Notable Quotables

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.

- Seth Godin

We are in control of the one asset that we all give the most f#%ks about, and that is time.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

When I was growing up, I always knew I’d be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence.

- Sergey Brin

Okay, let’s talk about cartoon labels for half a second – some people think anything with a dog or a car or a colorful alien is garbage, which is not true. Look at Big Moose Red. It’s, like, a $6 wine with a cheesy label, and it’s actually a solid wine.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Don’t count the things you do. Do the things that count.

- Zig Ziglar

Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.

- Winston Churchill

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

- Bill Gates

Restructuring a job usually means restructuring a score of jobs, moving people around, and upsetting everybody. There is one exception: the exceedingly rare, truly exceptional man for whose sake the rule should be broken.

- Peter Drucker

our skills and talent, but above all, be tenacious. See yourself as victorious–which means never giving up

- Donald Trump

The young athlete who aspires to greatness, generally speaking, learns a number of things from several different coaches. The first one taught him the fundamentals; the second one instilled discipline in him and taught him more of the techniques that must be mastered to excel.

- Zig Ziglar

Personally, I think the failure to really kind of get his arms around this company and this industry led to confusion on behalf of the management team. And I didn’t see that getting any better.

- Phil Knight

A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

- Peter Thiel

On this basis, we intend to increase the dividend for the third time in a row. We are proposing a distribution of €3.25 per share, corresponding to a dividend payout ratio of 27.4 percent, which is again up slightly on the previous year’s level.

- Elmar Degenhart

Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism – and wars.

- Dale Carnegie

Jobs and businesses are just vehicles to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

- Clay Clark

When we think about online learning, it’s such ‘early days.’ Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like, ‘Who’s every going to need more than 640K of memory?’

- Reed Hastings

I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus.

- Larry Page

When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.

- Winston Churchill

Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.

- John C. Maxwell

There is no substitute for hard work. There is no such thing as overnight success or easy money.

- Henry Sy

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

- Winston Churchill

Nobody walks this earth thinking he’s better than I think I am – I think I’m great. At the same time, it’s so obvious to me that I’m nobody.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

What we know about the destination resort business is clearly established. But it’s all about one thing, and one thing only. All of the razzmatazz and jazz we hear about facilities and everything else doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s customer experience that determines the longevity and endurance of these enterprises.

- Stephen Wynn

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

- Henry Ford

In energy, you have to plan and do research way in advance, sometimes decades in advance to get a new system that’s safer, doesn’t require us to go around the world to get all our oil.

- Bill Gates

L.A. is only where you live, because otherwise it’s just a sprawling mass of everything, and I think if you live in L.A., you get a little network of places you go, and people you see, and when you leave town, you do miss those places and your friends.

- Steve Martin

You have to BE before you can DO, and DO before you can HAVE.

- Zig Ziglar

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

There’s plenty of room at the top but not enough room to sit down.

- Zig Ziglar

The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.

- Peter Thiel

No matter what any of us has—and how grateful we are for what we have—no one has it all.

- Sheryl Sandberg

I believe that those who stay in faith are highly favored. You need to prepare for an exceeding, abundant, above-and-beyond life; a life where people go out of their way for no reason to be good to you; a life where you get promoted even though you weren’t the most qualified; a life where you find yourself in the right place at the right time.

- Joel Olsteen

Today, Andy Quinn pitched a great game finally, and that’s what he’s capable of. He fell behind a few hitters, but he got stronger as he went on.

- Jack Taylor

The life of a startup is full of ups and downs, an emotional roller coaster ride that you can’t quite imagine if you’ve spent your whole career in a corporation.

- Harvey Mackay

It truly levels the playing field and puts all the emphasis on the content. And all the emphasis on the merit of the idea.

- Jack Dorsey

In the ’30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That’s not going to work today.

- Peter Thiel

Success is not final…Failure is not fatal…it’s the courage to continue that counts.

- Winston Churchill

My financial service business is the absolute best thing I have done to empower the poor. I run many charities and fight many political causes, but my financial service company is the greatest gift I’ve given.

- Russell Simmons

The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.

- Bill Gates

The skill sets it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, a successful marketer, or a relevant celebrity is a different skill set than you needed ten years ago, even though that was the skill set that mattered for decades.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Never allow anyone to get between you and your customers and suppliers.

- Jack Welch

Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable

- Peter Thiel

Americans reading the paper, listening to the news every single day, and all you hear is things are getting worse and worse. And that has a psychological effect on consumer confidence. That’s what consumer confidence is.

- Howard Schultz

I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody.

- Dale Carnegie

In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.

- Jeff Bezos

Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.

- Sam Walton

The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.

- Dale Carnegie

There’s always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It’s long since passed that a typical person doesn’t leave footprints.

- Bill Gates

The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations: communications, teamwork, self-development, and development of others.

- Peter Drucker

I’m pretty good at sticking to what I know. You don’t see me social commentating on health-care or presidential debates. I talk about what I know because I’m petrified of being wrong.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Working to fulfill someone else’s needs or dreams almost always catches up with you.

- Jack Welch

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

- Winston Churchill

There are things money can’t buy and hard work can’t win. One of them is happiness.

- Ray Kroc

Every one of my positions cuts – out half the country. I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-gay rights, I’m pro-immigration, I’m against guns, I believe in Darwin.

- Michael Bloomberg

Call it the emergence of a “world’s bank” – a system built by and for the people, delivering credit in America and across the globe in a radically decentralized, highly scalable, and crucially equitable way. The World Bank funds institutions.The world’s bank funds people.

- Reid Hoffman

Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That’s not possible on $1 a day.

- Bill Gates

When you acknowledge God, He will go before you and make the crooked places straight.

- Joel Olsteen

If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.

- Peter Thiel

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

- Jeff Bezos

“It’s clear there’s a lot of room for improvement, there’s no inherent ceiling we’re hitting up on.

- Sergey Brin

Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.

- Oprah Winfrey

I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I’m not an expert on how you get out of those things.

- Bill Gates

You’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.

- Peter Thiel

Frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

- Jeff Bezos

I think my greatest moment in business was when the first Southwest airplane arrived after four years of litigation, and I walked up to it and I kissed that baby on the lips and I cried.

- Herb Kelleher

Job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.

- Sam Walton

Drucker said: ‘If you weren’t already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?’ … Simple, right? But incredibly powerful.

- Jack Welch

Starting a company is a very tough thing. There’s a friend of mine, Bill Lee, whose phrase is ‘starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.’ So you should certainly expect that it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be harder than getting a job somewhere by a pretty good margin and the odds of you losing the money that you invested or your friends invested is pretty high. I mean, those are just the basic facts. So if you don’t mind things being really hard and high risk, then starting a company is a good idea. Otherwise, it’s probably unwise. It will certainly stress you out. So I think you have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.

- Elon Musk

FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON THE NUMBERS In the second example, I managed the team to a set of numbers that did not fully capture what I wanted. I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time—in that order. Unfortunately, the metrics that I set did not capture those priorities. At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them at every staff meeting, my people focused intensely on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result. Interestingly, I see this same problem play out in many consumer Internet startups. 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. It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.

- Ben Horowitz

The words Think and Thank are inscribed in many of the Cromwellian churches of England. These words ought to be inscribed in our hearts, too: Think and Thank. Think of all we have to be grateful for, and thank God for all our boons and bounties.

- Dale Carnegie

Remember, man does not live on bread alone: sometimes he needs a little buttering up.

- John C. Maxwell

We beat our expectations in the run up to Christmas and this time last year we had particularly high stock levels leading to a bigger clearance.

- Simon Wolfson

The only way to solve the problem of Boko Haram is to create jobs.

- Aliko Dangote

The little things in life frequently make the difference in success and failure.

- Zig Ziglar

And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round.

- Winston Churchill

the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.

- Dale Carnegie

Right now I’m just delighted to be alive and to have had a nice long bath.

- Richard Branson

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society. And I think talking in everyday terms and making sure people can understand it – I think that’s important.

- Joel Olsteen

Husbands and wives, have fun with each other. I’m convinced it makes all the difference in the world.

- Zig Ziglar

I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.

- Larry Ellison

One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice.

- Seth Godin

But innovation and change make inordinate time demands on the executive. All one can think and do in a short time is to think what one already knows and to do as one has always done.

- Peter Drucker

Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don’t approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.

- Bill Gates

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.

- Jeff Bezos

When you live your life in different ways, it makes people around you become uncomfortable. So deal with it. They don’t know what you are going to do.

- Larry Ellison

My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.

- Steve Wozniak

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