I was not an easy student, and I had to apply myself diligently to prepare my lessons, said Rockefeller, who described himself accurately as reliable but not brilliant.
- John D. Rockefeller
Notable Quotables
Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.
- Dale Carnegie
Learning is not done to you, it is something you choose to do.
- Seth Godin
In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
- Ben Horowitz
It is no ordindary desire that survives disappointment, discouragement, temporary defeat, criticism, and the constant reminding of waste of time. It is a burning desire an obsession! – Napoleon Hill (on leadership)
- Napoleon Hill
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
- Peter Drucker
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
I usually describe myself as an engineer. That’s basically what I’ve been doing since I was a kid.
- Elon Musk
Consumers are spontaneous and if you can catch their attention, that’s going to increase the chance that they will look at your product.
- Jack Taylor
I think there will be 20 years of evolution from linear broadcast to internet television.
- Reed Hastings
In life, you don’t have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you’re a CEO. CEOs aren’t born.
- Ben Horowitz
“It’s clear there’s a lot of room for improvement, there’s no inherent ceiling we’re hitting up on.
- Sergey Brin
There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Don’t confuse selling with art.
- Jack Taylor
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 believe that success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have.
- Timothy Ferriss
Revolution has values, revolution has purpose. Revolution has direction. Revolution has leaders. Revolution looks at the intersection ahead and pushes people to do the right thing. And it doesn’t always have to be loud. It doesn’t always have to be violent. It’s just as powerful in it’s stillness.
- Jack Dorsey
Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day.
- Peter Thiel
You reinforce the behaviors that you reward, he explained. If you reward candor, you’ll get it.
- Jack Welch
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
- Bill Gates
In the 1970s, Japan moved into the U.S. turf with its televisions, cars, chips, and steel. But if you think about it, the only business Japan destroyed was the U.S. television industry.
- Fujio Mitarai
How has being realistic” or responsible” kept you from the life you want? How has doing what you should” resulted in subpar experiences or regret for not having done something else?
- Timothy Ferriss
I really like using my Samsung (005930:KS) tablet. I previously used the Motorola Xoom for a while and liked that.
- Larry Page
I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them.
- Sam Walton
If you can’t make 40% on your money in Russia, you’re a fool.
- Simon Reuben
The characteristics that make a good advertisement or commercial – it’s memorable, engaging, entertaining, focused, sends a clear message, makes you want to see it again, makes you want to buy the product.
- David Novak
Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Sunseeker is well placed to take full advantage of opportunities in China, one of the world’s fastest growing luxury yacht markets.
- Wang Jianlin
This country provides opportunities. If you don’t take advantage of them, it’s your own fault.
- Sam Huff
There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, ‘The government’s corrupt,’ and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.
- Bill Gates
I can be stressed, or tired, and I can go into a meditation and it all just flows off of me. I’ll come out of it refreshed and centered and that’s how I’ll feel and it’ll carry through the day.
- Ray Dalio
It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
- Bill Gates
It costs nothing, but creates much. It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever. None are so rich they can get along without it, and none so poor but are richer for its benefits. It creates happiness in the home, fosters good will in a business, and is the countersign of friends. It is rest to the weary, daylight to the discouraged, sunshine to the sad, and Nature’s best antidote for trouble. Yet it cannot be bought, begged, borrowed, or stolen, for it is something that is no earthly good to anybody till it is given away.
- Dale Carnegie
The number of residential units which have been booked in the financial statements of the Group in the period under review totalled 5,800 and amounted to approximately HK$14 billion in aggregate value.
- Lee Shau Kee
The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.
- Thomas Edison
Unfavorable hereditary back ground.
- Napoleon Hill
Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism – and wars.
- Dale Carnegie
Money without brains is always dangerous.
- Napoleon Hill
And because no matter who you are, if you believe in yourself and your dream, New York will always be the place for you.
- Michael Bloomberg
Japanese businesspeople and companies are lacking in individuality.
- Tadashi Yanai
The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.
- Jack Welch
I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product.
- Ben Horowitz
We started with this very simple idea
- Jack Dorsey
Don’t lose youself on the way to the top.
- Jack Welch
I get calls from everybody asking if I know of any drivers, anybody they can hire.
- Jack Taylor
Even if you have a world class idea and want to give it away for the good of humanity, you will have to sell the concept. If you can’t sell it, you’ll be stuck with your idea, poorer for your brilliance and generosity.
- Jerry Vass
What’s happening is that the two groups assume that the nature of the debate is really a matter of disagreement about their own sides’ core issues. Each side is assuming that people in the other group oppose what they hold most dear to themselves – what’s most important to their side – but in fact their adversaries really don’t oppose them.
- John Chambers
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
What you study is more important than how you study. Students are subordinate to materials, much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong material, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn’t matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn’t matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency material. Material beats method.
- Timothy Ferriss
Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The plot is certainly sensational, but it hardly represents what actually happened. It is difficult to believe that the European emigrants by whom America has been populated took away with them all the virtues and left behind them all the vices of the races from which they had sprung; or that a few generations of residence on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to create an order of beings definitely superior in morals, in culture, and in humanity to their prototypes in Europe. The American.
- Winston Churchill
No matter how many times people say it – ‘Oh, I’m just writing this for myself’ ‘Oh, I’m just doing this for myself’ – nobody’s doing it for themselves! You’re doing it for an audience. So whether I’m performing or writing a book or playing music, it’s definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way, definitely.
- Steve Martin
You’ve got to embrace what you don’t know.
- Sara Blakely
Storytelling is the game. It’s what we all do. It’s why Nike is Nike, it’s why Apple is Apple, it’s why Walt Disney built Disney World and it’s why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.
- Sara Blakely
Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.
- Steven Spielberg
A man who succeeds in life must sometimes go against the current.
- Ron Chernow
It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.
- Napoleon Hill
It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot.
- Paul Theroux
The first thing the secretary types is the boss.
- Donald Trump
I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.
- Bill Gates
High expectations are the key to everything.
- Sam Walton
I DECLARE a legacy of faith over my life. I declare that I will store up blessings for future generations. My life is marked by excellence and integrity. Because I’m making right choices and taking steps of faith, others will want to follow me. God’s abundance is surrounding my life today. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
Strive to make every person feel special. After all, every person you meet is made in the image of God.
- Joel Olsteen
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.
- Thomas Edison
After putting economics aside, I found that there were two primary reasons why people quit: They hated their manager; generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they were receiving. They weren’t learning anything: The company wasn’t investing resources in helping employees develop new skills.
- Ben Horowitz
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That’s the fundamental thing.
- Ben Horowitz
Cold steel and discipline and the slight capital surplus necessary to move and organise armies constituted the sole defences.
- Winston Churchill
Definiteness of purpose is the starting point from which one must begin. He recognized, too that definiteness of purpose of takes on animation, life, and power when backed by a burning desire to translate that purpose into its material equivalent. – Napoleon Hill (on leadership and vision)
- Napoleon Hill
I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.
- Ben Horowitz
Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.
- Ben Horowitz
I can’t afford this land either, but my business can.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I’m healthy as can be – not an ache or a pain. A lot of my prayer is thanking the Lord that I am healthy. I pray for long life and good health.
- Joel Olsteen
just like most nightmares, it’s not that big a deal and is reversible.
- Timothy Ferriss
The most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?
- Peter Thiel
If I was down to my last dollar, I would spend it on public relations.
- Bill Gates
I came over from Wal-Mart to help set up Sam’s. Since we were patterned after PRICE CLUBS, sometimes we copied them without exactly knowing what we were doing. We were bringing a West Coast idea to the Midwest, and we didn’t know how it would be received. I remember one idea that didn’t transfer too well. Price Club had a huge stack of wine in front of its stores. We bought the same amound for our stores in the Midwest and we learned the hard way that Midwesterners aren’t exactly wine drinkers. (on competition)
- Ron Loveles
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
In 2008, Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But people didn’t know they needed such a thing—cloud computing hadn’t caught on yet. That summer, Blake was hired as Box’s third salesperson to help change that. Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company. In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.
- Peter Thiel
Care more than others think wise.
- Howard Schultz
This is indicative of how quickly CEO caution can put the foot on the brake.
- John Chambers
You may have made a lot of wrong choices, but you’ve also made a lot of choices that were right. Focus on your good qualities. Focus on your victories. Get off the treadmill of guilt.
- Joel Olsteen
I encourage active skepticism – when people are being skeptical because they’re trying to identify the best course of action. They’re trying to identify the next step for themselves or other people.
- Timothy Ferriss
Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man’s character.
- Thomas Edison
Success is best when it’s shared.
- Howard Schultz
As a rule, theory does not precede practice. Its role is to structure and codify already proven practice. Its role is to convert the isolated and “atypical” from exception to “rule” and “system,” and therefore into something that can be learned and taught and, above all, into something that can be generally applied.
- Peter Drucker
We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.
- Peter Thiel
Our mail product, Hotmail, is the market leader globally.
- Steve Ballmer
Unleash the power of people. No involvement means no committment.
- David Novak
People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.
- Benjamin Franklin
What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?
- Winston Churchill
A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
- Mark Zuckerberg
As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
- Peter Thiel
It’s OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don’t want them to catch up because we’re slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.
- Bill Gates
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
- David Novak
I think I’m less afraid of failure than some others.
- Russell Simmons
All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can’t worry about it, you can’t panic when you look at the stock market’s decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.
- Larry Ellison
What is school for? If you’re not asking that, you’re wasting time and money.
- Seth Godin
The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.
- Peter Thiel
