People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
Here in the West, people often don’t like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.
- Elon Musk
Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?
- Rupert Murdoch
Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.
- Elon Musk
Capital isn’t scarce, vision is.
- Sam Walton
Chance can allow you to accomplish a goal every once in a while, but consistent achievement happens only if you love what you are doing.
- Bart Conner
If you’re a Wal-Mart of a Meijer you can draw the shoppers without using signs to advertise your specials, … But when you’re a little guy, you really depend on those signs.
- Michael Ward
Value is what you get.
- Warren Buffett
Great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.
- Seth Godin
Things get much easier if one jumps on the bandwagon of existing trends.
- Lei Jun
Communications and the exchange of value – they’re both foundational, essential things to our civilization. When you simplify those, when you get down to the essence, you fix so many things.
- Jack Dorsey
I am both pleased but astonished by the fact that mankind has not yet begun to use all the means and devices that are available for destruction. I hope that such weapons are never manufactured in quantity.
- Thomas Edison
Humility is becoming a lost art, but it’s not difficult to practice. It means that you realize that others have been involved in your success.
- Harvey Mackay
We have the necessary foundations that will enable us to weather the current storm and enter into a new era of growth.
- Cheng Yu-tung
In the next decade, I see Spanx going worldwide. Everywhere. No butt left behind. It’s going to be all over the world and it’s going to be an aspirational brand that transcends categories. There’s so many things we can improve upon and make better.
- Sara Blakely
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
In reality it is the focus on the first three D’s that ultimately gains you the data, and the dollars you need to become very, very rich…in other words the dollars are derived from having a dream, being dedicated, and having the drive to win.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.
- Peter Thiel
Will flash cards invade the disk drive makers’ core markets and supplant magnetic memory? If they do, what will happen to the disk drive makers? Will they stay atop their markets, catching this new technological wave? Or will they be driven out?
- Clayton M. Christensen
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
We’ve grown from 18% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry to 23% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry over the last five years. Profits are up over 70%, where the industry profit is up about 35%. Pretty good.
- Steve Ballmer
People don’t want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology – all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.
- Peter Thiel
They need to avoid coming at us head-on, and do their own thing better than we do ours. It doesn’t make any sense to try to underprice Walmart on something like toothpaste. That’s not what they customer is looking to a small store for anyway. Most independents are best off, I think, doing what I prided myself on doing for many years as a storekeeper, getting out front on the door and meeting everyone of the customers. Let them know how much you appreciate them, and that register yourself. That little personal touch is so important for an independent merchant because no matter how hard Walmart tries to duplicate, ad we try awfully hard, we can’t really do it.
- Sam Walton
Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.
- Sam Walton
The current (educational) structure, which seeks low-cost uniformity that meets minimum standards, is killing our economy, our culture, and us.
- Seth Godin
Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.
- Bill Gates
The thing about information is that information is more valuable when people know it. There’s an exception for business information and super timely information, but in all other cases, ideas that spread win.
- Seth Godin
‘You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‘Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.’
- Joel Olsteen
Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.
- Bill Gates
You don’t have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.
- Michael Dell
Life is too short for long-term grudges.
- Elon Musk
Perhaps your quest to be part of building something great will not fall in your business life. But find it somewhere. If not in corporate life, then perhaps in making your church great. If not there, then perhaps a nonprofit, or a community organization, or a class you teach. Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.
- James C. Collins
Trees will improve property values, take pollutants out of the air, help with water runoff.
- Michael Bloomberg
You should know now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, not by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it.
- Carlos Castaneda
Countries which receive aid do graduate. Within a generation, Korea went from being a big recipient to being a big aid donor. China used to get quite a bit of aid; now it’s aid-neutral.
- Bill Gates
At the point when adding people into the company feels like more work than the work that you can offload to the new employees, the defensive lineman has run around you and you probably need to start giving ground grudgingly.
- Ben Horowitz
Tell your lizard (brain) to shut up.
- Seth Godin
Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit
- Napoleon Hill
We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
- Bill Gates
You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.
- Dale Carnegie
Superstition of Prejudice.
- Napoleon Hill
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.
- Henry Ford
Rockefeller succeeded because he believed in the long –term prospects of the business and never treated it as a mirage that would soon fade.
- Ron Chernow
We have to find our way back to a definite future.
- Peter Thiel
Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.
- Walt Disney
There is never a bad time to start a business – unless you want to start a mediocre one.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
It’s hard for me to imagine how a $50 million marketing campaign is ever appropriate for any business to launch an ideavirus. If you need to interrupt that many people, you’re doing something wrong.
- Seth Godin
Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.
- Santana
David Novak CEO of YUM Brands (on crisis management)
- David Novak
The New Rich ( NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.
- Timothy Ferriss
Levi Strauss headed for the gold fields of California to strike it rich in mining. However, he was not a good miner, so he instead began sewing pants out of canvas for the miners who were successful. Today I think most of the world has heard of Levi’s pants.
- Robert Kiyosaki
You must be the change to wish to see in the world.
- Mahatma Gandhi
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
Selling and delivering a product is at least as important as the product itself.
- Peter Thiel
When a person says No” and really means it, he or she is doing far more than saying a word of two letters. The entire organism—glandular, nervous, muscular—gathers itself together into a condition of rejection.
- Dale Carnegie
You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart.
- Thomas J Watson
I’d learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.
- Ben Horowitz
[Medco] had a different culture with respect to spending money. I believe health care demands that we be as frugal as possible and pay money for things that matter. We’re pretty frugal. Everybody has the same size offices. Everybody has the same size cube. There are no perks.
- George Paz
It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.
- Elon Musk
You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That’s how you know you’re still alive.
- Jerry Seinfeld
In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.
- Lee Iacocca
You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.
- Larry Ellison
If you are not confused, you don´t know what is going on.
- Jack Welch
We believe our growth rate indicates that Cisco continues to gain market share against our traditional competitors in most product sectors.
- John Chambers
No, markets weren’t “efficient” at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion—often the wrong conclusion.
- Ben Horowitz
These endless legal challenges that define elections in New York are a joke in this country, and they are the reason why it is so expensive, or one of the reasons, it’s so expensive to run here and why so many people decide not to run.
- Michael Bloomberg
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
- Henry Ford
I watch mostly independent films.
- Reed Hastings
We don’t mature momentarily, but over the long-term.
- John C. Maxwell
Any time is a good time to start a company.
- Ron Conway
[On the cost to found Nike] Six hundred dollars each. Twelve hundred dollars total investment.
- Phil Knight
Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.
- P.T. Barnum
We are still masters of our fate.We are still captains of our souls.
- Winston Churchill
Lack of Controlled Sexual Urge.
- Napoleon Hill
In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.
- Bill Gates
The future is sooner and stranger than you think.
- Reid Hoffman
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
- Og Mandino
But no parties could live under such labels as Petitioners and Abhorrers. Instead of naming themselves they named each other. The term “Whig” had described a sour, bigoted, canting, money-grubbing Scots Presbyterian. Irish Papist bandits ravaging estates and manor-houses had been called “Tories”.
- Winston Churchill
I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.
- Herbert Bayard Swope
I love technology, and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.
- Steve Martin
I believe in motivating with humor. … – David Novak CEO OF Yum! Brands
- David Novak
Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
- Peter Drucker
My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.
- Jerry Seinfeld
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
- Alexander Graham Bell
The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.
- Bill Gates
I like winning. There’s also a certain joy in it. I feel fulfilled by it.
- Carl Icahn
As an entrepreneur, remove obstacles for your team. If there is anything that is holding the team back, get it out of the way.
- David Nilssen
Life is too short to be small.
- Benjamin Disraeli
I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Do or do not. There is no try.
- Yoda
We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster – closed and forgotten within the first year.
- Walt Disney
Nobody is actually a natural C.E.O.
- Ben Horowitz
We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.
- Peter Thiel
The real opportunity for success lies within the person and not in the job.
- Zig Ziglar
We have two turbines in our company: One is engineering, and the other is operations. And so our business people are on equal footing with our engineering and technology culture. Cars are moving because of what we do, so there’s an imperative to go beyond just the technology.
- Travis Kalanick
War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war:
- Peter Thiel
Ideas are cheap. The difficult part is finding the team to execute them.
- Raymond Kwok
You have to be a crazy guy and a little eccentric to be very successful.
- Tadashi Yanai
Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power.
- Sergey Brin
