If I have one skill as a manager, I can make things extremely clear.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
The foundation of success in life is good health: that is the substratum fortune, it is also the basis of happiness. A person cannot accumulate a fortune very well when he is sick.
- P.T. Barnum
Encourage yourself.
- Joel Olsteen
My wheels are running. My investments are local, regional and international.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.
- Peter Thiel
At Uniqlo, we’re thinking ahead. We’re thinking about how to create new, innovative products… and sell that to everyone.
- Tadashi Yanai
The typical project design time for a large company like IBM – and they keep track of this – is a little over four years.
- Bill Gates
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
I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.
- Warren Buffett
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
- Bill Gates
Speeches will not distribute the future.
- Jack Dorsey
People begin to become successful the minute they decide to be.
- Harvey Mackay
If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.
- Elon Musk
You were not created to just get by with an average, unrewarding, or unfulfilling life. God created you to leave your mark on this generation.
- Joel Olsteen
To make meetings less boring, leaders must look for legitimate reasons to provoke and uncover relevant, constructive ideological conflict.
- Patrick M. Lencioni
One of the most important management lessons for a founder/CEO is totally unintuitive. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.
- Ben Horowitz
Word of mouth works now, much more than ever. @-reply every single person.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I shopped for body shapers for the first time in my life and I was horrified. They were thick – it was like wearing workout clothes and they all had a leg band on one side that showed through the pants.
- Sara Blakely
When people come to Twitter and they want to express something in the world, the technology fades away. It’s them writing a simple message and them knowing that people are going to see it.
- Jack Dorsey
The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.
- Elon Musk
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?
- Peter Thiel
Money motivates neither the best people nor the best in people.
- Dee Hock
Fulfilling the vision of the Irvine Ranch master plan has been a lifetime dedication and lifetime passion, and I am hopeful the heritage of our Irvine stewardship will live on in many new ways.
- Donald Bren
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
I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don’t laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that’s not real laughter.
- Steve Martin
I’d work in the store all day, then take off around closing and drive that windy road over the Mississippi River, and then into Tennessee with an old homemade trailer I had hitched to my car. I’d stuff that car and trailer with whatever I could get good deals on – usually on soft lines, ladies panties and nylons, men’s shirts and I’d bring them back, price them low and just blow that stuff out of the store.
- Sam Walton
Our mail product, Hotmail, is the market leader globally.
- Steve Ballmer
Success doesn’t make you and failure doesn’t break you.
- Zig Ziglar
If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another…so they follow.
- Seth Godin
Lack of ambition to aim above mediocrity.
- Napoleon Hill
The Internet will help achieve friction free capitalism” by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.
- Bill Gates
Consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.
- Seth Godin
The way to work with a bully is to take the ball and go home. First time, every time. When there’s no ball, there’s no game. Bullies hate that. So they’ll either behave so they can play with you or they’ll go bully someone else.
- Seth Godin
If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.
- Elon Musk
I really believed that fear is contagious.
- Joel Olsteen
The difficult task is to marry relentless discipline with creativity, neither letting discipline inhibit creativity nor letting creativity erode discipline.
- James C. Collins
Branding is what people think about you before they even know you.
- Bryan Smith
The game of life does not proceed like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes they make five, or minus four, and sometimes the blackboard topples over in the middle of the sum and the pedagogue is left with a black eye.
- Winston Churchill
And well you should not. For my ally in the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. It’s energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we…(Yoda pinches Luke’s shoulder)…not this crude matter. (a sweeping gesture) You must feel the Force around you. (gesturing) Here, between you…me…the tree…the rock…everywhere! Yes, even between this land and that ship!
- Yoda
Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional. We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double-down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success.
- Jeff Bezos
When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good, you will not, hmmmm?
- Yoda
If parents pass enthusiasm along to their children, they will leave them an estate of incalculable value….
- Thomas Edison
Since we happened to be good at shoes, we thought we could be successful with casual shoes. But we got our brains beat out.
- Phil Knight
There’s never been a doctor who served many patients who, despite their best efforts, did not lose some of them to death. But they understood that was part of life itself.
- Zig Ziglar
So sure, start with a slogan. But don’t bother wasting any time on it if you’re merely going for catchy. Aim for true instead.
- Seth Godin
I’ve actually not read any books on time management.
- Elon Musk
What most people know but don’t realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn’t there, we’d be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.
- Elon Musk
Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.
- Reed Hastings
You may have made some mistakes, and you may not be where you want to be, but that has NOTHING to do with your future.
- Zig Ziglar
We, in short, propose to tax luxuries, monopolies, and superfluities, but we scrupulously avoid taxing the necessaries of life.
- Winston Churchill
Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
However, for equity to create commitment rather than conflict, you must allocate it very carefully. Giving everyone equal shares is usually a mistake: every individual has different talents and responsibilities as well as different opportunity costs, so equal amounts will seem arbitrary and unfair from the start. On the other hand, granting different amounts up front is just as sure to seem unfair. Resentment at this stage can kill a company, but there’s no ownership formula to perfectly avoid it.
- Peter Thiel
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
Success is not what you have, but who you are.
- Bo Bennett
Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
- Thomas Edison
The current (educational) structure, which seeks low-cost uniformity that meets minimum standards, is killing our economy, our culture, and us.
- Seth Godin
Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.
- Bill Gates
Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.
- Rupert Murdoch
If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.
- Dale Carnegie
During their lifetimes, every man and woman will stumble across a great opportunity. Sadly, most of them will simply pick themselves up, dust themselves down and carry on as if nothing ever happened.
- Winston Churchill
Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that everything changes except the law of change. He said: You cannot step in the same river twice. The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?
- Dale Carnegie
On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.
- Bill Gates
Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.
- Seth Godin
And you know, I’ve had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.
- Richard Branson
Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. 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
about 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.
- Dale Carnegie
I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
- Winston Churchill
Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.
- Peter Thiel
The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn’t thought of before and that aren’t talked about in the news all the time.
- Steve Wozniak
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 perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.
- Peter Thiel
Why does a 67-year-old guy who got his start running an athletic shoe company think he can enter a field famous for gobbling up fortunes.
- Phil Knight
Refrain from throwing the executive under the bus.
- Ben Horowitz
Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.
- Dale Carnegie
Don’t be impatient. It’s not over until God says it’s over.
- Joel Olsteen
Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.
- Warren Buffett
Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
- Napoleon Hill
Those who keep the peace of their inner selves in the midst of the tumult of the modern city are immune from nervous diseases.
- Dale Carnegie
1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
- Timothy Ferriss
For a rich and reasonably successful guy, it is impossible not to enjoy your job; otherwise, why would you spend so much time and effort doing it? I am a great fan of Norilsk, and I like this kind of challenge.
- Vladimir Potanin
Change is powerful, but change always comes with the possibility of failure as its partner. “This might not work” isn’t merely something to be tolerated; it’s something you must seek out.
- Seth Godin
The way to become rich is to put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.
- Andrew Carnegie
Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
- Ben Horowitz
Sometimes God will deliver you from the fire, and other times God will make you fireproof.
- Joel Olsteen
What is closest to my heart is our education program.
- Henry Sy
Don’t waste your time trying to win people over that can never be won over.
- Joel Olsteen
The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
- Peter Drucker
The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you’ve got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don’t give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.
- Jack Ma
[On stopping working and focussing 100% on his company Nike] I was still teaching accounting, but the next year, I told Penny [married in 1968] if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I’m going to go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000. I said, that ‘s close enough.
- Phil Knight
Your legacy is being written by yourself. Make the right decisions.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
As youngsters, my mother taught her children that while we might not be the smartest people around, we could be courteous, polite and considerate of others.
- Zig Ziglar
the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19
- James C. Collins
The uncertainty and importance of the present reduce the past and future to comparative insignificance, and clear the mind of minor worries. And when all is over, memories remain which few men do not hold precious.
- Winston Churchill
Everything popular is wrong.
- Oscar Wilde
God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days. Why should you and I?
- Dale Carnegie
I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us- everything that exists – proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.
- Thomas Edison
A valuable business must start by finding a niche and dominating a small market.
- Peter Thiel
Hi-tech is best managed by younger people.
- Lee Shau Kee
Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.
- John C. Maxwell
