Categories:
- Rallying the Team
- Personal Success
- Thoughts on Innovation
- Overcoming Challenges
- Conquering Fear
- Dealing with Failure
- Ins and Outs of Entrepreneurship
Thoughts on Innovation
The power of compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world.
If I’m the smartest guy in the room, I’m in the wrong room.
I never read. I just look at pictures.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Nothing is easy. If you want to do nothing, that’s easy.
At the opening of the Hoover Dam, a beaver told a rabbit: ‘Well, I didn’t build it. But it’s based on my idea.
Mediocre people are always at their best.
Terrible is the temptation to do good!
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
They say the secret of success is being at the right place at the right time, but since you never know when the right time is going to be, I figure the trick is to find the right place and just hang around.
It’s not a good strategy until it costs you something to pursue.
I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.
Success is easy if you think of it like rust: It’s inevitable if you keep at it.
You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I will ruin you.
Make no little plans.
Humility is the most underrated aspect of being an entrepreneur. Once your head gets too big, you’re cooked.
Good enough never is.
An entrepreneur is someone who shoots an arrow and then runs to move the target, so the arrow hits it.
Innovation is seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more.
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
You can’t really run the company by pissing off the scientists who do the work.
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
It’s hard to teach a young dog old tricks.
There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight.
It’s not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
You’ll see it when you believe it.
Even if you are on the right track, the train will run you over if you just sit there.
Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.
Strategy – is figuring out what is the most important thing for your company and deciding to focus on it and say no to everything else.
If the shoe fits, you probably didn’t buy it online.
There’s only one boss: the customer. He can fire everybody from the chairman on down simply by spending his money elsewhere.
Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves it’s amazing what they can accomplish.
If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will.
Customers don’t want 1/4 drills, they want 1/4 holes.
Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, and abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.
Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance – or a stranger.
To do a common thing, uncommonly well, brings success.
Choice is the enemy of decision.
Always make new mistakes.
As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
More startups die of indigestion than starvation.
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!
I don’t want the revenue; I just want the profit.
If you have no idea how something is supposed to be done, I guarantee you’ll be disruptive. Let what you don’t know become your greatest asset.
One can learn to cook, but a restaurateur is born.
The greatest discoveries in nanotech have been 20 years away for 20 years.
Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!!
Entrepreneurship exists in the tiny space between madness and genius; and, its journey requires a few cross border violations across both madness and genius to get to the final destination.
The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.
I’m sure that you’re trying to challenge yourself to invent something new. That’s impossible.
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme. (One leads by calm.)
There is nothing so depressing as boundless optimism.
In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could.
You can’t innovate once.
Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.
It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
The beginning of thought is disagreement – not only with others but also with ourselves.
Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
Science is truth found out.
Feed the strong, starve the weak. Lead with your strength and avoid protecting the weak – weak brands, weak products and weak people. Know your strengths and lead with them.
Deliberately obsolete your product. Do this by raising expectations for the category and ‘reinventing’ your brand in the eyes of the consumer. Nothing puts more pressure on a competitor.
Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.
To be persuasive, we must be believable. To be believable, we must be credible. To be credible, we must be truthful.
Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about full speech because you have nothing to say.
Sleep on your big decisions and then be decisive.
Is anything more un-American than an empty shelf?
There are only two problems in business: 1. Not enough orders. 2. Not enough capacity to ship the orders.
95% of Initial Coin Offerings give the rest a bad name.
Great advertising can make food taste better, can make your car run smoother.
When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight.
The meek shall inherit the earth – but not its mineral rights.
A leader’s job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room.
No amount of advertising can force any large number of people to buy things they do not want. Advertising can only create a new market for products which fill a genuine – though often unexpressed or latent – consumer want.
Leaders define reality and provide hope.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
The impossible missions are the only ones that succeed.
Looking forward, people need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Advertising cannot sell a poor product. It might induce people to try it once. But it cannot build an enduring business on such a product.
Change before you have to.
Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master.
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
I hate any advertisement that pretends to know me. You’re not my friend. You’re a company.
Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance; the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty.
The four most important words in business are ‘What do you think?’
Smart MFs sound like Crazy MFs to Dumb MFs.
No matter what cohort you think you are part of, there is always a bell-shaped curve.
The amount of money start-ups raise in their seed and Series A rounds is inversely correlated with success. Yes, I mean that. Less money raised leads to more success.
The most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘We’ve always done it this way.’
Our mission is to delight people who appreciate quality of life.
Corporations don’t have morals.
Teach thy tongue to say: ‘I do not know.’
If you’re the smartest guy in the room, find another room.
If I knew what I was going to do next, I wouldn’t do it.
We shall make no progress today.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Purpose motivates employees better than profit. They are proud if they can say, ‘Our company is making the world cleaner, the food healthier.’
Advertising is art serving capitalism.
Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.
Complaining is not a strategy.
I think strategic planning is the antithesis of building a corporation.
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.
Nobody cares about your product, service or solution. All they care about is the difference you can make for their organization.
Developers will fill the world with empty buildings – if you pay them to do it.
Success is an accident … well placed.
When assessing ‘first mover advantage’ remember that mousetraps demonstrate the wisdom of being the second mouse.
Building a great company is necessary but insufficient for building a great investment.
Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment.
Face-to-face contact will give you the edge over your competitors every time.
I made it because I believed I’d make it.
History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers. Customers always win.
What is not possible is not to choose.
Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.
Mistakes … the portals of discovery.
Startup companies don’t do better just because you throw more money at them.
The four most dangerous words in investing are: This time it’s different.
Your results may be worthless or misleading … but at least the data was easy to collect and you got published.
Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency.
Many angels have seen more deals than they can remember. Some remember more homeruns than they have seen.
I’m only interested in designing for a certain type of woman. Specifically, one that has money.
Think like an entrepreneur. Create like an innovator. Perform like a teammate.
Proving it will be a homerun ahead of the swing is impossible! You have to try for a hit first and sometimes it turns into a homerun.
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.
Discovery is the process of simultaneously seeing things that everyone sees and thinking things that no one has thought.
Creativity without action is merely imagination.
Expedite the inevitable.
Objects have their own world. Making an object means imbuing it with its own spirit.
Purpose is not the sole pursuit of profits, but the animating force for achieving them.
The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.
Never rule out that there are economic linkages you don’t understand.
The cloud is like the Roach Motel. Your data checks in, but it can’t check out.
But that is what fashion is about, when you look at something, and you aren’t sure if you like it or not.
We may be wise, after all, to treat impossibility as something other than an absolute condition. Alone among all the creatures in the world, we can think about fantastical things and, at least some of the time, bring them into being.
The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth (broadly, Artificial Intelligence) is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.
Neatness rejects involvement.
Purpose is not a mere tagline or marketing campaign, it is a company’s fundamental reason for being.
In my next life, I will try to commit more errors.
You can fool all the people all of the time – if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.
Give someone a book, they’ll read if for a day. Teach someone how to write a book and they’ll experience a lifetime of paralyzing self-doubt.
People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.
For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.
The best innovation comes from technology which reduces the time between intention and action.
There is no reason for any person to have a computer in their home.
People have anxiety about ambiguity.
Even a correct decision is wrong when it was taken too late.
History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Trying to come up with a great idea is not a great idea. Go for quantity over quality.
One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.
Less is more.
We’re not funding Mother Teresa. We’re funding imperial, will-to-power people who want to crush their competition.
Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.
Be a skeptic but never a cynic.
What got you here won’t get you there.
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll take you there.
When you’re through changing, you’re through.
Wonder what your customer really wants? Ask. Don’t tell.
What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others lives on.
The first 98% of the engineering design takes 98% of the time. The remaining 2% of the design work takes the other 98% of the time.
It is very hard to find any evidence which shows that a focus on maximizing shareholder value actually maximizes shareholder value.
Make space for the new mistakes.
We were given some great advice early on: Strategy is what you don’t do. Whenever we do anything, we ask ourselves, ‘Is this true to Warby Parker?’
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.
A business exists to create a customer.
An expert is [somebody] who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.
It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.
After 35 years, there is not a shred of evidence that stock-based compensation by company officers is correlated with company performance.
You don’t give people what they want. You give them what they don’t yet know they want.
A leader is a dealer in hope.
More is more.
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
Innovation often originates outside existing organizations, in part because successful organizations acquire a commitment to the status quo and a resistance to ideas that might change it.
Investing is about meeting people’s needs.
The greater the area of our knowledge, the greater the perimeter of our ignorance.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.
If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.
If everything is important, then nothing is.
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.
The only thing worse than a big flop is a small success.
Whatever people … do not understand, they are always prepared to dislike.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
A pessimist sees the glass as half empty. An optimist sees the glass as half full. The engineer sees the glass as twice the size it needs to be.
If all you ever did is all you’ve ever done, then all you ever get is all you’re gonna get.
The less money you need, the harder it is to run out.
A man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Fear is an excellent motivator. I find that it really brings out the true ingenuity of a creature.
If you try to do some big thing, you don’t just need it to be big: you need it to be good. And it’s really hard to do big and good simultaneously.
The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions.
Organizations resist innovation because people are more comfortable with what they know than what they don’t.
Price is what you pay, value is what you get.
Failing is good as long as it doesn’t become a habit.
Anyone who has ever taken a shower has had a great idea.
A joint venture is two parties in the same bed with different dreams.
A setback is a setup for a comeback.
This way to the egress.
If you’ve gotten to the point where you are thinking it might be time to think about replacing the founder, its past time to replace the founder.
If you don’t have a solution to match the scale of the problem, you have a hobby.
Done is better than perfect.
A recent study found that intense tedium is a major contributing factor in the desire for an early death. I just made that up. But I’ll be we could pay for research that would find that.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.
We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.
Even if the situation or challenge is very complex, usually the simplest solution is the one to go with.
The business of America, it turns out, is not business. It’s monetizing what is in our heads.
The future is like a Japanese game show. You have no idea what’s going on.
Facts tell. Stories sell.
If it doesn’t scare you, you’re probably not dreaming big enough.
Any data fed to AI is chosen subjectively. Computers do not see the world precisely as it is; they see it within the limits of the data given to them to represent the world. That’s a flaw AI and people have in common.
There are decades when nothing happens and then there are weeks where decades happen.
If I can’t make money in the $5 trillion U.S. market, it may be a little bit of wishful thinking to think that all I have to do is get a few thousand miles offshore and I’ll start showing my stuff.
The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.
The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.
They tried to be too clever, and that was their undoing.
Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems.
Content is king but context is the kingdom.
Failing to plan, is planning to fail.
A financier is a pawnbroker with imagination.
Try to become not a [person] of success, but try rather to become a [person] of value.
Typos in your presentation tell your investors how carefully you plan to manage their money.
If you build a better mousetrap, you will catch better mice.
No nationwas ever ruined by trade.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go long, go together.
I never know how much of what I say is true.
Our company is guided by three deeply held beliefs: That brands with purpose grow, companies with purpose last and people with purpose thrive.
Elon cares a lot about humanity, but he doesn’t really care about individual people all that much.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Nothing new ever happened before.
A principle isn’t worth anything if it doesn’t cost you.
We’re all born different, that’s what we got in common.
Better salesperson always beats better product.
Your job is to make people care about your obsessions.
The public wants what it can’t get.
Done equals good.
640 [kilobytes] ought to be enough for anyone.
A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
Focus wins. Doing too many things fails.
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
Anytime anybody says, ‘It’s good enough,’ it’s shitty.
If you watch entrepreneurs long enough, you observe that innovation is typically a ground game, not a Hail Mary pass.
I look for businesses in which I think I can predict what they’re going to look like in ten to fifteen years’ time.
I never had an idea in my life. I’ve got no imagination. I never dream. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment – I took them out.
