object, continuing to charge until the object has been secured.
- Paul Johnson
I think that God gives you your own will and choices. I don’t believe that we’re supposed to drag ourselves through life defeated and not see God’s blessings. But you have to make the right choices and follow that still, small voice within you. Because I think that’s how God leads us.
- Joel Olsteen
There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there’s just millions of voices and people want to be heard.
- Rupert Murdoch
It is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing what it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot . .
- Zig Ziglar
Every setback means you’re one step closer to seeing the dream come to pass.
- Joel Olsteen
Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.
- Colin Powell
When an employee asks why the company does things a certain way, and you can explain the logical reason, then the employee knows what she’s doing is valid.
- Harvey Mackay
A bunch of high-IQ people with the wrong kind of ambition won’t work.
- Ben Horowitz
In the end, Mockler and the board were proved right, stunningly so. If a shareflipper had accepted the 44 percent price premium offered by Ronald Perelman on October 31, 1986, and then invested the full amount in the general market for ten years, through the end of 1996, he would have come out three times worse off than a shareholder who had stayed with Mockler and Gillette.20 Indeed, the company, its customers, and the shareholders would have been ill served had Mockler capitulated to the raiders, pocketed his millions, and retired to a life of leisure.
- James C. Collins
Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.
- Peter Thiel
Is it really necessary to work like a slave to live like a millionaire?
- Timothy Ferriss
There are no rules here — we’re trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison
The bluegrass community… can be very strict. I didn’t know if I’d be welcomed into the bluegrass community or not, but I think they judge you very fairly… I felt really welcome.
- Steve Martin
Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.
- Bill Gates
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
- Steve Jobs
I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.
- Steve Martin
China has set its cultural industries as pillar industries.
- Wang Jianlin
Be fair. You have to be able to see their point of view.
- Michael Levine
I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.
- Winston Churchill
The U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar, the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro.
- Peter Thiel
When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness. Our enemies would dance with joy if only they knew how they were worrying us, lacerating us, and getting even with us! Our hate is not hurting them at all, but our hate is turning our own days and nights into a hellish turmoil.
- Dale Carnegie
Exceptionally hard decisions can deplete your energy to the point at which you finally cave in. If you mentally crumble and degenerate into negative thinking, you’ll magnify the problem to the point where it can haunt you.
- John C. Maxwell
One of the jobs of a manager is to instill confidence, pump confidence into your people. And when you’ve got somebody who’s raring to go and you can smell it and feel it, give ’em that shot.
- Jack Welch
Strip malls are history.
- Jeff Bezos
For a successful entrepreneur it can mean extreme wealth. But with extreme wealth comes extreme responsibility. And the responsibility for me is to invest in creating new businesses, create jobs, employ people, and to put money aside to tackle issues where we can make a difference.
- Richard Branson
Create a vision and personalize it. People need to say, I understand it, I’m excited about it, and I can make it happen.
- David Novak
I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.
- Steve Martin
Leadership, very simply, is about two things: 1. Truth and trust. 2. Ceaselessly seeking the former, relentlessly building the latter.
- Jack Welch
Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.
- Bill Gates
Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
- Warren Buffett
A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.
- Winston Churchill
When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.
- Rupert Murdoch
I’ve always leaned toward a feminine, funky style, even in business settings. I used to paint my nails blue in 1993, before it was mainstream.
- Sara Blakely
All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.
- Walt Disney
We’re running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere… can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.
- Elon Musk
The foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love and loyalty.
- Zig Ziglar
Nothing tells in the long run like a good judgment, and no sound judgment can remain with the man whose mind is disturbed by the mercurial changes of the stock exchange. It places him under an influence akin to intoxication. What is not, he sees, and what he sees, is not.
- Andrew Carnegie
I’m not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative.
- Steve Ballmer
You need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
- Ben Horowitz
Of course I needed somebody to run my new store, and I didn’t have much money, so I did something that I would do for the rest of my run in the retail business without any shame or embarrassment whatsoever: nose around other people’s stores searching for good talent. That’s when I made my first real hire, the first manager, Willard Walker.
- Sam Walton
Determine your destiny or somebody else will.
- Jack Welch
I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.
- Winston Churchill
Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it’s really let us down.
- Bill Gates
Education comes from within, you get it by struggle and effort and thought.
- Napoleon Hill
The goal is to get the buyer to like and trust you.
- Clay Clark
Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.
- Sam Walton
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Excellence isn’t achieved without inspiration and perspiration. You’ve got to have both.
- George Foreman
Opportunity is walking through your life every day in the form of people you meet.
- Zig Ziglar
Growth inside fuels growth outside.
- John C. Maxwell
