My highlights from the book: 1. Don’t even think of temporary advantages. Don’t waste your effort on a thing which ends in a petty triumph unless you are satisfied with a life of petty success. 2. As our successes began to come, I seldom put my head upon the pillow at night without speaking a few words to myself in this wise: "Now a li...

My highlights from the book: 1. It is impossible to produce superior performance unless you do something different. 2. Henry Singleton was a remarkable man with an unusual background for a CEO. A world-class mathematician who enjoyed playing chess blindfolded, he had programmed MIT’s first computer while earning a doctorate in electric...

My highlights from the book: 1. I graduated from high school eighth from the bottom of my class of 1,200. Frankly, I still have no idea how those seven kids managed to do worse than I did. 2. Too many people are mired in the details of their lives. They are stuck down “in" their lives, rather than staying "on" them. They miss the large...

My highlights from Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage: 1. In appreciation for whatever it is that makes men accomplish the impossible. 2. Their plight was naked and terrifying in its simplicity: If they were to get out—they had to get themselves out. 3. The motto of his family: By endurance we conquer. 4. From studying the outco...

My highlights from the book: 1. Orville’s first teacher in grade school, would remember him at his desk tinkering with bits of wood. Asked what he was up to, he told her he was making a machine of a kind that he and his brother were going to fly someday. 2. What is most uncharacteristic about the pose is that they sit doing nothing, so...

My top 20 highlights from the book: 1. I go my own way, take no partners, risk nobody else’s fortune. 2. I have had fights with some of the greatest financial men in the country. Did you ever hear of any of them getting ahead of Hetty Green? 3. A few clever men like Russell Sage, a future role model for Hetty, kept substantial amounts ...

My highlights from the book: 1. I just wanted a sound bite, but he launched into a passionate, twenty-minute soliloquy about his latest work. I could barely get a word in edgewise. He couldn't help himself: Design is his passion. 2. The thing is, it's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better. 3. It becomes about conse...

My top 20 highlights from the book: 1. Whatever you do, you must do it with gusto, you must do it in volume. It is a case of repeat, repeat, repeat. 2. Life is hard for the man who thinks he can take a short cut. 3. I did write this 100% with my 40 year old typewriter. I didn’t have a ghost writer. I wanted it in my own words. 4. I hop...

My highlights from the book: 1. In one lifetime, we can become a revered, immortalized politician, a scholar, a revolutionary, a writer, a musician, a painter, or a businessman like those we admire. These remarkable people did not take two or three lifetimes to accomplish what they did. They did it in one. 2. I think there is nothing m...

My top 20 highlights from the book: 1. As a colleague acknowledged many years later, this man “never had an ordinary reaction to anything.” 2. There’s a rule they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School: if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess. 3. Land recalled that his “whole life has been spent trying to teach peopl...

My highlights from the book: 1. Carmack and Romero personified an American dream: they were self-made individuals who had transformed their personal passions into a big business, a new art form, and a cultural phenomenon. Their story made them the unlikeliest of antiheroes. 2. The twenty-nine-year-old Carmack was a monkish and philanth...

My top 20 highlights from Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story 1. I decided that the best course for independence was to mind my own business and make my own money. 2. I never felt that I was good enough, strong enough, smart enough. He let me know that there was always room for improvement. A lot of sons would have been cripp...

My notes from Disney's Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World turned into maxims: • You have time. Walt Disney created his masterpiece when he was 55. • Great products are not built by consensus. Disneyland was an extension of the personality of its creator. • Invert. Everyone thought building ...

My highlights from the book: 1. To that Amazon is an unconventional company is an undersay statement. Its most significant initiatives have often been criticized and even derided as folly. 2. This book is primarily about showing you some of the unique principles and processes at Amazon with enough detail that you will be able to implem...

My highlights from the book: 1. He had an utter aversion to doing anything conventionally. 2. Every interesting thing I've ever done, every important thing I've ever done, every beneficial thing I've ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures. I'm covered in scar tissues as a result of this. 3. If Be...

My highlights from The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon: 1. When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are o...

My highlights from Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman 1. I learned at an early age that it’s better to invent your own game; then you can always be a winner. 2. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take awa...

My highlights from Confessions of an Advertising Man: 1. If you detect a slight stench of conceit in this book, I would have you know that my conceit is selective. I am a miserable duffer in everything except advertising. I cannot read a balance sheet, work a computer, ski, sail, play golf, or paint. 2. Search all the parks in all your...

My highlights from Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson 1. I am a creator of products, a builder of things, and my name appears love on them. That is how I make a living and they are what have made nom my name at least familiar in a million homes. 2. This is also the exposition of a business philosophy, which is very diffe...

My highlights from the book. 1. Cicero, learned man that he was, believed in self-improvement so long as breath lasts. 2. In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and/or minimizing one or a few variables-like the discount warehouses of Costco. 3. "Invert, always invert." It is in the ...