Ranking the 18 best quotes and tips for business and career success

By my reckoning, over the years we have collected more than 2,000 quotes and sayings on this blog, some more popular and others more commercial.

So this time we are gathering the quotes and pieces of advice that send a message the moment you read them, whether of inspiration, motivation or resilience, and above all a lesson you can take away. This would be my own ranking of the best quotes for entrepreneurs that hide a big lesson.

1. The key ingredient for achieving anything in life is to work your tail off doing something. It’s that simple. Plenty of people have ideas, but few decide to act on them now. Not tomorrow, not next week: today. The real entrepreneur is a doer. The world doesn’t belong to the dreamers; it belongs to the doers. (Nolan Bushnell)

2. One of the big mistakes we make is pushing ourselves to go looking for our passions. You don’t pick your passions. If you keep your eyes open, you’ll discover that it’s your passions that pick you. (Jeff Bezos)

3. Logic can carry you from point A to point B, but imagination can carry you anywhere. (Albert Einstein)

4. Twenty years from now you’ll be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So cast off the lines, sail away from the safe harbour, make the most of the fair winds and fight the headwinds. Explore, dream and discover. (Mark Twain)

5. If you don’t feel able to do great things, do small things in a great way. (Napoleon Hill)

6. Stay away from people who try to shrink and belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the truly great ones make you feel that you, too, can become great. (Mark Twain)

7. People don’t realise that success is not the key that opens the door to happiness. It is happiness that opens the doors to success. If you enjoy what you do, you will succeed. (Albert Schweitzer)

8. Don’t be arrogant. Don’t be showy. There is always someone better who can prove they’re better than you. (Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos)

9. Don’t worry too much about your failures. Getting it right just once is enough to succeed. (Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox)

10. In business you have to be like a sniper. Don’t shoot where the target was; shoot where it’s going to be.

11. Lots of people are going through hell and decide to do nothing to get out of it. If you’re going through hell, keep moving forward. (Winston Churchill)

12. Life is neither a celebration nor a complaint about the cards we’ve been dealt. Sometimes it’s about winning with a weak hand. We’re born with certain cards; how you play the hand is up to you. (Jack London)

13. In every opportunity, a pessimist sees the difficulty; in every difficulty, an optimist sees the opportunity. (Winston Churchill)

14. To start a business you only need three very simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed. (Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s)

15. Never give up. It’s very hard to beat a person who never gives up. (Babe Ruth, a true baseball legend)

16. Your most dissatisfied customers will be your greatest source of learning. (Bill Gates)

17. Every worthwhile achievement, big or small, goes through the same stages of drudgery and triumph: a beginning, a struggle and a victory. (Mahatma Gandhi)

18. Great leaders are those who were great followers and come to understand that leadership is not about producing more followers but about making more leaders. (Ralph Nader)

Further reading

• 50 inspiring quotes for entrepreneurs
• 11 Steve Jobs quotes that will go down in business history
• Life advice from 21 US presidents
• 15 short jokes about accountants

Featured image: Javier Candeira, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.