“Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.”
- Sam Walton
Notable Quotables
Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles.
- Peter Thiel
There is no man living that can not do more than he thinks he can.
- Henry Ford
Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.
- Bill Gates
Proposition 19 already is a winner no matter what happens on election day. The mere fact of its being on the ballot has elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy in ways I could not have imagined a year ago.
- George Soros
I don’t like mixing up moralities with mathematics.
- Winston Churchill
We have to realize that our lives could be gone in a moment. There are no guarantees that we will be here at this time next year. Learn to live each day to the fullest. Don’t complain. Don’t focus on what’s wrong. Be grateful for the opportunity to experience each day.
- Joel Olsteen
There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.
- Bill Gates
It is easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That’s not true. The opposite is true. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you.
- Ben Horowitz
People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for them.
- Dale Carnegie
How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?
- Seth Godin
If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that’s a good discussion. Maybe that’s the way to help close the deficit.
- Bill Gates
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
- Winston Churchill
Perhaps we have been guilty of some terminological inexactitudes.
- Winston Churchill
Do extremely difficult work.That seems obvious, right? If you do something that’s valued but scarce because it’s difficult, you’re more likely to be in demand and to be compensated fairly for what you do.The implication is stunning, though: When designing a project or developing a skill, seek out the most difficult parts to master and contribute. If it’s easy, it’s not for you.
- Seth Godin
Money is like an arm or leg – use it or lose it.
- Henry Ford
Being a leader gives you charisma. If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that’s where charisma comes from, from the leading.
- Seth Godin
Success is not final…Failure is not fatal…it’s the courage to continue that counts.
- Winston Churchill
As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.
- Donald Trump
I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.
- Elon Musk
To my mind the old masters are not art, their value is in their scarcity.
- Thomas Edison
I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention…. Its their ‘ideas’ that appeal to me. I am quite correctly described as ‘more of a sponge than an inventor….’
- Thomas Edison
It also makes clear that it is her meeting and will take as much or as little time as she needs. During the meeting, since it’s the employee’s meeting, the manager should do 10 percent of the talking and 90 percent of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most one-on-ones.
- Ben Horowitz
How Many Marriages Would Be Better If the Husband and the Wife Clearly Understood That They’re On the Same Side?
- Zig Ziglar
And yet the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world.
- Seth Godin
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?
- Winston Churchill
When we try to drill and practice someone into subservient obedience, we’re stamping out the artist that lives within.
- Seth Godin
We need to and must protect privacy. But I think that people will be willing and even eager to share medical information about themselves for the greater good of mankind.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
If you’re going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don’t work.
- Seth Godin
Shapewear is the canvas and the clothes are the art.
- Sara Blakely
Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.
- George Soros
I think the acquisition of consumers might be on the verge of being mapped. The battlefield is going to be retention and lifetime value.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
A smile, someone once said, costs nothing but gives much. It enriches those who receive without making poorer those who give. It takes but a moment, but the memory of it sometimes lasts forever. None is so rich or mighty that he cannot get along without it and none is so poor that he cannot be made rich by it. Yet a smile cannot be bought, begged, borrowed, or stolen, for it is something that is of no value to anyone until it is given away. Some people are too tired to give you a smile. Give them one of yours, as none needs a smile so much as he who has no more to give.15 Smile. It increases your face value.
- Dale Carnegie
Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic. They are hard because you don’t know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness.
- Ben Horowitz
I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we’re not wise enough to see it.
- Oprah Winfrey
The epidemic So many people are frozen in the face of uncertainty and paralyzed at the thought of shipping work that matters that one might think that the fear is hardwired into us. It is. Scientists can identify precisely where your lizard brain lives. This is your prehistoric early brain, the same brain that’s in the lizard or the deer. Filled with fear, intent on reproduction. Steven Pressfield gives the voice of the lizard brain a name: he calls it the resistance. And the resistance is talking to you as you read this, urging you to compromise, to not be an troublemaker, to avoid rash moves. For many of us, the resistance is always chattering away, frequently sabotaging our best opportunities and ruining our best chance to do great work. Naming it helps you befriend it, and befriending it helps you ignore it.
- Seth Godin
Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
- Dale Carnegie
The reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls looking like hard work.
- Thomas Edison
Ten or twelve men, especially between brothers and between fathers and sons; but the offspring of these unions are counted as the children of the man with whom a particular woman cohabited first.
- Winston Churchill
King Alfred’s Book of Laws, or Dooms, as set out in the existing laws of Kent, Wessex, and Mercia, attempted to blend the Mosaic code with Christian principles and old Germanic customs. He inverted the Golden Rule. Instead of “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you”, he adopted the less ambitious principle, “What ye will that other men should not do to you, that do ye not to other men”, with the comment, “By bearing this precept in mind a judge can do justice to all men; he needs no other law-books. Let him think of himself as the plaintiff, and consider what judgment would satisfy him.” The King, in his preamble, explained modestly that “I have not dared to presume to set down in writing many laws of my own, for I cannot tell what will meet with the approval of our successors.
- Winston Churchill
The potential financial reward for building the ‘next Windows’ is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.
- Bill Gates
An organization takes its cue from the person on top. I always told our business leaders their personal intensity determined their organization’s intensity….For me intensityh covers a lot of sings. If there’s one characteristic all winners share, it’s that they care more than anyone else. No detail is too small to sweat or too large to dream. Over the years I have looked for this characteristic in the leaders we selected. It doesn’t mean loud or flamboyant. It’s something that comes from deep inside. Great organizations can ignite passion….Leaders must have courage to kick ass and break glass.
- Jack Welch
America’s leaders need to put their feet in the shoes of working Americans.
- Howard Schultz
I think the idea of getting money out of politics is critical.
- Russell Simmons
Personally, I just hope that my family keeps getting bigger and bigger. That would make me very happy.
- Lee Shau Kee
Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.
- Bill Gates
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
- John F. Kennedy
A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.
- Peter Thiel
Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
- Dale Carnegie
The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.
- Peter Thiel
A little boy went out to the backyard to play with a baseball bat and a ball. He said to himself, I am the best hitter in the world.” Then he threw the ball up in the air and took a swing at it, but he missed. Without a moment’s hesitation, he picked up the ball and tossed it in the air again, saying as he swung the bat, I’m the best hitter in all the world.” He swung and missed. Strike two. He tossed the ball up again, concentrating more intensely, even more determined, saying, I am the best hitter in all the world!” He swung the bat with all his might. Whiff! Strike three. The little boy laid down his bat and smiled real big. What do you know?” he said. I’m the best pitcher in all the world!
- Joel Olsteen
Here’s the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don’t you hate that? I love that there’s no map.
- Seth Godin
You’ll never find a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
- Winston Churchill
I went online with winelibrary.com in July of 1997. That was my first professional online play
- Gary Vaynerchuk
What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
- Napoleon Hill
Strange as it sounds, great leaders gain authority by giving it away.
- Napoleon Hill
Let your motto then always be ‘Excelsior’, for by living up to it there is no such word as fail.
- P.T. Barnum
Initiative = Happiness
- Seth Godin
All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.
- Jeff Bezos
People going nowhere want company.
- Brian Tracy
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.
- Yoda
The idea of lying on a beach as my main thing just sounds like the worst. It sounds horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs. I’d be super-duper bored. I like high intensity.
- Elon Musk
Rap helps me connect emotionally.
- Ben Horowitz
PATIENCE YOU MUST HAVE my young padawan.
- Yoda
Pick a movement. Pick something you believe in. Pick something you want to have an impact in and then question every single thing and be a founder, and be an entrepreneur inside those organizations and inside that movement.
- Jack Dorsey
As an immigrant, I chose to live in America because it is one of the freest and most vibrant nations in the world. And as an immigrant, I feel an obligation to speak up for immigration policies that will keep America the most economically robust, creative and freedom-loving nation in the world.
- Rupert Murdoch
If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook. And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school’s promise. It lets parents off the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook, since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook, because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone. If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault. That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. ‘I did what they told me to do and now I’m stuck and it’s not my fault.’ What they’ve exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next.
- Seth Godin
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
People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonald’s? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly.
- Ben Horowitz
Intolerance.
- Napoleon Hill
Leadership is not dictatorship
- Tony Hsieh
I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
- Larry Page
Love is a promise delivered already broken.
- Steve Martin
The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.
- Seth Godin
“High expectations are the key to everything.”
- Sam Walton
Life is not a dress rehearsal.
- Clay Clark
The greatest business people I’ve met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost.
- Michael Gerber
There are two kinds of pride, both good and bad. ‘Good pride’ represents our dignity and self-respect. ‘Bad pride’ is the deadly sin of superiority that reeks of conceit and arrogance.
- John C. Maxwell
Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.
- Steve Ballmer
It’s been a long career, and I’ve made some mistakes along the way.
- Rupert Murdoch
Risk, to some, is a bad thing, because risk brings with it the possibility of failure. It might be only a temporary failure, but that doesn’t matter so much if the very thought of it shuts you down. So, for some, risk comes to equal failure (take enough risks and sooner or later, you will fail). Risk is avoided because we’ve been trained to avoid failure.
- Seth Godin
We are focusing on the increasing need for mobility and growing demand from our industrial customers. The production volume for vehicles weighing up to six tons is expected to rise to between 100 million and 105 million vehicles. Furthermore, installation of electronics and software will continue to grow substantially, driven by growing demands from end-users and increasingly strict legal requirements for safety and energy consumption. It is partly on this basis that we are aiming for profitable sales of over €50 billion in 2020.
- Elmar Degenhart
Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.
- Brian Tracy
E – Energize Others
- Jack Welch
I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the site, and we’ve funded ever since by putting ads on the site.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
- Peter Drucker
I’m in a different position than most CEO’s. I’m a founder. I’m not a hired CEO. Now, I can be fired by the board, but most CEO’s are hired by the board.
- Howard Schultz
What is measured improves.
- Peter Drucker
Stay focused instead of getting offended or off track by others.
- John C. Maxwell
This Sunday School has been of help to me, greater perhaps than any other force in my Christian life, and I can ask no better things for you than that you, and all that shall come after you in this great band of workers for Christ, shall receive the same measure of blessedness which I have been permitted to have.
- John D. Rockefeller
I got my story, my dream, from America. The hero I had is Forrest Gump… I like that guy. I’ve been watching that movie about 10 times. Every time I get frustrated, I watch the movie. I watched the movie before I came here again to New York. I watched the movie again telling me that no matter whatever changed, you are you.
- Jack Ma
People tend to over-weigh risks on a personal level. It’s one thing if you’ve got a mortgage to pay and kids to support, so that if you were to deviate from your job, well, how are you going to feed your family and pay the rent? That’s understandable, but let’s say you’re young and you’re just coming out of college, what are your risks? You’re not going to starve, certainly not in any kind of modern economy. It’s so easy to earn enough money just to live somewhere and eat food. Very easy to do. So I don’t know what they’re afraid of. Mostly afraid of failure, I think, but people should be less risk averse, when there’s not much at risk.
- Elon Musk
If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
- Elon Musk
There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.
- Dale Carnegie
Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.
- Bill Gates
Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money, non-monopolists can’t.
- Peter Thiel
People ask me what’s the most important function when you’re starting an organization or setting up the kind of culture and values that are going to endure. The discipline I believe so strongly in is H.R., and its the last discipline that gets funded.
- Howard Schultz
Being an artist isn’t a genetic disposition or a specific talent. It’s an attitude we can all adopt. It’s a hunger to seize new ground, make connections, and work without a map. If you do those things, you’re an artist.
- Seth Godin
The secret of your success is found in your daily routine
- John Maxwell
Mormonism is a little different, but I still see them as brothers in Christ.
- Joel Olsteen
