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...

My highlights from the book: 1. Most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else. 2. Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known. And once he sees he’s wro...

My highlights from this book: 1. Jobs’ intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. 2. “There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve,” Nolan Bushnell said. “I taught him that if you act like you can do something, ...

My highlights from this book: 1. Johnny was comfortable in front of twenty million but uncomfortable in a gathering of twenty. 2. He had too keen an appreciation for how much work and talent and discipline went into success to be flattered by praise and adulation 3. Johnny Carson performed on television, but he didn’t watch it. 4. Cars...

My highlights from the book: 1. His talent sprang from his unrivaled independence of mind and ability to focus on his work and shut out the world, yet those same qualities exacted a toll. 2. Berkshire was a "job" to him in the sense that England was a job to Churchill. 3. He emerged from those first hard years with an absolute drive to...

My highlights from the book: 1. Having one's own shop, working on projects of one’s own choosing, making enough money today so one could do the same tomorrow: These were the modest goals of Thomas Edison when he struck out on his own as full-time inventor and manufacturer. The grand goal was nothing other than enjoying the autonomy of ...

My highlights from the book: 1. He was a doting father who sheltered them from his own fame. He enjoyed telling how six-year-old Diane had asked him if he was Walt Disney. “You know I am,” he answered. “The Walt Disney?” she questioned. When he chortled that he was, she asked for his autograph. He would chase the girls around the house...

My highlights from the book: 1. He had found a way to block out the world and dedicate all of his concentration to a single task. 2. “It is perhaps worth noting that those launch companies that succeeded also took their lumps along the way,” Musk wrote in a postmortem. “A friend of mine wrote to remind me that only 5 of the first 9 Peg...

My highlights from the book: 1. Celebrate optimum rather than maximum. 2. Take a primitive organism, any weak, pitiful organism. Say a freshman. Make it lift, or jump or run. Let it rest. What happens? A little miracle. It gets a little better. It gets a little stronger or faster or more enduring. That's all training is. Stress. Recove...

My highlights from this book: 1. Lucas unapologetically invested in what he believed in the most: himself. 2. “What we’re striving for is total freedom, where we can finance our pictures, make them our way, release them where we want them released, and be completely free to express ourselves,” explained Lucas. “That’s very hard to do i...