"Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't as all. You can be discouraged by failure -- or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you will find success. "

-- Thomas J. Watson, Sr. (Founder and former CEO of IBM)

"We generally judge the difficulty of a proposed action by how much we are resisting it rather than by how much skill or technical expertise it will take. So many people see doing their tax return as very difficult, even though no real skill is involved."

--Mark Forster

"I spend most of my day writing. I write everything on our website. Communicating clearly is my top priority. Web writing is terrible, and corporate sites are the worst. You don't know what they do, who they are, or what they stand for. I spend a lot of time taking a sentence and reworking it until it's perfect. I love the editing process."

--Jason Fried, 37Signals.com

"I have a very simple philosophy on life. You shouldn’t steal from yourself. If you’re going to commit your life to an enterprise, wealth creation, the security and the financial well-being of your family… and if other people your staff, your team, your employees, your vendors are going to commit their lives to you, you owe it to yourself and to everyone else to get the highest and best results. You should never accept a fraction of the yield when with the same effort or less, the same people or fewer, the same time or less, the same capital or less, the same opportunity cost or less, can deliver so much more to you currently, and perpetually."

--Jay Abraham

"Confidence and competence is not the same thing. No one should go into their garden and chant, 'There are no weeds. There are no weeds. There are no weeds.' For people to be true leaders, they have to first see things as they are, not worse. Then see it better than it is, and then make it the way you see it."

--Anthony Robbins (as quoted in SUCCESS Magazine, January 2009)

"Competition doesn't breed innovation; it breeds conformity."

--Steve Miller (http://theadventure.com/)

"I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time."

--Herbert B. Swope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Bayard_Swope

"Selling stuff is easy. All you gotta do is give away stuff that makes people happy …and then sell stuff that makes ‘em even happier."

-- Frank Kern

"Negative criticism is easy because it is always possible to find fault with anything if one looks hard enough. It is quite easy to concentrate on the faults and ignore what is worthwhile. But the main and overriding attraction of criticism is that it at once makes the critic superior to what he is criticizing."

--Edward de Bono (http://www.debonothinking.com/)

"We may need to solve problems not by removing the cause but by designing the way forward even if the cause remains in place."

--Edward De Bono

Bill Russell is one of the great names in basketball, an all-American… and the only athlete to ever win an NCAA Championship, an Olympic Gold Medal, and a professional championship all in the same year—1956…But Bill Russell had this one problem: He threw up before every game.

--John Eliot, PhD (The Maverick Mindset and Overachiever)

"As soon as we concern ourselves with the 'good' and 'bad' of our fellows, we create an opening in our hearts for maliciousness to enter. Testing, competing with, and criticizing others weakens and defeats us." -- Morihei Ueshiba

(today's quote is dedicated to Wicke Chandler, who lost his life in a tragic accident yesterday)

"There are three kinds of people. One kind is the dumb ones who don't learn. The smart ones who learn from their own mistakes. Very smart ones. But then there are the wise ones, the ones who learn from other people's mistakes."
-- not sure

Several

Ran across some great quotes (and individuals) on Jonathan Stark's web site. Below are some of my favorites:

In times of change, the learners will inherit the world and the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. - Eric Hoffer

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. - William James

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure - Colin Powell [I continually encounter folks who put in the hard work, but lacking in either preparation or, more importantly, learning from failure... and I'm not innocent either. -jr]

Why do you wake up in the morning and do things? If you can't answer that, you might as well end it now. - Peter Baer

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it's the same problem you had last year - John Foster Dulles

A problem well stated is a problem half solved. - Charles F. Kettering

A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire

Security is mostly superstition. It doesn't exist in nature. Life is a great adventure or it is nothing. - Helen Keller

I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. - Albert Einstein

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. - Arthur Schopenhauer

Sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge. - Don Henley

There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity. - General Douglas MacArthur

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself. - Eleanor Roosevelt

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value. - Albert Einstein

Happiness depends upon ourselves. - Aristotle

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. - Mark Twain

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. - Aristotle

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. - Eleanor Roosevelt

There is one and only one path out of poverty. The one and only path out of poverty is entrepreneurship and business success.

[...]

So yes, some business people are too greedy. Some entrepreneurs don't care about their fellow man. Some people do make their money by dishonest means. But remember, the character quotient is no better on the poor side of the fence.

So if you're prospering by means of an honest enterprise - or if you're struggling to put one together - then you are a hero. The bards and minstrels may not sing songs about you, and your handsome face may never appear on The Apprentice, but what you do every day when you get out of bed is a worthwhile and indeed necessary thing.

Don't ever forget it. What you do matters. A lot. It's worth celebrating and it's HONORABLE.

-- Perry Marshall

"We’re orbiting an exploding star. Lighten up."
--Alan Weiss in I Resemble That Remark

"Businesses have expectations for their traffic and often those expectations are not realistic. We all want results and we want them now but the reality is that the market is going to give us what we earn not what we want. So once we get a visitor to the site how do we earn the goal for the traffic? The simple answer is we earn the result by providing a web experience that takes the visitor from hello to thank you. In between those two is a conversation with the prospect and many web sites fail in managing that conversation."

--Bob Dumouchel in "Life After the First Click"

"He who notices, names, and leverages the most patterns, wins."

--Scott Ginsbert (Hello, my name is Scott! nametag guy)

Every part of your success is dependent upon one individual. You are that individual. You’re in charge. You say when to begin. You’ve got the insight to make the right decisions now. To succeed, you’re going to need that insight, along with courage and conscientiousness. If you’re frightened of making mistakes, you’re sunk. Accept that you’ll make mistakes. Each one has a lesson to be learned.

Michael Eisner, chairman and CEO of Disney, and the man who propelled it to undreamt of success, says, "At a certain level, what we do at Disney is very simple. We set our goals, aim for perfection, inevitably fall short, try to learn from our mistakes, and hope that our successes will continue to outnumber our failures." There’s nothing Mickey Mouse about that kind of philosophy -- because it embraces mistakes as part of the process.

--Jay Conrad Levinson (Guerilla Marketing)

"Logic makes you think; emotion makes you act." -- Alan Weiss

"Our present satisfaction [with our state of understanding] may reflect the paucity of the data rather than the excellence of the theory."
--Martin Rees

"I find the best time management is based in pure clarity around my near term goals. That works well and nothing else works at all."
--Paul Lemberg
http://www.be-unreasonable.com/blog/
http://www.paullemberg.com/

"Before you worry about whether to do something, or how to do something, ask yourself WHY you are considering doing something."
-- Alan Weiss, Summit Consulting Group

"Don't play games that you don't understand, even if you see lots of other people making money from them."
&
"Hope is not a good plan."

--Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com (among other things)

[ Advice we could all use on a wallet sized card to carry around to be pulled out every few years... Bubbles...bubbles...bubbles... don't you mean bath bubbles? No, not those ones... Don't your remember when....? Nah... ]