“I think it's about usefulness! People talk of 'following your passion' but there are plenty of things people are passionate about that nobody will pay them money for, so you can't just tell someone to just follow their passion. The missing piece? usefulness… We say the magic formula is: Passion + Usefulness = Success.”— Chris Guillebeau
The quote archive
A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.
The best analogy I can give for an IPO is that it's like a wedding. There's a whole lot of attention directed toward the wedding, and less toward the 20 years of marriage after the wedding. IPO has the word initial in it, it's the starting line for being a public company.
— Mike EvansNFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion
Every business makes money as a secondary purpose. It's the coincidental result of creating customer value and changing the world in some way that people are willing to pay for and find valuable. That is the primary activity of a business – and you happen to get paid for it.
— Mike EvansNFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion
The only real competitive advantage that's durable is cost and innovation – as long as innovation happens along the trajectory that takes into account stakeholders, not just shareholders. Your customers, employees, shareholders, and communities in which you operate are all stakeholders. If you innovate, you need to think about all these groups – and then, guess what, the shareholders will benefit.
— Mike EvansNFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion
I saw something in the world that was done poorly and thought it could be done better. The difference between a miserable, crank grump and an entrepreneur? Both are unhappy- but the entrepreneur says they can make it better… that they can fix it… and they follow the spark.
— Mike EvansNFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion
All we can control in this life is our dedication, our self-belief, our determination. I can guarantee you, I will always have that, and that's my legacy. That's what I want to leave as a gift to my kids – the message that they should never give up, never have regrets, to give everything, never back down in front of obstacles, and to always keep going, no matter what.
— Francis NgannouFormer UFC Heavyweight Champion & Mixed Martial Arts Pioneer
I don't want my success to define me. I want people to see me without all that – success comes and goes, without it, I am still who I am.
— Francis NgannouFormer UFC Heavyweight Champion & Mixed Martial Arts Pioneer
If you fail many times in life, it can be frustrating, but, if you look differently at that, you can see that if you fail many times, you get up many times. If you didn't get up after the first fall, you could never have fought. Failure just means you got knocked down.
— Francis NgannouFormer UFC Heavyweight Champion & Mixed Martial Arts Pioneer
The reason why I fight is that I'm fighting against the pain of seeing my family get sick and fighting against not being able to help them. That's more painful than anything. To see my kids, get sick tomorrow and not being able to help them? That's more painful than anything I would experience in a fight.
— Francis NgannouFormer UFC Heavyweight Champion & Mixed Martial Arts Pioneer
Everyone has a little bit of warrior in them. We all grow up and have a little piece of us which wants to be a superhero, who goes and fights the bad guys. In real life, fighting is tough, you have to overcome your fears – nobody really wants to get into a fight! Escaping that fear is the reason so many people who get into combat sports.
— Francis NgannouFormer UFC Heavyweight Champion & Mixed Martial Arts Pioneer
We run the very real risk now, not of going back to the 1970s, but of going back to the 1930s or 40s with economic and financial collapse, massive pandemic, and real-world wars.
— Nouriel RoubiniEconomist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.
I have grey hair, I'm 64. I grew up in Italy in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s. When I grew-up, I never worried about nuclear war, global pandemic, technology destroying jobs, climate change destroying the world, or stable democracies being taken over by authoritarian extremists.
— Nouriel RoubiniEconomist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.
Today, there is uncertainty like we've never seen before. We are not only facing economic risks, but real social, political, geopolitical, technological, and environmental risks too.
— Nouriel RoubiniEconomist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.
Until now, we had an insolvency problem – but we didn't have a liquidity problem that could trigger that insolvency because interest rates were so low. Now they're rising, and the mother of all debt crises is going to occur.
— Nouriel RoubiniEconomist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.
We are facing the mother of all debt crises. When you look at the data on private and public debt, the debt to GDP ratio was near 200% of global GDP in 1999, today it's more like 350% and rising. In advanced economies, it's over 420% and in China, 330% and rising.
— Nouriel RoubiniEconomist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.
When Putin invaded in February 2022, we made the mistake of thinking that Putin's of this conflict would be one made by a 'reasonable person'. There are some very worrying elements of intelligence suggesting he has been very seriously out of touch… isolated from reality… and that he's only listening to those telling him what he wants to hear.
— Simon SmithPutin badly miscalculated his chances of quick success in launching his 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But I think he will make a much sounder calculation of the costs to him of taking the action of using WMD.
— Simon Smith