“Starting a company is like throwing yourself off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.” Reid Hoffman · Interviews
“An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.” Reid Hoffman · Interviews
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.” Elon Musk · Interviews
“If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on.” Sheryl Sandberg · Lean In, 2013 (quoting Eric Schmidt)
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that's changing quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” Mark Zuckerberg · Y Combinator interview, 2011
“That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better.” Jeff Bezos
“I think we’ve got the risks pretty well characterized. I think we are at least avoiding the mistakes that have been made in the past.” Elon Musk
“When thinking about starting a business, I think it’s actually better to start in a trough and come to market in a peak, than the other way around. Frankly, if anything does, and it’s almost cliché, space has a long-term future.” Elon Musk
“We got to the moon, but have never done anything better since. I'm disappointed that we have not made more progress since Apollo. I don't even see a plan that says we're going to do better than Apollo to exceed that goal.” Elon Musk
“When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, "Nah, what's wrong with a horse?" That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.” Elon Musk
“Our performance, relatively, is likely to be better in a bear market than in a bull market ... in a year when the general market had a substantial advance, I would be well satisfied to match the advance of the averages.” Warren Buffett
“If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression.” Peter Drucker
“[C]ollaboration between... divergent systems is possible... only as long as both are stable. ...International security is ...based upon the internal political and social security of each of the Great Powers.” Peter Drucker
“The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.” Peter Drucker
“I think what I want Disneyland to be most of all is a happy place — a place where adults and children can experience together some of the wonders of life, of adventure, and feel better because of it.” Walt Disney
“If we could get to a place of true equality, where what we do in life is determined not by gender but by our passions and interests, our companies would be more productive and our home lives not just better balanced but happier.” Sheryl Sandberg
“At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.” Paul Graham
“Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.” Paul Graham
“The Star Trek computer doesn't seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that.” Larry Page
“I would say, we can't allow ourselves to be frightened into not living our lives, and I think that we have to keep going and we have to keep going with the faith that thing will get better … And things will get better when we make them better.” Oprah Winfrey
“The power to distinguish between person and performance and to communicate intrinsic worth flows naturally out of our own sense of intrinsic worth.” Stephen Covey
“Integrity in the Moment of Choice Quality of life depends on what happens in the space between stimulus and response.” Stephen Covey
“What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.” Malcolm Gladwell
“Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“From the standpoint of an institution, the existence of a risk manager has less to do with actual risk reduction than it has to do with the impression of risk reduction.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“I have organized my career and business in such a way as to... benefit... I am profiting from the rare event, with asymmetric bets.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“[W]e read too much into shallow recent history... but not from history in general [which] teaches us that things that never happened before do happen. ...outside of the narrowly defined time series; the broader the look, the better the lesson.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“There's literally no difference between a physician recognizing a disease from a "facial expression", and a little child pointing to something and saying "doggie".” Daniel Kahneman
“There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases.” Daniel Kahneman
“There is no evidence that risk takers in the economic domain have an unusual appetite for gambles on high stakes; they are merely less aware of risks than more timid people are.” Daniel Kahneman
“Experienced well-being is on average unaffected by marriage, not because marriage makes no difference to happiness, but because it changes some aspects of life for the better and others for the worse.” Daniel Kahneman
“Although humans are not irrational, they often need help to make more accurate judgements and better decisions. [...] [They] also need protection from others who deliberately exploit their weaknesses [...].” Daniel Kahneman
“Quasi-integration is to use debt or equity investments and other means to create alliances between vertically related firms without full ownership.” Michael Porter
“Do not wait; the time will never be "just right." Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along. p. 127” Napoleon Hill
“The "Master Mind" may be defined as: "Coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose.” Napoleon Hill
“That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better.” Jeff Bezos