Jim > Jim's Quotes

“All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.”
― Goethe

“When asked why they quit, the lapsed dieters cited complexity as the single most important reason for giving up. Simplicity is even more important when people are tired, stressed, or otherwise cognitively impaired.”
― Donald Sull, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World

“Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a human
civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from every wall,
rebuilding what had been merely superhuman.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“Investing the time up front to clarify what will move the needles dramatically increases the odds that simple rules will be applied where they can have the greatest impact.”
― Donald Sull, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World

“Imagine a book that is seven times as long as War and Peace, but without any characters, plot points, or insight into the human condition. That book is the U.S. tax code.”
― Donald Sull, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World

“I once heard worship defined as celebrating the availability of God.”
― Larry Crabb, The Pressure's Off: There's a New Way to Live

“The Christian always has reason to celebrate. When we fail, celebrate His grace. When we are blessed, celebrate His mercy. When others reject us, celebrate His love.”
― Larry Crabb, The Pressure's Off: There's a New Way to Live

“I have determined, the Almighty God being my help and my shield, yet to suffer, if frail life might continue so long, even until the moss shall grow on my eyebrows, rather than to violate my faith and my principles.”
― John Bunyan

“You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.”
― John Bunyan

“We’ll never abandon ourselves to the Spirit as long as we think we can change without Him.”
― Larry Crabb, The Pressure's Off: There's a New Way to Live

“But a man cannot by writing a bill of divorce to his vice get rid of all trouble at once, and enjoy tranquillity by living apart.”
― Plutarch, Moralia

“By the aid of philosophy you will live not unpleasantly, for you will learn to extract pleasure from all places and things: wealth will make you happy, because it will enable you to benefit many; and poverty, as you will not then have many anxieties; and glory, for it will make you honoured; and obscurity, for you will then be safe from envy.”
― Plutarch, Moralia

“Pile up gold, heap up silver, build covered walks, fill your house with slaves and the town with debtors, unless you lay to rest the passions of the soul, and put a curb on your insatiable desires, and rid yourself of fear and anxiety, you are but pouring out wine for a man in a fever, and giving honey to a man who is bilious, and laying out a sumptuous banquet for people who are suffering from dysentery,”
― Plutarch, Moralia

“Sales is a business of relationships, and you must cultivate customers with tenderness and love, like cabbages in winter, even if the customer is an egomaniacal asshole you want to hit with a shovel.”
― Max Barry, Company

“Explain the value and justify the cost - People don’t mind paying; they just don’t like to overpay.”
― Chris Murray, Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction

“If you don't appreciate your customers, someone else will.”
― Jason Langella

“Get up in the morning on a mission to save prospective clients from the shabby, ill-fitting, overpriced and worthless alternatives that those charlatans - who are your competition - are trying to get away with flogging them.”
― Chris Murray, Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction

“Salespeople who think that it’s all about price aren’t required: If it can be sold on the internet at the lowest price, you can take the huge cost of a sales team out of the equation.”
― Chris Murray, Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction

“We all need salespeople who help people with the same enthusiasm shown by a small child describing the best Christmas present EVER”
― Chris Murray, Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction

“If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will.”
― Sam Walton

“High expectations are the key to everything.”
― Sam Walton

“Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves it s amazing what they can accomplish.”
― Sam Walton

“What we guard against around here is people saying, ‘Let’s think about it.’ We make a decision. Then we act on it.”
― Sam Walton, Sam Walton: Made In America

“There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
― Sam Walton

“For my whole career in retail, I have stuck by one guiding principle. It’s a simple one, and I have repeated it over and over and over in this book until I’m sure you’re sick to death of it. But I’m going to say it again anyway: the secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want.”
― Sam Walton

“I don’t think any other retail company in the world could do what I’m going to propose to you. It’s simple. It won’t cost us anything. And I believe it would just work magic, absolute magic on our customers, and our sales would escalate, and I think we’d just shoot past our Kmart friends in a year or two and probably Sears as well. I want you to take a pledge with me. I want you to promise that whenever you come within ten feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him. Now I know some of you are just naturally shy, and maybe don’t want to bother folks. But if you’ll go along with me on this, it would, I’m sure, help you become a leader. It would help your personality develop, you would become more outgoing, and in time you might become manager of that store, you might become a department manager, you might become a district manager, or whatever you choose to be in the company. It will do wonders for you. I guarantee it. Now, I want you to raise your right hand—and remember what we say at Wal-Mart, that a promise we make is a promise we keep—and I want you to repeat after me: From this day forward, I solemnly promise and declare that every time a customer comes within ten feet of me, I will smile, look him in the eye, and greet him. So help me Sam.”
― Sam Walton, Sam Walton: Made In America

“What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path. As”
― Sam Walton, Sam Walton: Made In America

“As an old-time small-town merchant, I can tell you that nobody has more love for the heyday of the smalltown retailing era than I do. That’s one of the reasons we chose to put our little Wal-Mart museum on the square in Bentonville. It’s in the old Walton’s Five and Dime building, and it tries to capture a little bit of the old dime store feel. But I can also tell you this: if we had gotten smug about our early success, and said, “Well, we’re the best merchant in town,” and just kept doing everything exactly the way we were doing it, somebody else would have come along and given our customers what they wanted, and we would be out of business today.”
― Sam Walton, Sam Walton: Made In America

“We used to get in some terrific fights. You have to be just as tough as they are. You can’t let them get by with anything because they are going to take care of themselves, and your job is to take care of the customer. I’d threaten Procter & Gamble with not carrying their merchandise, and they’d say, ‘Oh, you can’t get by without carrying our merchandise.’ And I’d say, ‘You watch me put it on a side counter, and I’ll put Colgate on the endcap at a penny less, and you just watch me.’ They got offended and went to Sam, and he said, ‘Whatever Claude says, that’s what it’s going to be.’ Well, now we have a real good relationship with Procter & Gamble. It’s a model that everybody talks about. But let me tell you, one reason for that is that they learned to respect us. They learned that they couldn’t bulldoze us like everybody else, and that when we said we were representing the customer, we were dead serious.” In”
― Sam Walton, Sam Walton: Made In America

“Watson, Sr., was running IBM, he decided they would never have more than four layers from the chairman of the board to the lowest level in the company. That may have been one of the greatest single reasons why IBM was successful.”
― Sam Walton, Sam Walton: Made In America