Notable Quotables

Don’t simply settle for what your parents had. You can go further than that. You can do more, have more, be more.

- Joel Olsteen

We live well below our means. We wear inexpensive suits and drive American-made cars. Only a minority of us drive the current-model-year automobile. Only a minority ever lease our motor vehicles.

- Thomas J Stanley

The world is facing a new networked, digital lifestyle, and we will ensure that Canon remains ahead of the game.

- Fujio Mitarai

Faith in your new apprentice, misplaced may be. As is your faith in the dark side of the Force.

- Yoda

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

Mudhole? Slimy? My home this is!

- Yoda

Wonder what your customer really wants? Ask. Don’t tell.

- Lisa Stone

The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

- Seth Godin

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.

- Elon Musk

Only the Dark Lord of the Sith knows of our weakness. If informed the senate is, multiply our adversaries will.

- Yoda

There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don’t usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Do you know how many companies have wanted me to do an energy drink for them because I named my book ‘Crush It!’? It might be fun one day, but right now I think it would undermine the personal brand I’ve built.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I can do what it says I can do.

- Joel Olsteen

The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.

- Peter Drucker

Don’t go in and tell somebody else how to run their business.

- Carl Icahn

It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.

- Bill Gates

The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.

- Thomas Edison

No alibi will save you from accepting the responsibility.

- Napoleon Hill

[On the three keys to Twitter’s success.] The first lesson: Draw. The most important thing you can do with an idea: get it out of your head. Second lesson: Luck. Be able to recognize when luck is happening around you. Third lesson: iteration. Originally Twitter asked ‘What’s your status?’ Bonus fourth lesson: know when to stop. Sometimes put the idea away, that idea will often emerge later.

- Jack Dorsey

Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.

- Og Mandino

Extraordinary benefits also accrue to the tiny majority with the guts to quit early and refocus their efforts on something new.

- Seth Godin

Why do I need succession planning? I’m very alert, I’m very vibrant. I have no intention to retire.

- Sheldon Adelson

There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.

- Winston Churchill

There is no way of making a business successful that can vie with the policy of promoting those who render exceptional service.

- Andrew Carnegie

The expensive act of planning on late When you’re late, there’s not a lot of room for choice or decision or initiative. When you’re late, the path is well lit, and the choices are clear. Run! Run down the path you’ve run down before. Late is a tool for people unable to find the guts to stand for their acts. Late gives us cover; it permits us to trample forward, without creativity or panache. “Can’t you see I’m late!” we shout, as we do what we have to do, without even pausing to think about what we could do instead. Late might be useful, except that late is incredibly expensive. This strategy, the one we choose so we can avoid the fear of choice, costs us in so many ways. It degrades quality, misses airplanes, charges overtime, and shuts down those around us. It’s also exhausting. The alternative to planning on late is to initiate before it’s required, to ship before deadline, to put the idea out there before the crisis hits. This act of bravery actually gives you influence, leverage, and control in a way that planning on late never can.

- Seth Godin

You want to do good things, and once you’ve done a couple of good things in a row, you think ‘Well gee, let’s not mess this up.’ But I am lucky at this point that I have something I really love to do, and it completely holds my attention. I never feel frustrated by it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

- Elon Musk

As long as you’re living in regret, focused on the negative things of the past, you won’t move ahead to the bright future God has in store. You need to let go of what didn’t work out. Let go of your hurts and pains. Let go of your mistakes and failures. You can’t do anything about the past, but you can do something about right now.

- Joel Olsteen

Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.

- John C. Maxwell

Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless.

- James C. Collins

Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.

- Sam Walton

I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: He is nothing but a boy — a little boy!

- Dale Carnegie

It’s not sufficient that I succeed, everyone else must fail.

- Larry Ellison

There’s 20 companies that I have investments in – some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.

- Bill Gates

Courage is on display every day, and only the courageous wring the most out of life.

- Zig Ziglar

I’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

- Elon Musk

Network effects businesses must start with especially small markets.

- Peter Thiel

Over three hundred years ago Galileo said: You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.

- Dale Carnegie

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

- Abraham Lincoln

It’s lonely at the top, so you had better take someone with you…and it’s lonely at the top, so you had better know why you are there.

- Napoleon Hill

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

- Napoleon Hill

What’s also missing is a sense of relationship. People suffer in isolation from one another. In a world without purpose, without meaningful values, what have we to share but our emptiness, the needy fragments of our superficial selves? As a result, most of us scramble about hungrily seeking distraction, in music, in television, in people, in drugs. And most of all we seek things. Things to wear and things to do. Things to fill the emptiness. Things to shore up our eroding sense of self. Things to which we can attach meaning, significance, life. We’ve fast become a world of things. And most people are being buried in the profusion. What most people need, then, is a place of community that has purpose, order, and meaning. A place in which being human is a prerequisite, but acting human is essential. A place where the generally disorganized thinking that pervades our culture becomes organized and clearly focused on a specific worthwhile result. A place where discipline and will become prized for what they are: the backbone of enterprise and action, of being what you are intentionally instead of accidentally. A place that replaces the home most of us have lost. That’s what a business can do; it can create a Game Worth Playing.

- Michael Gerber

Exchanging practically all the British infantry and artillery in India for Territorial batteries and battalions, and the formation of the 27th, 28th and 29th Divisions of regular troops. The New Zealand contingent must be escorted to Australia and there, with 25,000 Australians, await convoys to Europe. Meanwhile the leading troops of the Canadian Army, about 25,000 strong, had to be brought across the Atlantic. All this was of course additional to the main situation in the North Sea and to the continued flow of drafts, reinforcements and supplies across the Channel. Meanwhile the enemy’s Fleet remained intact, waiting, as we might think, its moment to strike; and his cruisers continued to prey upon the seas. To strengthen our cruiser forces we had already armed and commissioned twenty-four liners as auxiliary cruisers, and had armed defensively fifty-four merchantmen. Another forty suitable vessels were in preparation. In order to lighten the strain in the Indian Ocean and to liberate our light cruisers for their proper work of hunting down the enemy, I proposed the employment of our old battleships (Canopus class) as escorts to convoys.

- Winston Churchill

It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path at Dell. There’s always an opportunity to make a difference.

- Michael Dell

I don’t want to just preach to the church. I feel like I have a broader message.

- Joel Olsteen

I’m not as interested in what you make as I am in what you’re passionate about. What business are you really in?

- Howard Schultz

There certainly is a case to be made that taxes should be more progressive.

- Bill Gates

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

- Warren Buffett

In the early days, I really felt the pain of not being able to find information easily. I guess that helped me to develop an urge to write things like a search engine.

- Robin Li

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

You cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure.

- Zig Ziglar

Although DJ Clay may never sleep, all of his dreams come true!

- Blake Fraley

Flaming enthusiasm, backed by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.

- Dale Carnegie

Energy is the essence of life. Every day you decide how you’re going to use it by knowing what you want and what it takes to reach that goal, and by maintaining focus.

- Oprah Winfrey

Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they’re rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.

- Bill Gates

Being surrounded by educated people makes democracy stronger, and it benefits our entire economy.

- Seth Godin

Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so love the people who treat you right, forget about the ones who don’t, and believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.

- Harvey Mackay

When it comes to social consequences, they’ve got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it’s a difficult task.

- George Soros

When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.

- Walt Disney

I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

- Timothy Ferriss

If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed.

- Winston Churchill

Being called a huckster and a charlatan started several years ago, so that’s something I’m accustomed to. In most cases, it doesn’t bother me.

- Timothy Ferriss

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

- Winston Churchill

It is possible to become world-class, enter the top 5% of performers in the world, in almost any subject within 6-12 months, or even 6-12 weeks.

- Timothy Ferriss

The factory is a dead end and so is compliance. More obedience will not make us better. That’s why graceful is in such demand.

- Seth Godin

We will invest 1.1 billion dollars in India, of which 150 million dollars would be for providing leasing and financial solutions to the company’s customers and partners.

- John Chambers

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

- Russell Simmons

The first dollar is the most you will get if you don’t love what you are doing.

- Ray Kroc

To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.

- Thomas Edison

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.

- Zig Ziglar

Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.

- Seth Godin

Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that.

- Steve Ballmer

No one can make you jealous, angry, vengeful, or greedy — unless you let him.

- Napoleon Hill

We, in short, propose to tax luxuries, monopolies, and superfluities, but we scrupulously avoid taxing the necessaries of life.

- Winston Churchill

I have lots of sources of information about what’s going on at the company. I think I have a pretty good pulse on where we are and what people are thinking.

- Steve Ballmer

I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.

- Oprah Winfrey

Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society – and especially in the economy – as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. That is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur. It was intended as a manifesto and as a declaration of dissent: the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is “creative destruction.

- Peter Drucker

I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don’t retire before I go senile, then I’ll do more damage than good at that point.

- Elon Musk

Give me a highly successful unionized industry.

- Jack Welch

Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.

- Peter Drucker

Confidence in our own independence of mind. But advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away, it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. Anyone who can’t acknowledge its likely effect on himself is doubly deceived.

- Peter Thiel

Be happy with who God made you to be, and quit wishing you were something different.

- Joel Olsteen

The only definition by which America’s best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.

- Bill Gates

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

- Ben Horowitz

Don’t just accept whatever comes your way in life. You were born to win, you were born for greatness, you were created to be a champion in life.

- Joel Olsteen

Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.

- Henry Ford

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