People talk about consumer confidence, but that is a misleading phrase. There are a number of factors that mean people just have less money. Mortgage rates are at a historic high for many people. The fuel price is another major contributory factor. We don’t see any particular reason why any of that will change for at least another six months or so. We reckon we can grow market share, but that will be through increasing selling space.
- Simon Wolfson
Notable Quotables
The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.
- Anthony Robbins
Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.
- Jack Ma
Never forget, the real secret of giving advice is this: Once you’ve given it, don’t concern yourself with whether it is followed or not, and refrain from saying ‘I told you so.’
- Harvey Mackay
Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.
- Steve Ballmer
Expect the unexpected. And whenever possible, be the unexpected. I try to live by that on a daily basis.
- Jack Dorsey
The idea flow from the human spirit is absolutely unlimited. All you have to do is tap into that well. I don’t like to use the word efficiency. It’s creativity. It’s a belief that every person counts.
- Jack Welch
Napoleon was criticized for giving toys” to war-hardened veterans, and Napoleon replied, Men are ruled by toys.
- Dale Carnegie
I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.
- Winston Churchill
On balance, I am a supporter of the minimum wage going up. We’ve got to be very careful what we wish for because some employers – and there could be a lot of them – will be scared away from hiring new people or creating incremental hours for part-time people as a result of that wage going up.
- Howard Schultz
Victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats.
- Og Mandino
For a rich and reasonably successful guy, it is impossible not to enjoy your job; otherwise, why would you spend so much time and effort doing it? I am a great fan of Norilsk, and I like this kind of challenge.
- Vladimir Potanin
[On an American taking second place in the Olympics] He didn’t win the silver, he lost the gold
- Phil Knight
The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.
- George Lucas
If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.
- Seth Godin
Your best days are not behind you. They’re in front of you.
- Joel Olsteen
Intemperance.
- Napoleon Hill
If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.
- Andrew Carnegie
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
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
- John Wooden
If into the security recordings you go, only pain will you find.
- Yoda
In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.
- Wang Jianlin
I have 2 million Twitter followers. Some of those people are also yogis and activists and people who really go out and make a difference. I do as much as I can with my voice. It’s effortless in some cases. I try to remind everybody that they have that kind of voice.
- Russell Simmons
A friend is a person before whom I may think aloud.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society, they’re powerful engines for making it better.
- Peter Thiel
Earl Nightingale has inspired more people toward success and fortune than any other motivational speaker on the planet.
- Zig Ziglar
Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars.
- Rupert Murdoch
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
God always wants us to be growing.
- Joel Olsteen
If your thinking is limited, then your life is going to be limited.
- Joel Olsteen
You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.
- Gary Keller
Well, I am a Republican, and I would run as a Republican. And I have a lot of confidence in the Republican Party. I don’t have a lot of confidence in the president. I think what’s happening to this country is unbelievably bad. We’re no longer a respected country.
- Donald Trump
The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.
- Bill Gates
A barber lathers a man before he shaves him.
- Dale Carnegie
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
- Mark Twain
There are two main drivers of asset class returns – inflation and growth.
- Ray Dalio
Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts … genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation … the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality …though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries [WWII]
- Winston Churchill
There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.
- Winston Churchill
If you think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself.
- Woodrow Wilson
The majority of people begin to drift as soon as they meet with opposition, and not one out of ten thousand (people) will keep on trying after failing two or three times.
- Napoleon Hill
As the Readers’s Digest once said: ‘Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience.
- Dale Carnegie
Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.
- Warren Buffett
I knew I could only play Cyrano if he were Americanized. I had no intention of writing the script myself. I was afraid of it. You’re playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It’s hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.
- Steve Martin
You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.
- John Maxwell
Money is fun to make, fun to spend and fun to give away.
- Sara Blakely
Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.
- Vida D. Scudder
Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.
- Bill Gates
Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.
- Yoda
The way to achieve happiness is to try for perfection that is impossible to achieve, and spend the rest of your life trying to achieve it.
- Winston Churchill
1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
- Timothy Ferriss
We have secured the rigs necessary to complete our program, a program that focuses on more development activity and less risk. The current forecasted activity level calls for 391 wells, with increased activity in each region including expanded drilling on each of the acquisition plays purchased in 2005.
- Dan Dinges
One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that good ones slip through.
- Seth Godin
I just believe that the interesting time in a career is pre-success, what shaped things, how did you get to this point.
- Steve Martin
Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.
- Mark Zuckerberg
My wheels are running. My investments are local, regional and international.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Those people behind the mosque have to respect, have to appreciate and have to defer to the people of New York. The wound is still there. Just because the wound is healing you can’t say, ‘Let’s just go back to where we were pre-9/11.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
There is no decision that we can make that doesn’t come with some sort of balance or sacrifice
- Simon Sinek
By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: ‘John, I’d love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I’ve got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said ‘no’ yesterday. Gotta run!
- Timothy Ferriss
At the start of each new day, remind yourself: I am talented. I am creative. I am greatly favored by God. I am equipped. I am well able. I will see my dreams come to pass.” Declare those statements by faith and before long, you will begin to see them in reality.
- Joel Olsteen
You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.
- Bill Cosby
If a hurricane strikes, we can blame the president for not being there; we can blame Congress and FEMA; we can blame the state governments; but in the end, it’s the mayors and the local city governments that have to be prepared for emergencies and be prepared to act.
- Michael Bloomberg
Branding is what people think about you before they even know you.
- Bryan Smith
If you treat your wife like a thoroughbred, you’ll never end up with a nag.
- Zig Ziglar
And being as wicked as any man who ever lived, he exploited his advantage to the full.
- Winston Churchill
Without a sense of fairness and justice, no leader can command and retain the respect of his followers.
- Napoleon Hill
Our history is based on extending the brand to categories within the guardrails of Starbucks.
- Howard Schultz
A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.
- Peter Thiel
If there’s a problem, we at Wine Library never tell ourselves that once we handle this issue, we’ll never have to deal with the person again. We talk to every single person as though we’re going to wind up sitting next to that person at his or her mother’s house that night for dinner.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
THE HABIT OF DOING MORE THAN PAID FOR – One of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness, upon the part of the leader, to do more than he requires of his followers.
- Napoleon Hill
Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I’d try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, ‘This is the end.’ I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.
- Rupert Murdoch
If the terrorists have the sympathy of people, it’s much harder to find them. So we need people on our side, and that leads us to be responsible leaders of the world, show some concern with the problems.
- George Soros
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
What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?
- Sam Walton
The most valuable kind of company maintains an openness to invention that is most characteristic of beginnings.
- Peter Thiel
We take care of the people, the products, and the profits—in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work.
- Ben Horowitz
No one is guaranteed a job in this.
- Jack Welch
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
Basically, our goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.
- Larry Page
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 should be only paying for things that matter. I shouldn’t be paying for things that don’t matter. And, if Walgreen wants a premium, and they’re not doing anything different, why should I pay them more?
- George Paz
Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is–the strong horse that pulls the whole cart.
- Winston Churchill
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
Chambers have numerous committees and serving on one of them provides numerous networking opportunities as well as professional leadership development.
- American Business Magazine
The U.S. couldn’t even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They’ll be killing each other again in less than a year. I’m sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.
- Bill Gates
The torch relay is an excellent embodiment of all that the Olympic Games have come to symbolise – a celebration of the human spirit. Personally to me, it represents striving to be the best in whatever we do, never giving up despite the odds, and a commitment to health and fitness.
- Lakshmi Mittal
G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. … We found that they don’t predict anything.
- Laszlo Bock
When you’ve got a strong enough why, you can always find the how.
- Zig Ziglar
I was leading a lot of idea and the vision for where the product was going. Ev [Evan Williams] was funding and supporting what we were doing. He put the shelter over our heads. And Biz [Stone] was just an amazingly creative guy.
- Jack Dorsey
Chase the vision, not the money; the money will end up following you.
- Tony Hsieh
The only discipline that lasts is self-discipline.
- Bum Phillips
When marketing put yourself in the shoes of the customer.
- David Novak
Lanai at one time grew 98% of the world’s pineapples. But the world’s pineapples are now grown in two places, Costa Rica and Panama, because no one wants to spend $45 for a pineapple from the United States.
- Larry Ellison
What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
- Napoleon Hill
A business is a complex system of inter-operating systems.
- Robert Kiyosaki
STARTUP THINKING New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.
- Peter Thiel
As Google CEO Larry Page put it in his 2014 TED talk: “The main thing that has caused companies to fail, in my view, is that they missed the future.
- Jack Welch
As a leader, the first person I need to lead is me. The first person that I should try to change is me.
- John C. Maxwell
Faith is easy. I think people complicate it.
- Joel Olsteen
Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.” The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.
- Ben Horowitz
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
- Haruki Murakami
