Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn't been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.
If Uber is lower-priced, then more people will want it. And if more people want it and can afford it, then you have more cars on the road. And if you have more cars on the road, then your pickup times are lower, your reliability is better. The lower-cost product ends up being more luxurious than the high-end one.
There are no rules or formulas for success. You just have to live it and do it. knowing this gives us enormous freedom to experiment toward what we want. Believe me, it's a crazy, complicated journey. It's trial and error. It's opportunism. It's quite literally, "Let's try lots of this stuff and see how it works."
You cannot control all of what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward all of what happens to you...You can choose to be happy and grateful rather than disappointed and bitter, by focusing on how it could have turned out worse but didn't, rather than how it could have turned out better but didn't.
I always say there are two things to be successful. The first is decide exactly what you want - set your goals - and then determine how you will achieve them (what skills you will have to learn, what actions will you have to take). And these are totally under your control. These are not dependent upon anyone else.
Software touches all of these different things you use, and tech companies are revolutionizing all different areas of the world...from how we shop to how farming works, all these things that aren't technical are being turned upside down by software. So being able to play in that universe really makes a difference.
Everything about 'Adventure Time' is the purest form of kid's play. A kid does not live in the Land of Ooo. That is one of the wonderful things about the show; it doesn't pretend to be real. That was the great thing about 'Pee Wee's Playhouse'; it existed in a world completely outside any reality a kid recognized.
I don't think BuddyPress will be something you use instead of your existing social networks... but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use.
I always loved both 'Breakout' and 'Asteroids' - I thought they were really good games. There was another game called 'Tempest' that I thought was really cool, and it represented a really hard technology. It's probably one of the only colour-vector screens that was used in the computer graphics field at that time.
Some people mistake grit for sheer persistence - charging up the same hill again and again. But that's not quite what I mean by the word 'grit.' You want to minimize friction and find the most effective, most efficient way forward. You might actually have more grit if you treat your energy as a precious commodity.
Most people do not ever pick up the phone. They never ask, and that is what separates the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You have to act, and you have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to crash and burn, because if you are afraid of failing, you will not get very far.
The essence of a successful business is really quite simple. It is your ability to offer a product or service that people will pay for at a price sufficiently above your costs, ideally three or four or five times your cost, thereby giving you a profit that enables you to buy and to offer more products and services.
I think our society is no longer properly valuing the intangible potential of innovation, even if we have to be a little uncomfortable with the risks associated with it, and a little bit willing to fail, pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try again. We don’t seem to want to do that as much as we used too.
If you do not know where your competitor is, or overconfident and snobbish about your competitor, or are unable to comprehend how yourcompetitor became a real threat, you will surely fall behind him. Don't be the "they" in this idiom: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
When we were walking through the narrow alleys [of the Mathare Valley slums], it was literally impossible not to step in the raw sewage and the garbage alongside the little homes. But at the same time it was also impossible not to see the human vitality, the aspiration and the ambition of the people who live there.
What's awesome about social media is you curate your own experience. That leads to the rise of niche celebrities, who are actually just as popular as mass celebrities, but because there's no incentive for traditional media to invest in them as celebrities, they find a home where people can follow them on Instagram.
Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong in their seeds. Simply, society never gave them the base to grow on. All it needs to get the poor people out of poverty for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly.
Indian higher education is completely regulated. It's very difficult to start a private university. It's very difficult for a foreign university to come to India. As a result of that, our higher education is simply not keeping pace with India's demands. That is leading to a lot of problems which we need to address.
I do think Tim Cook is doing a very good job, I think he has almost impossibly big shoes to fill with Steve Jobs' departure. And so, that's the context always someone has to put things in. But, I do think that for the most part that Apple is at a point where it's much more focused on scale than on doing new things.
My background is that I've spent a lot of time marketing entertainment. One of the old saws in package goods is you can take something that is popular and you can make it more popular. But if you take something less popular, you can't automatically market it into the same success as something that's already popular.
I went to the brink many times. A couple of times I thought "I'm gone, This is it." But then you would just keep working. I think if you're close to the brink and just make sure that you work twice as hard and put twice as much effort into everything and the people around you and everything, you should come through.
Now an audience of more than 1 billion people is only a click away from every voice online, and remarkable stories and content can gain flash audiences as people share via social networks, blogs and e-mail. This radically equalizes the power relationship between, say, a blogger and a multibillion dollar corporation.
There came a time when these two incompatible notions of who I was, well, something had to give. Either that 'something' is where you acquiesce to the world around you and you conform, or you sort of defiantly break whatever remaining bonds connect you to that world and create for yourself a different set of values.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself: If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town, and we've been together ever since.
The trouble with the new world we have watched being created over the past decade is that it sees no further than money. People have always been obsessed with money, of course - greed is as old as history. But when the institutions that govern all our lives forget there was ever anything else, then it gets dangerous.
When I was 17, I went to India for six weeks and had what, at the time, was a very challenging trip. You walk down the street and you see lepers and beggars, and there were several of us, a group of Americans. I remember we were just trying to park one night somewhere and people were just sleeping in the parking lot.
I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.
If the helplessness and isolation of labour, who have nothing to sell but their labour, can be totally removed by connecting labour with capital through a universal credit system, we'll then have other kinds of actors on the economic scene different from what the existing capitalist world would allow us to bring out.
As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what's happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don't seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.
The prescience of the founding fathers continues to astonish me. They were freedom fighters. They made America. They gave us this magical country. They also were slaveowners - which is confusing to their legacy. How could such brilliant men have only secured freedom for themselves, but not their wives or their slaves?
Most of the time, when you need something at a company, you make it. If you want to sell a product, you create it. If you need a head of marketing, you hire one. If you want to create a great company culture, what do you do? The lack of a clear answer on this is why I believe most companies don't have a great culture.
You need to put the fear of risk aside. Startups need leaders who are willing to persevere through the hard times. Failure is an option, and a real risk. Failure and risk are something entrepreneurs should understand well, and learn to manage. Don’t have a fear of talking about your failures. Don’t hide your mistakes.
Ask any successful person to look back over the events of his or her life, and chances are there'll be a turning point of one kind or another. It doesn't matter if that success has come on a ball field or in a boardroom, in a research laboratory or on a campaign trail - it can usually be traced to some pivotal moment.
Almost every morning I write in my journal. I've been keeping it for a long time - I've filled more than 50 books. I write about what's going on in my personal and spiritual life or what's going on at work. It helps me keep things in perspective, especially when things get crazy or I get stressed or we have obstacles.
Giving feels good, but it's also good for the bottom line. Charity is a viable growth strategy for a lot of companies. Our customers get excited to be a part of what we're doing. If you ask anyone wearing Toms how they first heard about us, most won't mention an advertisement; they'll say a friend told them our story.
Ninety to ninety-five percent of people will withdraw to the comfort zone when what they try doesn't work. Only that small percentage, 5 or 10 percent, will continually improve themselves; they will continually push themselves out into the zone of discomfort, and these are always the highest performers in every field.
Podcasting is not really that different from streaming music, which we've done for quite a long time. Having a traditional podcast that people subscribe to - the hype is ahead of the quality. Podcasting is essentially a download, and you run into copyright issues. What you're left with currently is podcast talk radio.
I really want to move away from the old model in which you have to rely on people giving $10 after a humanitarian crisis to a newer model where people give money but also their time and their skills, whatever they have, to the causes that are personally meaningful to them well before the crisis moment presents itself.
Anywhere from 40% to 60% of people, when they're given a requisition by a doctor to go get tested, don't, because they're scared of needles or the locations are inconvenient or the cost is too high. And if you're not even getting tested, how is it possible that we're going to move toward an era of preventive medicine?
It was 1999, and we were building a way for college kids to create online profiles for the purpose of sharing... with employers. Oops. I vividly remember the moment I realized my company was going to fail. My co-founder and I were at our wits' end. By 2001, the dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money.
I like to say StumbleUpon provides a personal tour of the Internet. The responses are more targeted to your interests than they would be with a regular search engine. If you choose a topic on our site that you're interested in, such as art, Web sites related to art appear, as if you're leafing through an art magazine.
The human spirit is extraordinary. If we give the 3 billion people who live in poverty the opportunity to change their lives, they will. For too long, we've looked at needing to "save" these people - with an emphasis on "these people" - rather than removing the constraints keeping them from solving their own problems.
Vertical search engines that match your business, service or products with a target market offer you a higher conversion rate than traditional search engines. Because they have already qualified their interest by coming to a search engine with a specific focus, searchers will be more receptive to targeted advertising.
Sudan has been an experiment that resonated across Africa: if we, the largest country on the continent, reaching from the Sahara to the Congo, bridging religions, cultures and a multitude of ethnicities, were able to construct a prosperous and peaceful state from our diverse citizenry, so too could the rest of Africa.
People can change their own lives, provided they have the right kind of institutional support. They're not asking for charity, charity is no solution to poverty. Poverty is the creation of opportunities like everybody else has, not the poor people, so bring them to the poor people, so that they can change their lives.
Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn't always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company's core business.
These days when you say 'videogame', people think of immersive games that take over your life and require three thumbs to control. My goal is to create games that almost retreat into the background. I'm interested in bringing them back to their role as a social facilitator, the way party games help people to interact.
I have really seen the best in people and I've absolutely seen the worst in people. And I'm happy to say that most of the time I have been seeing the best of people in the first congressional district and connecting with voters and seeing what's important to them hearing their stories and what they want to see happen.
My biggest mistake was when I started up easyEverything, a chain of Internet cafes. The idea that people would go to a shop to use a computer was revolutionary in 1999. It worked for a while, but cheap technology almost killed it. One silver lining of the problems I faced was that it gave me experience of turnarounds.