If something is expensive to develop, and somebody’s not going to get paid, it won’t get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
- Bill Gates
Notable Quotables
When marketing put yourself in the shoes of the customer.
- David Novak
Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.
- Steve Jobs
Rap helps me connect emotionally.
- Ben Horowitz
Yes, it’s absolutely true that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly – until you can learn to do it well.
- Zig Ziglar
That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity.
- Beryl Markham
We’re not in the fashion business, as the Wall Street Journal wrote the other day. We’re in the sports business, and there’s a big difference.
- Phil Knight
We were guerilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit.
- Phil Knight
Hong Kong is uniquely positioned as the best place to integrate with the fast-growing Pearl River Delta Region and to capitalize on the opening up of China’s economy and markets.
- Cheng Yu-tung
A lot of psychological principles and even medical principles, you see them coming around to what the Bible said hundreds of years ago: a merry heart is good like a medicine.
- Joel Olsteen
Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance.
- Oprah Winfrey
To succeed in business, you must build a brand and never destroy it.
- Aliko Dangote
The [Henderson] Group possesses substantial recurrent income.
- Lee Shau Kee
Education isn’t a problem until it serves as a buffer rom the world and a refuge from the risk of failure.
- Seth Godin
Resposibility is the price of greatness.
- Winston Churchill
Be reactionary. React to what the market wants. And the market wants one-on-one real time engagement. Now that we have the tools to engage, I’m going to continue fighting for the end user.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.
- Jeff Bezos
The path of least resistance makes all rivers, and some men, crooked.
- Napoleon Hill
There’s this great quote…which says ‘The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.’
- Jack Dorsey
One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But… I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
- Thomas Edison
The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios… The idea that you can actually predict what’s going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.
- George Soros
Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation…. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward!
- Thomas Edison
I enjoy the hunt much more than the ‘good life’ after the victory.
- Carl Icahn
Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
- Winston Churchill
Buoyant consumer confidence will continue to underpin retial spending and hence rental growth for shopping centres. The office market is expected to perform well on the back of tight supply being met by keen demand from companies looking for expansion opportunities.
- Lee Shau Kee
Whether you’re talking about the core consumer or the person on the street, the principle is the same: you have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.
- Phil Knight
That’s one of our biggest challenges – getting the people to the product immediately in a consistent way.
- Jack Dorsey
I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I’ve become. If I had, I’d have done it a lot earlier.
- Oprah Winfrey
Somebody needs what you have to give. It may not be your money; it may be your time. It may be your listening ear. It may be your arms to encourage. It may be your smile to uplift. Who knows? Maybe just like that little baby, putting your arm around somebody and letting him or her know that you care can help begin to heal that person’s heart. Maybe you can give a rescuing hug.
- Joel Olsteen
If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.
- Napoleon Hill
Personal discipline, when it becomes a way of life in our personal, family, and career lives, will enable us to do some incredible things.
- Zig Ziglar
Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars.
- Rupert Murdoch
When companies fail, or fail to grow, it’s almost always because they don’t invest in the people, the systems, and the processes they need.
- Howard Schultz
No alibi will save you from accepting the responsibility.
- Napoleon Hill
Successful people think on paper.
- Brian Tracy
One who buys things to write them off for their business whether they need them or not and who borrows massive sums of money to buy frozen yogurt and cupcake franchises that cannot possibly generate enough money to produce a livable wage, much less anything approaching prosperity.
- Clay Clark
Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.
- Stephen R. Covey
I have thought about some kind of musical involving my music. That would be kind of interesting. I have thought of it in that way, as a creator of something, not so much a performer. So that’s in my head.
- Steve Martin
Google’s motto—“Don’t be evil”—is in part a branding ploy, but it’s also characteristic of a kind of business that’s successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence.
- Peter Thiel
We didn’t really know what was happening.
- John Chambers
Law of Clarity – If you can’t explain what you sell to a ten-year old child then you don’t know what you sell.
- Jerry Vass
Kickstarter isn’t a profit center, it’s an organizer and an instigator.
- Seth Godin
I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial… I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.
- Winston Churchill
I am a tightwad. That’s one of the main reasons I completed a long questionnaire for a crispy $1 bill. Why else would I spend two or three hours being personally interviewed by these authors? They paid me $100, $200, or $250. Oh, they made me another offer–to donate in my name the money I earned for my interview to my favorite charity. But I told them, I am my favorite charity.
- Thomas J Stanley
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
- Alexander Graham Bell
When you give directives to a child, especially a teenager, you must consider the nature of your child.
- Zig Ziglar
Ranking among the greatest Christmas movie classics, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ tells a beautiful story about the priceless value of relationships.
- John C. Maxwell
Unemployment in America today is too high. And part of the reason, unfortunately, is that many companies cannot fill the high-skilled jobs increasingly at risk of going overseas.
- Michael Bloomberg
The secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda.
- John C. Maxwell
Positive thinking is more than just a tagline. It changes the way we behave. And I firmly believe that when I am positive, it not only makes me better, but it also makes those around me better.
- Harvey Mackay
If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb.
- Peter Thiel
Find a job that you will be happy with and work hard at.
- Lee Shau Kee
Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.
- Peter Drucker
Daimler uses Tesla’s battery packs, Mercedes-Benz uses a Tesla powertrain, Toyota uses a Tesla motor. General Motors has even created a task force to track Tesla’s next moves.
- Peter Thiel
Don’t wait for the right answer and the golden path to present themselves.This is precisely why you’re stuck. Starting without seeing the end is difficult, so we often wait until we see the end, scanning relentlessly for the right way, the best way and the perfect way.The way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path, right now.Step by step, page by page, interaction by interaction. As you start moving, you can’t help but improve, can’t help but incrementally find yourself getting back toward your north star.You might not end up with perfect, but it’s significantly more valuable than being stuck.Don’t just start. Continue. Ship. Repeat.
- Seth Godin
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
- Mark Twain
Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.
- P.T. Barnum
My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.
- Jack Ma
People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.
- Ben Horowitz
If you are going through hell, keep going.
- Winston Churchill
I learned this early on in the variety business: You’ve got to give folks responsibility, you’ve got to trust them, and then you’ve got to check on them.
- Sam Walton
[In January 2011] I think the important thing for Twitter is that it works on any technology.
- Jack Dorsey
Money has always been in politics. And I’m not sure you’d want money to be completely out of politics.
- Bill Gates
Diplomacy is the art of saying Nice Doggie until you can find a rock.
- Will Rogers
In my opinion, education is the finest gift an individual can give a young person.
- Donald Bren
Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.
- Napoleon Hill
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
- Dale Carnegie
I don’t think that a same-sex marriage is the way God intended it to be.
- Joel Olsteen
Insulation prevents you from making the change and finding the understanding you set out to achieve in the first place.
- Seth Godin
Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult.
- Og Mandino
A man may be poor; he may have nothing at all except his labour to sell; he may be a manual worker for a weekly wage, but in a free commonwealth he must enjoy as good a right as any lord, or prelate, or capitalist in the country to the integrity of his own political convictions.
- Winston Churchill
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
Being a good company is an end in itself.
- Ben Horowitz
Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
- Winston Churchill
I believe people have to follow their dreams – I did.
- Larry Ellison
If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.
- Richard Branson
It’s paradoxical, but you want to identify the things that can kill you and engage them sooner. This is part of the metric behind fail fast. Of course, you’re not actually trying to fail; you want to succeed. But failing fast is much better than failing slowly, since it enables you to quickly to pivot, iterate, and redeploy capital. The one key mistake is that people tend to work first on the problems that they have the most confidence they can solve. In a good startup strategy you actually want to face death soonest because then you fail fast or get on a great path to success fast. Identify the hardest problems and try to solve those as soon as you can.
- Reid Hoffman
When overtaken with the temporay feelings of potential failure, burn all of your bridges of retreat, thus making retreat impossible.
- Napoleon Hill
Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.
- Winston Churchill
Churchill was in the lavatory in the House of Commons and his secretary knocked on the door and said: Excuse me Prime Minister, but the Lord Privy Seal wishes to speak to you. After a pause Churchill replied: Tell His Lordship: I’m sealed on The Privy and can only deal with one shit at a time.
- Winston Churchill
es it’s thinner, but I wanted storage. I don’t have broadband at home, and you can’t get great broadband connection in hotels, so I carry all my personal media in the iPad. So I was hoping Apple has a 256GB iPad. I was hoping for more storage so I could put every episode of Big Bang Theory on my iPad. So I emailed my wife and said ‘nope, I don’t want one of those.
- Steve Wozniak
Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in.
- Seth Godin
Company culture” doesn’t exist apart from the company itself: no company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.
- Peter Thiel
The problem with common sense is that it’s not really that common. – David Novak CEO of Yum! Brands
- David Novak
I never worry because I know who I am and I know Whose I am.
- Zig Ziglar
Learn to do common things uncommonly well, we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable.
- George Washington Carver
Anyone who has held an iDevice or a smoothly machined MacBook has felt the result of Steve Jobs’s obsession with visual and experiential perfection. But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively.
- Peter Thiel
Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.
- Donald Trump
It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.
- Napoleon Hill
Good talkers often choose to become sales professionals. Unfortunately, they don’t understand that selling well means listening well.
- Jerry Vass
If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.
- Elon Musk
Save your first bucket of gold… then use it for investments.
- Lee Shau Kee
If you and I go around grumbling about ingratitude, who is to blame? Is it human nature—or is it our ignorance of human nature? Let’s not expect gratitude. Then, if we get some occasionally, it will come as a delightful surprise. If we don’t get it, we won’t be disturbed. Here is the first point I am trying to make in this chapter: It is natural for people to forget to be grateful; so, if we go around expecting gratitude, we are headed straight for a lot of heartaches.
- Dale Carnegie
I have a calendar life that is complicated, so I use BusyCal and Google Calendar. I keep two different browsers open to avoid some confusion.
- Steve Wozniak
Nike is not about going to a ball game. It’s a business.
- Phil Knight
I have ways of making money that you know nothing about…(if you’re firm won’t sell) you will stand alone, Your firm can never make any more money in Cleveland. No use trying to do business in competition with Standard Oil Company. If you do (continue to fight) it will end in your being wiped out.
- John D. Rockefeller
I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
If you’re going to be thinking, you may as well think big.
- Donald Trump
Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.
- Walt Disney
My revenue was $4 million my first year in business, off of one $20 item.
- Sara Blakely