Best business quotes

When you point a finger at someone, always remember that three fingers are pointing back at you.

To succeed in business, you have to have a genuine,honest-to-goodness interest in profitability. And most people don’t.

One of the ugliest moments in business is when the customer changes, the profit model changes, so the business design has to change. It's horrible

If you want to know a business, you’ve got to look at it first-hand like a biologist studying a specimen. You’ve got to visit their stores or their factories or their offices, try their products, test their services, cruise their websites. Most important, you’ve got to talk with their customers or better yet, live with them.

There is no point at all in generating mediocre content. Don’t just write about your business or your product. Your content has to be educational and solve problems.

Great content is something you provide to your audience that captures their attention and encourages them to engage and share

Writing content is a two-way conversation, not a speech. Be personal and make people feel like you are there with them.

Content marketing is releasing something interesting that grabs attention for a business and builds trust.

Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.

But now I realize that the only way to find your voice is to use it. It’s hardwired, built into you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.

Don’t try to be hip or cool. Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.

Forget about being an expert or a professional, and wear your amateurism (your heart, your love) on your sleeve. Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

Give vulnerability a shot. Give discomfort its due. Because I think he or she who is willing to be the most uncomfortable is not only the bravest, but rises the fastest

The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion

The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles.

Happiness is wanting what you have.

Any time in life you’re tempted to think, ‘Should I do this OR that?’ instead, ask yourself, ‘Is there a way I can do this AND that?

Success emerges from the quality of the decisions we make and the quantity of luck we receive. We can't control luck. But we can control the way we make choices.

When people have the opportunity to collect information from the world, they are more likely to select information that supports their preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions

Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong. People go out and they’re collecting the data, and they don’t realize they’re cooking the books

Research has found that interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance

In financial terms, the difference between earning $10 or $20 for a job well done has a bigger effect on how happy you are than the difference between earning $110 or $120.

We spend more money on car repairs because we’ve already spent so much on the car.

The more choices people face in life, the more likely they are to simply do nothing.

Because people’s natural bias is to confirm what they already “know” or think they know, they reflexively try to prove a rule by looking for facts that would support it rather than looking for information that might contradict.

People overconfidently confuse familiarity with knowledge. For every example of a person who made money on an investment because she used a company’s product or understood its strategy, we can give you five instances where such knowledge was insufficient to justify the investment. A classic example is Apple.

Good health, longevity, happiness, a loving family, self-reliance, fine friends … if you [have] five, you’re a rich man….

Wealth is more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and, most of all, self-discipline.

Many people who live in expensive homes and drive luxury cars do not actually have much wealth.

It’s easier to accumulate wealth if you don’t live in a high-status neighborhood

If you’re not yet wealthy but want to be someday, never purchase a home that requires a mortgage that is more than twice your household’s total annual realized income

His view of millionaires is shared by most people who are not wealthy. They think millionaires own expensive clothes, watches, and other status artifacts. We have found this is not the case

How can well-educated, high-income people be so naive about money? Because being a well-educated, high-income earner does not automatically translate into financial independence. It takes planning and sacrificing

To build wealth, minimize your realized (taxable) income and maximize your unrealized income (wealth/capital appreciation without a cash flow).

What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.

When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.

Workaholics aren't heroes. They don't save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is home because she figured out a faster way

If circumstances change, your decisions can change. Decisions are temporary.

Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.

Find a judo solution, one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort. When good enough gets the job done, go for it.

Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy

You're better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.

The starting point of all achievement is DESIRE. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desire brings weak results, just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.

You are the master of your destiny. You can influence, direct and control your own environment. You can make your life what you want it to be.

When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal.

Set your mind on a definite goal and observe how quickly the world stands aside to let you pass.

Happiness is found in doing, not merely possessing.

The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next.

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!

Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.

Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace: “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.

what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life.

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.”

Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.

If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (“what can the world offer me?”) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (“what can I offer the world?”).

The good news about deliberate practice is that it will push you past this plateau and into a realm where you have little competition.

If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an acceptable level.

Your income eventually can’t depend on your time any more.

Start producing, stop consuming.

It’s no different with information – we’re bombarded with tweets, images, articles and podcasts.But when you spend all your time consuming, when are you going to start creating

So stop throwing money at another pair of shoes or skincare product, and instead, switch into producer mode.Look at the packaging.How does it feel? What does it do to make you want to buy it? Which words are they using in the ad?

In general, jobs suck because you have limited leverage (being 50% more productive will not get you a 50% raise) and limited control (what if you’re fired? What if your company is doing poorly and forces you to take a pay cut? etc.) General problems with jobs: you’re selling your time (and your life) for money

You can double your work hours and be miserable, but you cannot 10x your work hours. On the other hand, if you have your own business, growing revenues 10x is certainly possible. Basically, time has no leverage.

A few examples of Fastlane projects: write a book (lots of work, but then it makes money forever without you having to put in more work), make an invention (lots of work, but then you get royalties for a long time).

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.

Great vision without great people is irrelevant

By definition, it is not possible to everyone to be above the average

The good-to-great leaders never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes. They never aspired to be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results

Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it "eventually," just do it and correct course along the way.

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do

But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn't making you stronger, they're making you weaker

People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty

A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have

The question you should be asking isn't, "What do I want?" or "What are my goals?" but "What would excite me?

If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think

The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom

The next time you think that there's something that you "can't live without", wait for a week and then see if you're still alive or not

Successful companies are started, and made successful, by at least two, and usually more, soulmates.

The purpose of a pitch is to stimulate interest, not to close a deal.

The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.

Anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee.

To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?

The first problem of communication is getting people's attention.

The Curse of Knowledge: when we are given knowledge, it is impossible to imagine what it's like to LACK that knowledge.

People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick.

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

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).

Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

When you come across real talent, it is sometimes worth allowing them to create the structure in which they choose to labor. In nine cases out of ten, by inviting them to take responsibility and control for a new venture, you will motivate them to do great things.

Most of the worst errors I made in my life came from forgetting to act small.

Once you believe that you are infallible, that success will automatically lead to more success, and that you have "got it made," reality will be sure to give you a rude wake-up call. Believing your own bullshit is always a perilous activity, but never more fatal than for the owner of a start-up venture.

Sometimes, to ensure that a talented individual will work for you, or will stay working with you, you need to be flexible. Money is not always the great motivator here. Talented people want a good salary, of course, but surprisingly often they are more attracted to new opportunities and challenges.

Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.

Having a great idea is simply not enough. The eventual goal is vastly more important than any idea. It is how ideas are implemented that counts in the long run