There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry's having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising.

Opportunity presents itself sometimes in unusual situations. What you think is the worst thing turns out to be a good thing. Different circumstances challenge people to do things they didn't know they could do, and in those times when the outlook appears the worst, we find new reasons for optimism.

Unless you've a lot of passion about this, you're not gonna survive. You're gonna give it up. So you've got to have an idea or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about, otherwise you're not gonna have the perseverance to stick it through. I think it's half the battle right there.

Your beliefs about yourself and your world create your expectations. Your expectations determine your attitude. Your attitude determines your behavior and the way you relate to other people. And the way you behave toward and relate to other people determines how they relate to and behave toward you.

The best time to practice mental rehearsal is at night in bed, just before you fall asleep. The last thing you do before you doze off is to imagine yourself performing at your best the following day. You will be amazed at how often the upcoming event or experience happens exactly as you imagined it.

There are half a billion people that listen to music online and the vast majority are doing so illegally. But if we bring those people over to the legal side and Spotify, what is going to happen is we are going to double the music industry and that will lead to more artists creating great new music.

Hiring and retaining talent in the tech industry is expensive and vital. Those people have real power over their bosses, especially because it is often fairly easy for them to find work elsewhere, and employee walkouts are terrible PR for these leaders who are often obsessed with their public image.

I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they're competing on. If we're competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it's likely that both of us will become better, but it's also quite possible we'll lose sight of what's truly valuable.

The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

You have to look at leadership through the eyes of the followers and you have to live the message. What I have learned is that people become motivated when you guide them to the source of their own power and when you make heroes out of employees who personify what you want to see in the organization.

We would all be better off if our doctors took us aside, sat down next to us, and gave us this compassionate, yet universally true, warning, I'm very sorry to have to remind you of this, but you've got only so much time to live; I suggest you begin, now, to make the most of every minute of every day.

My best friend Jerry started a boat-washing business, and it was one of the most critical experiences of my life. I got to meet a lot of people who were entrepreneurs. My parents were schoolteachers, and I was now meeting people who owned companies. I realized that if this guy can do it, why can't I?

Traveling as much as I do, I get lonely sometimes. I have friends now in cities all over the world, so I get to be social, but it's hard to have the deep meaningful relationships, especially an intimate one. With my guy friends, I can show up once a month and go to dinner with them and they're happy.

Our bodies need regular washing because we get dirty everyday. But so do our hearts! Because each day, people hurt us, offend us, forget us, snub us, step on us, reject us. But if we choose to forgive everyone everyday, we cleanse our hearts! We wake up the next morning refreshed and pure and lovely!

Fortunately, right now 'entrepreneurship' is one of the business world's biggest buzz words and so many young people in our country are looking up to this new generation of CEO's as their modern day rock stars. Whenever you have that effect, it makes the job of promoting entrepreneurship much easier.

The word entrepreneur is associated with success and adventure. From my life, the only thing I can tell you that's consistently associated with entrepreneurship is failure, and the only thing consistently associated with invention is frustration. There is a long road between the idea and the reality.

I would argue that education, actual learning - it is hard work. It's very personal. Your parents don't teach you anything. Your teachers don't teach you anything. The government doesn't teach you anything. You read it. You don't understand it; you read it again. You break a pencil and read it again.

If your goal is to make money, becoming an entrepreneur is a sucker's bet. Sure, some entrepreneurs make a lot of money, but if you calculate the amount of stress-inducing work and time it takes and multiply that by the low likelihood of success and eventual payoff, it is not a great way to get rich.

In the industrial world we have the problem of having more productive capacity than we know what to do with. That's at the root of the unemployment crisis: we've got so productive at making things, we don't require people to be involved in making the basics of life any more. Or nearly as many people.

Mentors provide professional networks, outlets for frustration, college and career counseling, general life advice, and most importantly, an extra voice telling a student they are smart enough and capable enough to cross the stage at graduation and land their first paycheck from a career pathway job.

The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.” So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.”

Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

In India, I personally believe yes, there is a clear fear of unknown; there's a lot of risk aversions in science and technology. They want predictability in everything they do, and it starts from people. It starts from investors. It starts from the regulators. You see that mindset across the society.

The big advantage that we have as a venture capital firm over a hedge fund or a mutual fund is we have a 13-year lockup on our money. And so enterprise can go in and out of fashion four different times, and we can go and invest in one of these companies, and it's okay, because we can stay the course.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

I don't want our success to be measured only by financial yardsticks, or by our distribution or number of shops. What I want to be celebrated for - and it's going to be tough in a business environment - is how good we are to our employees and how we benefit our community. It's a different bottom line.

There's a tendency to attribute magical skills and knowledge to people who've been elevated in some way - appearing on TV, or having an impressive title, or coming from a wealthy family. There's often an assumption that these people possess some rare, mysterious qualities mere mortals lack. What crap.

I found every single successful person I've ever spoken to had a turning point. The turning point was when they made a clear, specific unequivocal decision that they were going to achieve success. Some people make that decision at 15 and some people make it at 50, and most people never make it at all.

Number one, I am a true movie maker. And, you know, I am very much - I don't want to say infatuated, but I'm impressed with the art of making a movie and invoking emotion. You know, when I started making movies, I thought it was easy, and then when I got into it, I was like, 'This is not easy at all.'

Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.

Even companies that do big business online struggle to be noticed by Google users. The Web, after all, is home to some 120 million Internet domains and tens of billions of indexed pages. But every company, big or small, can draw more Google traffic by using search-engine optimization - SEO, for short.

Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade leverage Amazon's existing 'Search Inside the Book' technology to give customers unusual flexibility in how they buy and read books, .. In collaboration with our publishing partners, we're working hard to make the world's books instantly accessible anytime and anywhere.

'Instagram' doesn't exist in a vacuum. We're not a bunch of siloed individuals. It's a bunch of people coming together on topics, fashion, you know, youthful teens, creatives, photographers, foodies, everyone coming together and building a community around the things they love, communicating visually.

In high school, I actually thought I was going to have to learn Japanese to work in technology. My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the '80s, and I got here too late. But then, I'm maybe the most optimistic person I know. I mean, I'm incredibly optimistic.

Dear London, British fashion is a serious business. The British fashion industry is worth £21bn to the U.K. economy and employs 819,000 people across the country. With your help, we would like to see these numbers rise for the good of our industry, our talented designers, and our reputation worldwide.

The thing that changes your professional life, your capabilities, your learning, your understanding, your opportunity flow, your ability to make things happen, is the center relationships you have with powerful and effective people around you in the industry, in the activity that you want to be doing.

I think I have a good track record, both in commercial investing and in philanthropic investing. I don't have any interest in creating a named foundation; I have an interest in really good impact for capital. I think I'm pretty good at doing it, so I'm going to apply myself to doing it in my lifetime.

Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

Be honest with yourself and with people always do everything on time. Never give up, go to your goals, even if all the bad. In this life, all really, you only need to do. The more I talk to people, the more I am convinced that in general they have one goal - to become the richest dead in the cemetery.

If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond 'the office.' If they do say the office, they'll include a qualifier such as 'super-early in the morning before anyone gets in,' or 'I stay late at night after everyone's left,' or 'I sneak in on the weekend.'

No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it's government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.

I think a lot about how ideas spread, how information spreads, why is it that something youre really proud of and you spend a lot of time creating sometimes doesnt go anywhere, and something that you kind of do on the side, on a lark, ends up getting shared and passed around and having this big impact.

I like to read first thing in the morning. I'm addicted to the Kindle. I read a lot of business books, because I feel like I should figure out how to be a real businessman before someone figures out that I'm not one. I really enjoy reading classics as well, which I try to work in once every two months.

I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn't have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person's existence.

By understanding and harnessing the forces that drive human behavior, you can create a self-sustaining philanthropic effort that reaches millions of people. It begins with an entrepreneurial attitude: take an idea and execute on that idea. If it doesn't work, learn why and build on what you've learned.

I always had faith in the internet. I believed in it and thought it was obviously going to change the way the world worked. I really did not understand why others were selling their stock. As stock prices plunged, I just bought them, one after another, since I had the money. I guess I was rather lucky.

It's about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it. Now 30 years on The Body Shop is a multi local business with over 2.045 stores serving over 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. And I haven't a clue how we got here!

The way the Facebook network is set up, it's not as suitable for content discovery. Twitter is better, but there are too many over-sharers. Also, on Twitter and Facebook, everything comes from people you know. On StumbleUpon, it comes from people that you don't necessarily know but share your interests.

If we want to impact hundreds - or millions - of people, we have to do things differently. If we look at the problem as an infrastructural problem, we cannot make an impact because it requires a lot of effort. But when we convert this problem into a knowledge problem, suddenly the problem is manageable.

Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'

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