RD > RD's Quotes

“I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.”
― Jeff Bezos

“Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new.”
― Jeff Bezos

“People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.”
― Jeff Bezos

“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”
― Jeff Bezos

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
― Jeff Bezos

“In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”
― Jeff Bezos

“If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.”
― Jeff Bezos

“When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.”
― Jeff Bezos

“No business can continue to shrink. That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.”
― Jeff Bezos

“All of you have heard of Dr. Emil Coue, the Frenchman who was in this country a few years ago, telling people they could cure themselves if they would adopt his plan. His idea was that you should say to yourself “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” Just ponder over that for a minute.”
― Claude M. Bristol, TNT: It Rocks the Earth

“Vision without traction is merely hallucination.”
― Gino Wickman, Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

“While you can't control your experiences, you can control your explanations.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“The skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Depression, I have argued, stems partly from an overcommitment to the self and an undercommitment to the common good. This”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“YOU SHOULD NOW be well on your way to using disputation, the prime technique for learned optimism, in your daily life. You first saw the ABC link—that specific beliefs lead to dejection and passivity. Emotions and actions do not usually follow adversity directly. Rather they issue directly from your beliefs about adversity. This means that if you change your mental response to adversity, you can cope with setbacks much better. The main tool for changing your interpretations of adversity is disputation. Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on. Anytime you find yourself down or anxious or angry, ask what you are saying to yourself. Sometimes the beliefs will turn out to be accurate; when this is so, concentrate on the ways you can alter the situation and prevent adversity from becoming disaster. But usually your negative beliefs are distortions. Challenge them. Don’t let them run your emotional life. Unlike dieting, learned optimism is easy to maintain once you start. Once you get into the habit of disputing negative beliefs, your daily life will run much better, and you will feel much happier.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“The optimists and the pessimists: I have been studying them for the past twenty-five years. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do:”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Bertrand Russell said that the mark of a civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“The optimists believe defeat is just a temporary setback.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“people with pessimistic habits of thinking can transform mere setbacks into disasters. One way they do this is by converting their own innocence into guilt.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“But failure also can occur when talent and desire are present in abundance but optimism is missing”
― Seligman Martin, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“The theory clearly predicts that in the classroom and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the playing field, success will not necessarily go to the most talented. The prize will go to the adequately talented who are also optimists.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“The optimists believe defeat is just a temporary setback.”
― Seligman Martin, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“This crisis and its resolution shaped their explanatory style for bad events, making it temporary, specific, and external.”
― Seligman Martin, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life