Rules & Quotes To Live By
When I come across quotes that resonate with me, I add them to this list. I refer to these quotes frequently for all different situations. For example, recently I’ve been dealing with grief and loss. Some of the quotes here help me deal with these feelings. If you have other great quotes to. help lead a great life (personal and/or business), please email me at doug [at] drdougkaufman [dot] com.
“There’s no taking in true love. The true joy in true love is in giving it….Love never goes to waste. The more you give it away, the more love you will feel and get back”
– Mo Gawdat
“Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves.”
– Stephen Covey
“If you’re experiencing loss, it means you’ve experienced love. If you’ve experienced pain, it means you’ve experienced joy. It actually means you’ve had the good fortune of receiving a glimpse of greatness.”
– Jay Shetty
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
– Mark Twain
“Never deprive someone of hope; it may be all they have”
— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
“When you like a flower, you just pluck it. But when you love a flower, you water it daily..! The One, who understands this, understands Life…”
— This is often attributed to the Buddha, but some say it’s actually from Socrates who was asked by Alexander the Great: “Sir what’s the difference between “like” and “love”?
“I define happiness by how I feel about myself when I’m by myself. When I’m alone and no one is around me, and nobody is clapping, and nobody is praising, how do I feel about myself in that moment”
– Jay Shetty
Man plans and god laughs (Der Mensch Tracht, Un Gott Lacht)
— Yiddish expression
“We live remarkable lives because life itself is remarkable, a fact that is impossible not to notice if only suffering leaves us alone for long enough.”
— Holly Bourne
”Your reputation is more important than your paycheck, and your integrity is worth more than your career.”
— Ryan Freitas, co-founder About.me
”It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
– Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO Berkshire Hathaway
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
“You’ll stop worrying so much about what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do”
– David Foster Wallace
“Sometimes when you’re in a dark place, you think you’ve been buried. Actually, you’ve been planted.”
– need to find the author
“How many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you”
— Warren Buffett
“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”
- Carl Jung
“When our memories outweigh our dreams, it is then that we become old.”
– Alan Watts
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
- Theodore Parker
“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”
- Vince Lombardi
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou
“Time decides who you meet in life. Your heart decides who you want in your life. Your behavior decides who stays in your life.”
– Ziad K. Abdelnour
“The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says ‘Go!’ – a leader says, ‘Let’s go!’.
– E.M Kelly, U.S Army
“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes–then learn how to do it later!”
— Richard Branson
“An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.”
— Reid Hoffman
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
“Micromanage the process, not the people.”
— Joe Apfelbaum, Ajax Union
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life... Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
– Steve Jobs
“Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.”
– Jack Dorsey
“Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.”
— Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO Dropbox
“Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.”
— Dale Carnegie
”Don’t be cocky. Don’t be flashy. There’s always someone better than you.”
— Tony Hsieh, CEO Zappos
“Employee engagement is an investment we make for the privilege of staying in business.”
— Ian Hutchinson
“The responsibility of a company is to serve the customer. The responsibility of leadership is to serve the people so that their people may better serve the customer. If leaders fail to serve their people first, both customer and company will suffer.”
— Simon Sinek
“An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.”
— Roy Ash, co-founder Litton Industries
“Hire for passion, train for skill, coach for performance”
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
― Jacob A. Riis
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
— Elon Musk
“If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.”
— Larry Page
“It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
— Bill Gates
"My research debunks the myth that many people seem to have . . . that you become a leader by fighting your way to the top. Rather, you become a leader by helping others to the top. Helping your employees is as important as, and many times more so than, trying to get the most work out of them."
— William Cohen (Stuff of Heroes)
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”
— Mark Zuckerberg
“Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It’s the mastery of fear. It’s about getting up one more time than we fall down.”
— Arianna Huffington
“Don’t let what you don’t know scare you, because it can become your greatest asset. And if you do things without knowing how they have always been done, you’re guaranteed to do them differently.”
— Sara Blakely, Spanx
“If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not making decisions.”
— Catherine Cook, MyYearbook
“I think not focusing on money makes you sane, because in the long run it can probably drive you crazy.”
— Kevin Systrom
“Micromanage the process, not the people.”
— Joe Apfelbaum, Ajax Union
“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 other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
— Steve Jobs
“My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had — everyday I’m learning something new.”
— Richard Branson, founder Virgin Group
“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”
— Scott Belsky, co-founder Behance
“The only thing worse than starting something and failing… is not starting something.”
— Seth Godin
“In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.”
— Steve Case
“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do."
— Steve Jobs
"My philosophy has always been, if you can put staff first, your customer second and shareholders third, effectively, in the end, the shareholders do well, the customers do better, and you are happy."
— Richard Branson
“Don’t be afraid to assert yourself, have confidence in your abilities and don’t let the bastards get you down.”
— Michael Bloomberg
“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
— Steve Jobs
“Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.”
— Guy Kawasaki
“So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.”
— Caterina Fake
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
— Thomas Edison
“When times are bad is when the real entrepreneurs emerge.”
— Robert Kiyosaki
“Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.”
— Napoleon Hill
“Make your team feel respected, empowered and genuinely excited about the company’s mission.”
— Tim Westergen, Pandora Founder
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
— Bill Gates
“Don’t play games that you don’t understand, even if you see lots of other people making money from them.”
— Tony Hsieh
“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team”
— Reid Hoffman
“An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.”
— Roy Ash
”Your reputation is more important than your paycheck, and your integrity is worth more than your career.”
— Ryan Freitas, co-founder About.me
“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
— Thomas Edison
Peter’s Rules
1. If anything can go wrong, Fix It!!… to hell with Murphy!
2. When given a choice… take both!!
3. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes.
4. Start at the top, then work your way up.
5. Do it by the book… but be the author!
6. When forced to compromise, ask for more.
7. If you can’t win, change the rules.
8. If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them.
9. Perfection is not optional.
10. When faced without a challenge, make one.
11. “No” simply means begin again at one level higher.
12. Don’t walk when you can run.
13. When in doubt: THINK!
14. Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing.
15. The squeaky wheel gets replaced.
16. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live.
17. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!
18. The ratio of something to nothing is infinite.
19. You get what you incentivize.
20. If you think it is impossible, then it is… for you.
21. An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how it can’t be done.
22. The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.
23. If it were easy it would have been done already.
24. Without a target you’ll miss it every time.
25. Fail early, fail often, fail forward!
26. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
27. The world’s most precious resource is the persistent and passionate human mind.
28. Bureaucracy is an obstacle to conquer with persistence, confidence and a bulldozer when necessary.