Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
I think growth covers up mistakes.
- Howard Schultz
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
When I hear Mitt Romney say that he believes that Jesus is the Son of God, that He’s the Christ, raised from the dead, that He’s his savior – that’s good enough for me.
- Joel Olsteen
I know I could be the host of ‘SportsCenter’ in two years if I changed my show today to sports.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Sure I am this day we are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us.
- Winston Churchill
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
- Winston Churchill
Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.
- Seth Godin
It is those who concentrate on but one thing at a time who advance in this world. The great man or woman is the one who never steps outside his or her specialty or foolishly dissipates his or her individuality.
- Og Mandino
A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.
- Henry Ford
Disneyland is a show.
- Walt Disney
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.
- Timothy Ferriss
Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it’s a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.
- Ray Dalio
When I started working on Southwest Airlines, I kid you not, only people flying on business and very wealthy people ever flew.
- Herb Kelleher
Movies always are open to being remade because times change so much, and the tempo of movies changes. I think of it like a James Bond. They can have different actors play the same role… I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘We want to remake ‘The Jerk’ with so and so.’ And I say, ‘Fine.’ It just doesn’t bother me. It’s an honor actually.
- Steve Martin
The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts.
- James C. Collins
Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.
- Peter Thiel
Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.
- Oscar Wilde
When advice is freely given, the receiver is free to use it as he or she sees fit.
- Harvey Mackay
It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested? Collin’s advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.
- James C. Collins
I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along with it.
- Walt Disney
(Physics is) a good framework for thinking. … Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.
- Elon Musk
Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.
- Peter Thiel
Tell your child, your spouse, or your employee that he or she is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you have destroyed almost every incentive to try to improve.
- Dale Carnegie
God’s got you in the palm of His hand. You won’t leave one second before your time. If God wants you to be here, then you’re going to be here.
- Joel Olsteen
When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don’t read much anymore.
- Steve Martin
Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.
- Elon Musk
I took a Fear of Flying class, and I always missed the class, because I was always flying.
- Sara Blakely
Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
- Oprah Winfrey
What you need to keep most in the U.S. is the entrepreneurial spirit.
- Alexei Mordashov
You may think you’re getting the short end of the stick, but when it’s all said and done, God will make sure that you don’t lose anything truly valuable. Moreover, He’ll make sure you get your just reward. Your responsibility is to remain calm and peaceable even when those around you are not.
- Joel Olsteen
There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I ask every participant to think about who their personal business mentors have been and why. I tell them my own business hero was Andy Pearson and I give them a few Andy stories to illustrate why. Then we break into groups of about twenty to go around in a circle and have each person talk about the person who has mean the most to him…We reconvene in the larger group and discuss some of the traits that were exhibited by the mentors; integrity, passion, inspiration, a positive outlook, and so on. A lot of people said it was someone who, helped me realize what I could achieve or really cared about me as a person. Then I try to get them to go a little deeper. I say, Now suppose that you were a fly on the wall, looking down on this room ten years from now. What would you like people to be saying about you? How would you feel if someone were saying that you were the person who had the greatest impact on his or her professional life?
- David Novak
An optimist understands that life can be a bumpy road, but at least it is leading somewhere. They learn from mistakes and failures, and are not afraid to fail again.
- Harvey Mackay
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
- Winston Churchill
The first four months of 2001 were extremely challenging, … This may be the fastest deceleration any company of our size has ever experienced.
- John Chambers
When you give directives to a child, especially a teenager, you must consider the nature of your child.
- Zig Ziglar
Timid salesmen have skinny kids.
- Zig Ziglar
If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.
- Harvey Mackay
and the rare individual who honestly satisfies this heart hunger will hold people in the palm of his or her hand”
- Dale Carnegie
Any area of achievement in your life required you to stick with the basics until you became great…it’s not about learning 4,000 moves but about doing just a handful of moves 4,000 times.
- Chet Holmes
What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.
- Admiral Jim Stockdale
My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.
- Jeff Bezos
And it turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.
- Seth Godin
There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
- Jeff Bezos
There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Certainly the caffeine in coffee, whether it’s Starbucks or generic coffee, is somewhat of a stimulant. But if you drink it in moderation, which I think four or five cups a day is, you’re fine.
- Howard Schultz
The order for the seats amounted to $90,000. Who do you suppose got the order—James Adamson or one of his competitors? From the time of this story until Mr. Eastman’s death.
- Dale Carnegie
Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.
- Walt Disney
If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.
- Jack Welch
How do you tap in to what God has already done? Very simple: just act like you’re blessed, talk like you’re blessed, walk like you’re blessed, think like you’re blessed, smile like you’re blessed, dress like you’re blessed. Put actions behind your faith, and one day you will see it become a reality.
- Joel Olsteen
Whatever your critics say about you has no bearing on your worth. You are a child of the Most High God. The Creator of the universe breathed life into you. You have seeds of greatness on the inside. You’ve been crowned with favor. God has already equipped and empowered you with everything you need. Don’t waste your valuable time trying to play up to people, trying to win over all your critics, or trying to prove to someone that you’re important.
- Joel Olsteen
Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they’ll turn out to be right.
- Reed Hastings
Let us work together to take Hong Kong to new heights.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The best way a mentor can prepare another leader is to expose him or her to other great people.
- John C. Maxwell
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
I don’t yell at people, I don’t mistreat people. I don’t talk down to people, so no one else in this building, in this vicinity, has the right to do it.
- Oprah Winfrey
Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability…. We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation.
- Thomas Edison
Mr Churchill, to what do you attribute your success in life? Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down
- Winston Churchill
There are two ways to grow: by stealing from the competition or by growing the market. The first path is slow and painful and difficult. The second path is where the magic of fast growth kicks in.
- Seth Godin
The accumulation of great fortunes calls for POWER and power is acquired through highly organized and intelligently directed specialized knowledge, but that knowledge does not necessarily have to be in the possession of the man who accumulates the fortune.
- Napoleon Hill
Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions. It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.
- Dale Carnegie
It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.
- Winston Churchill
No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.
- Napoleon Hill
It is important for a husband to understand that his words have tremendous power in his wife’s life. He needs to bless her with words. She’s given her life to love and care for him, to partner with him, to create a family together, to nurture his children. If he is always finding fault in something she’s doing, always putting her down, he will reap horrendous problems in his marriage and in his life. Moreover, many women today are depressed and feel emotionally abused because their husbands do not bless them with their words. One of the leading causes of emotional breakdowns among married women is the fact that women do not feel valued. One of the main reasons for that deficiency is because husbands are willfully or unwittingly withholding the words of approval women so desperately desire. If you want to see God do wonders in your marriage, start praising your spouse. Start appreciating and encouraging her. Every single day, a husband should tell his wife, I love you. I appreciate you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” A wife should do the same for her husband. Your relationship would improve immensely if you’d simply start speaking kind, positive words, blessing your spouse instead of cursing him or her.
- Joel Olsteen
Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.
- Og Mandino
Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations… They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them ‘operators’ or ‘programmers.’
- Peter Drucker
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
The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The reason that I have Global Grind is to communicate ideas to people who might otherwise not be listening.
- Russell Simmons
It’s absolutely a necessary and inevitable evolution in retailing (of Wal-Mart putting small stores out of business), as inevitable as the replacement of the buggy by the car, and the dissappearance of the buggy whip makers. The small stores (and DJs) were destined to dissappear, at least in the numbers they once existed., because the whole thing is driven by customers, who are free to choose where to shop.
- Sam Walton
Few people are logical. Most of us are prejudiced and biased. Most of us are blighted with preconceived notions, with jealousy, suspicion, fear, envy and pride.
- Dale Carnegie
Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don’t believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you’re likely to have issues.
- Larry Page
Weed out the bad fits right away
- Tony Hsieh
Attitude, not Aptitude, determines Altitude.
- Zig Ziglar
We subpoenaed him for the SAP trial and he was on the lam. The HP board sent him to Bolivia to talk to customers. Then they sent him to Mongolia to talk to customers, just out of reach of the federal subpoenas … the board figured out [later]: we should have left Leo in Mongolia.
- Larry Ellison
I’ve found that many of the greatest ideas surface in bars because that’s where many people cultivate inspiration.
- Herb Kelleher
I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it’s something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn’t compute with our existing educational system.
- Peter Thiel
People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.
- Zig Ziglar
Hmm. In the end, cowards are those who follow the dark side.
- Yoda
How about we agree upon what our common American values are, which is let’s make this a true land of opportunity.
- Laurene Powell Jobs
Every failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent benefit.
- Napoleon Hill
A story is at its best when it’s not intrusive, when it brings value to a platform’s consumers, and when it fits in as a natural step along the customer’s path to making a purchase.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Once the habit is ingrained and you become the starter, the center of the circle, you will find more and more things to notice, to instigate, and to initiate. Momentum builds and you get better at generating it. If you go to bed at night knowing that people are expecting you to initiate things all day the next day, you’ll wake up with a list. And as you create a culture of people who are always seeking to connect and improve and poke, the bar gets raised. What might be considered a board-level decision at one of your competitors’ companies gets done as a matter of course. What might be reserved for a manager’s intervention gets handled at the customer level, saving you time and money (and generating customer joy). This incredibly prosaic idea, the very simple act of initiating, is actually profoundly transformative. Forward motion is a defensible business asset.
- Seth Godin
Yes, it’s absolutely true that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly – until you can learn to do it well.
- Zig Ziglar
It takes a decade to grow trees but a century to nurture human beings.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I’ve always thought if we don’t want to enforce laws on the books, we should remove them from the books. But when you have laws, you breed contempt if you don’t enforce them.
- Michael Bloomberg
I encourage all my key people to bring their mobiles when they travel.
- Raymond Kwok
I find that a duck’s opinion of me is very much influenced over whether or not I have bread
- Mitch Hedberg
[On Twitter] We believe that fundamentally we are building a utility.
- Jack Dorsey
If you pay people peanuts, you will get monkeys.
- Andy Pearson
When the pressure is on, great leaders are at the their best.
- Napoleon Hill
Success is doing what you want, where you want, when you want, with whom you want and as much as you want.
- Tony Robbins
Satan knows, if you are against YOURSELF you will never fulfill your destiny. :(
- Joel Olsteen
If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.
- Ben Horowitz
We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.
- Henry Ford
Building companies involves creating great wealth. If that means I am an oligarch, OK, it’s fine. But if being an oligarch is about buying football clubs, it is not for me.
- Alexei Mordashov
You are not your resume, you are your work.
- Seth Godin
Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.
- Elon Musk
