In order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.
- Napoleon Hill
Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it’s easier, it scales and it’s profitable. But people don’t like it – we want to be who we are, not who some marketer tells us to be.
- Seth Godin
While technology is still important, the consumer has to lead innovation.
- Phil Knight
Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want that on my business card.
- Bill Gates
I tried to build a company my father would have been proud to work for, that he would have looked back on and said, ‘That’s the company that honoured me, even though I don’t have an education’. I wanted to build a company that had a conscience.
- Howard Schultz
This approach appeals to the media’s innate curiosity.Whereas a fastball stresses logic over emotion, the curveball stresses emotion over logic.
- Michael Levine
Lack of Self-Discipline.
- Napoleon Hill
It would be nice to design a real briefcase – you open it up and it’s your computer but it also stores your books.
- Steve Wozniak
My conclusion on Freewill and predestination- they are identical.
- Winston Churchill
Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work.
- Bill Gates
While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.
- Ray Kroc
The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.
- Bill Gates
We modeled our employee stock ownership plan after Sam’s, and it worked well for us.
- Bernie Marcus
We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God’s good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.
- Winston Churchill
In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.
- Ben Horowitz
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
- Dale Carnegie
And we know that in ALL things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
- Romans 8:28
Show a real interest in his problem and helping him solve it.
- Jack Nadel
If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
- Jeff Bezos
It’s the power of the brand. We’ve never formally advertised.
- Sara Blakely
If David our CEO, devotes so much of his time to this, then all this stuff about teamwork and learning how to be a great leader must be pretty important.
- David Novak
He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass.
- Ray Dalio
Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First he gets up everyday bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever know. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction. (qualities of great leaders)
- David Glass
Poker is a game where you don’t have to have the best hand to win. Poker is really reading other people and reading human emotion, which certainly comes into play in business.
- Charles Ergen
I loved doing ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ Because you have to understand that I’d been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don’t think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.
- Steve Martin
Quality is a cornerstone of the [Henderson] Group underpinning all our activities.
- Lee Shau Kee
Concentration is my motto – first honesty, then industry, then concentration.
- Andrew Carnegie
Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best….”
- Thomas Edison
Nigeria has moved into low-middle-income, but their north is very poor, and the health care systems there have broken down.
- Bill Gates
We fully intend to capitalise on our strengths as this dynamic market continues to flourish.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I think so many people are reactive… they see things in a short term way they’re right up against it.
- Ray Dalio
There are two types of people in the world. One type is known as leaders and the other as followers. Decide at the outset whether you intend to become a leader in your chose calling or remain a follower. The difference in compensation is vast. The follwer cannot reasonably expect the compensation to which a leader is entitled, although many followers make the mistake of expecting such pay.
- Napoleon Hill
The pent-up demand for the good life in China is extraordinary.
- Stephen Wynn
One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.
- Dale Carnegie
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.
- Wayne Gretzky
To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That’s what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games – nothing like saving the world.
- Elon Musk
Research indicates that employees have three prime needs: Interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company.
- Zig Ziglar
A decade and a half ago an ‘Esquire’ magazine reporter, noting our advertising played up the heros as aspects of great atheletes asked the question, who is your hero? My answer was simple. My college track coach and partner, Bill Bowerman. He had won four national championships, coached more sub four minute milers than anyone when he retired. He was the 1972 Olympic coach yet he insisted he was not a track coach. He was a professor of competitive response.
- Phil Knight
There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.
- Jack Welch
Owners don’t fire all the players. They fire the leader and bring in someone they hope the players will buy into.
- Napoleon Hill
When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.
- Walt Disney
As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies. At my companies, our position is that we hire someone in spite of an MBA, not because of one.
- Elon Musk
No matter how senior you get in an organization, no matter how well you’re perceived to be doing, your job is never done. Every day, you get up and the world is changing; your customers are expecting more from you. Your competitors are putting pressure on you by doing more and trying to beat you here and beat you there.
- Abigail Johnson
I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage — leverage being borrowed money. You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing.
- Warren Buffett
the world belongs to the man or woman who got up today and did something
- Jim Stovall
Twitter in 2000 was something that was fun to play with but something I put on the shelf to play with for another day. And that day was 2006.
- Jack Dorsey
You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.
- Bill Gates
A definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.
- Peter Thiel
If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.
- Jeff Bezos
The guerrilla is a cheapskate. She knows that every dollar allocated to marketing is essential, and she doesn’t plan to waste a penny. But she’s not foolish. When necessary, she hires the best designers, media planners, and experts in the business—she realizes that the best is often the cheapest in the end.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
Read the Bible, it is your roadmap through life.
- George Foreman
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
One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.
- Jeff Bezos
Once you’ve engaged with an organization or a relationship or a community, you owe it to your team to start. To initiate. To be the one who makes something happen. To do less is to steal from them. If you hide your spark, bury your ideas, keep your questions and notions from the team, you have hurt them as badly as if you had stolen a laptop and fenced it on eBay.
- Seth Godin
I don’t feel under-taxed in any way at all.
- Jack Welch
I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been
- Sam Walton
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
Good product managers crisply define the target, the “what” (as opposed to the “how”), and manage the delivery of the “what.” Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out “how.” Good product managers communicate crisply to engineering in writing as well as verbally. Good product managers don’t give direction informally. Good product managers gather information informally.
- Ben Horowitz
“Pick me, pick me” acknowledges the power of the system and passes responsibility to someone else to initiate. Even better, “pick me, pick me” moves the blame from you to them. If you don’t get picked, it’s their fault, not yours. If you do get picked, well, they said you were good, right? Not your fault anymore. Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.
- Seth Godin
Money doesn’t make people happy. People make people happy.
- Stephen Wynn
God created you to leave your mark on this generation. You have gifts and talents that you have not tapped into. There are new levels of your destiny still in front of you. But break out starts in your thinking. As you put these keys into action, making room for increase, expecting shifts of God’s favor, praying bold prayers, and keeping the right perspective, then God will release floods of His goodness that will thrust you beyond barriers of the past into the extraordinary life you were designed to live.
- Joel Olsteen
I enjoy the competition and the process of learning as we compete. The whole thing is just fascinating. I don’t know what I’ll do when I retire. When I go sailing, I look around … anyone want to race? I just love competing as opposed to just going out and watching the sunset.
- Larry Ellison
We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
- Abraham Lincoln
What we want to watch is whether this is a short-term bump or not.
- John Chambers
If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can’t radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return – if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.
- Dale Carnegie
I hate writing about personal stuff. I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.
- Elon Musk
The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.
- Bill Gates
If your feet are in two buckets and the average temperature of the water is 90 degrees, you’re probably fine—unless one bucket is at 35 and the other is at 145 degrees. On average, you’re fine. Based on variation, though, you’re miserable.
- Seth Godin
No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.
- Andrew Carnegie
In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
- Harry Truman
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
- Thomas Edison
Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.
- Warren Buffett
All of the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind.
- Winston Churchill
The seed of a bamboo tree is planted, fertilized and watered. Nothing happens for the first year. There´s no sign of growth. Not even a hint. The same thing happens – or doesn´t happen – the second year. And then the third year. The tree is carefully watered and fertilized each year, but nothing shows. No growth. No anything. For eight years it can continue. Eight years! Then – after the eight years of fertilizing and watering have passed, with nothing to show for it – the bamboo tree suddently sprouts and grows thirty feet in three months!
- Zig Ziglar
A friend is a person before whom I may think aloud.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.
- Benjamin Franklin
You can look at the situation and feel victimized. Or you can look at it and be excited about conquering the challenges and opportunities it presents.
- Jack Welch
How can we walk away from requirements that we know to be true to pursue something that we think will help?” It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.
- Ben Horowitz
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.
- Mark Zuckerberg
To do anything truly worth doing, I must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in with gusto and scramble through as well as I can.
- Og Mandino
Everybody is going to have their critics. It’s easy to get discouraged in life.
- Joel Olsteen
I taught myself how to program.
- Jack Dorsey
Become meaningful in your interactions and the path to success in any endeavor is simpler and far more sustainable.
- Dale Carnegie
The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over.
- Peter Thiel
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
- Winston Churchill
Small businesses don’t exist without the nucleus.
- Bryan Smith
I failed the LSAT. Basically, if I had not failed, I’d have been a lawyer and there would be no Spanx. I think failure is nothing more than life’s way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating.
- Sara Blakely
The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.
- Moliere
We must not let our standards be determined by the gentlemen of the oposition.
- Winston Churchill
When your art fails, make better art.
- Seth Godin
People will always blame the poets for society’s ills. But these are the true artists.
- Russell Simmons
New research shows that you will be dead longer than you will be alive.
- Zig Ziglar
China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them.
- Bill Gates
Uncontrolled Desire For Something For Nothing.
- Napoleon Hill
The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.
- Bill Gates
Service for the Right Reasons: To Save the Whales, or Kill Them and Feed the Children? Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.
- Oscar Wilde
Don’t Walter Cronkite me!
- Jack Welch
If I had to single out one element in my life that has made difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.
- Sam Walton
Never blindside an employee by firing them without warning.
- Clay Clark
