Success Quotes - Page 174

Do the very best you can.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

I wouldn't think a blues album would be that commercially successful, but I don't really care. I'd do it for the love of blues, not for the money. I've got plenty of money.

Ignore the naysayers. Really the only option is, head down and focus on the job.

Work outside of school hours was a necessity at an early age, and with such time as I had I turned toward interests of my own devising, making things, experimenting, and planning for the future. I had read of Thomas Alva Edison and other successful inventors, and the idea of making an invention appealed to me as one of the few available means to accomplish a change in one's economic status, while at the same time bringing to focus my interest in technical things and making it possible to make a contribution to society as well.

Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.

It has sometimes been said that the success of the Origin proved "that the subject was in the air," or "that men's minds were prepared for it." I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species.

As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it.

If you want to be successful, just meditate, man. God will tell you what people need.

Carry on any enterprise as if all future success depended on it.

But then when I'm in a halfway successful movie, it irritates the hell out of the critics in New York, because they'd like to kill my pictures if they could. So maybe I'm pretty good in the movie. Then they use all these words like I'm 'surprisingly' good, or 'shockingly enough,' I'm good. It's like I crawled out from under a magazine and they're surprised I can act.

The ideal is unnatural naturalness, or natural unnaturalness. I mean it is a combination of both. I mean here is natural instinct and here is control. You are to combine the two in harmony. Not if you have one to the extreme, you'll be very unscientific. If you have another to the extreme, you become, all of a sudden, a mechanical man No longer a human being. It is a successful combination of both. That way it is a process of continuing growth.

The faster you work and the more you get done, the better you feel. Most successful people work at a higher tempo of activity than unsuccessful people. They don't necessarily do different things, but they get things done more efficiently in a given time than the average person.

The primary reason for underachievement and failure is that the great majority of people don't decide to be successful.

The more accurately you can think about who you are, what you want to accomplish and how to accomplish it, the more successful you will be.

The predominant quality of successful people is optimism.... Your level of optimism is the very best predictor of how happy, healthy, wealthy, and long-lived you will be.

I think the biggest thing for me is being able to adjust to the way the game has changed. It's basically a 180-degree turn from the style I like to play. That's what I think I'm most proud of, being able to fit into this style of game and still be fairly successful.

Genius. It's a word. What does it really mean? If I win I'm a genius. If I don't, I'm not.

Willingness to take risks is the path to success.

Like a brain surgeon who drinks a martini when he's not on call, the successful kids in your school may smoke pot on occasion, but they are not stoners.

We should educate more women and girls. Because that is the surest route to controllably, manageably reducing the human population. Educated women have fewer kids. And the kids they do have are better cared for and are more successful. As I like to say, it's not one thing that we need to focus on. It's everything all at once.

Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.

Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we'd want to get involved.

Microsoft has had its success by doing low-cost products and constantly improving those products and we've really redefined the IT industry to be something that's about a tool for individuals.

I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.