My highlights from the book: 1. Ted came to appreciate the considerable discipline and commitment it took to hone expertise. 2. He was an inspiration. Whatever you do, he taught me, do it to perfection. 3. You’re crazy to be a professor she told Ted. What you really want to do is draw. 4. The money he earned through his advertising wor...

My highlights from the book: 1. In nearly every case the worst pilots die by their own stupidity. 2. I sensed that he was a very strong and determined person, a poor boy who had started with nothing and would show the world what he was really made of. 3. Every muscle in my body is hammering at me. I just want to let go of this guy and ...

My highlights from the book: 1. The self-awareness that would become so characteristic of him was awakening and with it the determination to be the master of every situation. He was not going to throw himself into the world and let luck or chance lead the way. 2. When it comes to serious matters, I have adopted the rule of acting serio...

My highlights from the book: 1. There are limitless opportunities open to the man who appreciates the fact that his own mind is the sole key that unlocks them. 2. A boy of exceptional brilliance, of humble origins and poor health, who dreamed great dreams and pursued them throughout a dedicated life. He was a distinguished but absentmi...

My highlights from the book: 1. Why would a man as unquestionably brilliant as he knowingly and deliberately destroy himself? 2. The rise and fall of Bill Shockley’s company took less than a year and a half. It profoundly affected Shockley, but had even more impact on the world around him and on our lives today. In all of the history o...

My highlights from the book: 1. Bob Noyce took me under his wing,” Steve Jobs explains. “I was young, in my twenties. He was in his early fifties. He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand.” Jobs continues, “You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understan...

My highlights from the book: 1. At the time of her death on August 9, 1980, Jacqueline Cochran held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history. 2. Jacqueline Cochran was a self-named, self-created phenomenon. Whatever the circumstances of her birth, she must have been born fight...

My highlights from the book: 1. The Larry H. Miller Group, which produces $3.2 billion in sales annually, ranking it among the 200 largest privately-owned companies in the United States. 2. All of this blossomed from a single car dealership with fewer than 30 employees. 3. He was an ordinary man even though he did extraordinary things....

My highlights from the book: 1. Every time we had a conversation he [Walter Chrysler] shed tears yet always what started them was thinking of the past when he was a poor young man. At first, I mistakenly supposed that he was feeling sorry for himself. Finally, I came to realize what it was that so deeply moved him when he contemplated ...

My highlights from the book: 1. Words were what made him. Reading this collection, one is struck, piece after piece, whether in the most apparently (but perhaps not so) casual of memoranda or the most public of pronouncements, by how David's words surprise and seduce, tease and provoke. 2. His writing is opinionated, forceful, and urge...

My highlights from the book: 1. When he spoke about topics that energized him, which seemed to include almost everything, Lewin became so animated-arms gesticulating, eyes ablaze-that his enthusiasm was infectious. “What stood out to me was how engaging he was, almost like this live wire. When Danny was excited about something, you cou...

My highlights from the book: 1. Barnum is a representative man. He represents the enterprise and energy of his countrymen in the nineteenth century, as Washington represented their resistance to oppression in the century preceding. 2. Even as a young man he had an unfailing sense of what the public wanted, yet he could be brazenly mani...

My highlights from the book: 1. In 1980, business at my company, Chuck E . Cheese’s, was thriving and I was feeling flush. So I bought a very large house in Paris. We threw a huge party, inviting everyone I knew at Chuck E . Cheese’s and my other company, Atari, and all my old friends as well. I looked up and noticed that my former Ata...

My highlights from the book: 1. Power and machinery, money and goods, are useful only as they set us free to live. They are but means to an end. 2. The fact that the commercial success of the Ford Motor Company has been most unusual is important only because it serves to demonstrate, in a way which no one can fail to understand, that t...

My highlights from the book: 1. Maybe somewhere in a footnote, it would be mentioned that he came from nothing, grew up poor, dropped out of high school, and made himself three or four billion dollars. 2. Clark was the first person to create three different multibillion dollar technology companies. 3. Oddly enough, this character at th...

My highlights from the book: 1. Evan decided to study product design, to learn how to look at the things he used in his daily life and see how he could make them better and cooler. 2. One thing was clear; as he frequently put it, “I’m not going to work for someone else.” 3. While the outcome was disappointing, Evan learned a valuable l...

My highlights from the book: 1. If you want to persist and thrive, you’d better not rest on your laurels. 2. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing. I was born to go into business for myself — and I was destined to find a business that would allow me to share with others my enthusiasm for things I find pleasurable. 3. This is not a typica...

My highlights from the book: 1. I kept coming back to the time that many have described as his "wilderness" years, the dozen years between his first tenure at Apple and his return. That era, from 1985 to 1997, is easy to overlook. Those years are in fact the critical ones of his career. That's when he learned most everything that made ...

My highlights from the book: 1. They had carried with them the frugal culture of Puritan New England, which John D. Rockefeller would come to exemplify. 2. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that there was something extraordinary about the way this stolid boy pinpointed goals and doggedly pursued them without any trace of childi...

My highlights from the book: 1. I wrote this book to help entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. That's why there's a lack of miracles and a surplus of marketing details including buying, advertising, distributing, and running stores; and lots of discussion of how we built a successful business on high wages. 2. The general theme in...

My highlights from the book: 1. Joseph Pulitzer was the midwife to the birth of the modern mass media. Pulitzer’s lasting achievement was to transform American journalism into a medium of mass consumption and immense influence. 2. Pulitzer never relaxed his grip on the World, his influential New York newspaper that had ushered in the m...

My highlights from the book: 1. In a drama that would seem fake were it not so horrifying, Einstein’s brain ended up being, for more than four decades, a wandering relic. 2. Einstein remained consistent in his willingness to be a serenely amused loner who was comfortable not conforming. 3. “In teaching history,” Einstein replied, “ther...

My highlights from the book: 1. This eccentric and outlandish company has established a consistent pattern of deviating from convention. When other airlines were creating big hubs, Southwest was flying point to point. Instead of serving expensive meals, flight attendants pass out nuts. Instead of wearing stuffy uniforms, they sport pol...

My highlights from the book: 1. He hasn't the least idea how much work and care, how much imagination and effort, go into the proper running of a hotel. 2. This was the very heart of a world that had shaped him, a world of privilege and luxury in which he had forged a place for himself, against all odds. Ritz had not been born to this ...

My highlights from the book: 1. He refused to settle for the pragmatic dictum of maturity. Issy also skipped skepticism and "Let's be sensible." People said he was naïve, with a kind of glandular optimism. Perhaps. But as it turned out naïveté served him well. 2. Early on he made some audacious statements that sounded like pipe dreams....

My highlights from the book: 1. They ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing. 2. His notebooks are the greatest record of curiosity ever created, a wondrous guide to the most rel...

My highlights from the book: 1. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind, there are few. 2. Life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, and I didn’t want that. 3. Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated into less burden, more energy, and...

My highlights from this book: 1. “The most beautiful things in the world,” Ford said, “are those from which all the excess weight has been eliminated.” 2. Ford had just one sales strategy, and that was to keep lowering the price of the car. 3. The conclusion of his report is a succinct summary of what would enable Henry Ford to sell mo...

My highlights from this book: 1. Each night he would practice a technique he called “envisioning myself at the next level,” in which he would imagine doing his dives perfectly. In this he would presage the “mental rehearsal” training of Olympic and professional athletes but also invented a mental habit for himself that he would continu...

My highlights from this book: 1. I never considered my dreams wasted energy. They were invariably linked to some form of action. 2. It was a restaurant stripped down to the minimum in service and menu. Of course, the simplicity of the procedures allowed the McDonald’s to concentrate on quality in every step. That was the trick. 3. I ha...