highlights
37 highlights saved, filed under business.
- 01
The biggest tragedy in life is failing to reach your potential.
- 02
I realized that no matter what may have occurred in my life, I had nothing to feel down about. I have countless reasons to be happy, and I need to remind myself of this from time to time. I also believe deeply in the concept of being in the moment—of experiencing to the fullest everything that is occurring to you and around you, and absorbing it with every sense of your body. No one can understand this more than someone with a limited time to live. And no one, I am convinced, can experience this aspect of life, this seizing of the moment, as fully as a child with a terminal ailment.
- 03
“Bad stuff happens in life, and when it does, you just have to get up the next day and carry on.”
- 04
You cannot dismiss the power of a vision to drive entrepreneurs and build wealth.
- 05
Lesson learned: Talk to people in their own language. Understand their interests and their point of view, and tailor your words to suit them.
- 06
Once again, action is better than inaction. If you stay on the mountain and do nothing, you will freeze to death.
- 07
Anyone in sales who is too sensitive to deal with a negative response or so unrealistic that they believe every sales call must be 100 percent successful is in the wrong job. Stuff happens. To everyone. In every company. Deal with it.
- 08
Maximum transparency is best because it builds trust and loyalty.
- 09
I don’t believe in waiting and seeing what happens. I believe in making things happen, and nothing spurs me in that direction faster than falling or even plateaued sales. Slimmer margins can be fixed and high costs can be lowered, but falling sales mean declining market share, and without sales there is nothing. My response to lower sales volumes is similar to that of a captain of a vessel that meets an unexpected iceberg: all hands on deck, sound the fire alarm and stand by while I get busy.
- 10
Don’t ask the customer questions you can answer yourself. I hate laziness. And I especially hate it when salespeople start asking me questions such as how many offices we have and what services we provide, when it’s all on our website. If they can’t bother to learn basic information about our company, how much effort will they put into working for me?
- 11
Another sloppy line that has been touted for years without any sales payback is “What can I do to win your business?” Get specific, as in: “Do you have any potential objections about today’s meeting?”
- 12
Curious people generally make great salespeople.
- 13
Never assume that you are smarter than your customer. Because when it comes to knowing what is needed, knowing how to measure value and knowing all the reasons to make the investment you are asking them to make … you are not.
- 14
Proving that when you can do just one thing well enough and often enough, little else matters. It’s all about knowing your strength and building on it. That’s what makes winners.
- 15
You can’t sit around and moan about the advantages that your competitors have. You need to be creative, build on your strengths, discover a way to outflank the other guys and get it done.
- 16
The first priority should be to bring your strengths up to as near optimal performance as realistically possible. Then you can pay attention to solving or at least minimizing the negative impact of your weaknesses.
- 17
Good managers acknowledge the strengths of their employees, and they ensure that they have all the opportunity they can handle to perform according to those strengths.
- 18
I’m not suggesting you will always avoid problems, or that you won’t be able to turn some problems into opportunities, which I have managed to do from time to time. I’m proposing that the first step you need to take is to solve the darn problem, then look for any opportunities.
- 19
Have a clear sense of purpose. Average people have no clear purpose in life, which is why they remain average. Reaching levels of success that are well above average demands setting purposes for your life, your job and your week. Weekly purposes are goals you want to achieve in the next seven days, and should be limited to one or two.
- 20
We are here to build a great company. We are here to build a company that will last through the ages. We are here to build a company that will last longer than you and me.
- 21
“Good management is not about the state of things as they are today,” George has explained. “It’s about the state of things as they will be tomorrow.”*
- 22
Sometimes making a good decision today is preferable to making a perfect decision tomorrow.
- 23
When I come up on a guy ahead of me, I think, ‘Get the hell out of my way! Why are you ahead of me? You do not deserve to be in my way! By being in my way you are taking victory out of my hands and food out of the mouths of my children! So get the hell out of my way!’ That’s how I think in a race when somebody is ahead of me. And you need to think that way too.”
- 24
Understanding the limits and being able to motivate people to work up to but not beyond these limits is one of the most valuable skills an employer can have.
- 25
One of the keys to being a successful entrepreneur is being able to make decisions with the best data available at the time.
- 26
Don’t let the size of your dreams limit the scope of your capabilities.
- 27
“Show me a drop of hope and I can see the rain.”
- 28
Each of us can achieve far more than we imagine, but only if we persuade ourselves that “impossible” isn’t a fact, it’s an opinion.
- 29
And a substantial amount of credit for my company’s success must go to a policy I have maintained when choosing new employees: I hire people who are smarter than me.
- 30
Businesses are sustained from two sources of energy: good management and clear vision.
- 31
Research has proven that successful people focus on their strengths and delegate others to perform tasks in areas where they are weak.
- 32
Mark Cuban has a different take on this. His words—”Every day somebody somewhere wakes up with the sole purpose of kicking your ass”—
- 33
Michael Jordan had his own way of making the same point. “Some people want it to happen, some people wish it would happen, others make it happen.” When I quoted this to someone once, they replied, “And some people stand around and ask ‘What the hell just happened?’“
- 34
Too many people waste the hours given them the same way they might waste money handed them. They waste it in four ways: by procrastinating, by losing focus on important things, by thinking too much and doing too little, and by lowering their eyes to look at the downside instead of lifting their heads to see the upside.
- 35
The best cure for procrastination is to break the task down into smaller elements and do one element at a time.
- 36
My dad often said that working hard doesn’t guarantee you will be rich, but not working hard means you’re sure to stay poor.
- 37
In the long run, “good enough” is never good enough, whether in our personal lives or in our careers.