Shoe Dog Quotes

“I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.”

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”

“The easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.”

“I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling.”

“Let everyone else call your idea crazy... just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where ‘there’ is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.”

“You are remembered for the rules you break.”

“People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.”

“There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought.”

“How can I leave my mark on the world, I thought, unless I get out there first and see it?”

“Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.”

“Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company.”

“But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.”

“But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.”

“It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.”

“He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to - equally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion.”

“I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time.”

“But confidence was cash. You had to have some to get some. And people were loath to give it to you.”

“‘The cowards never started,’ he’d tell me, ‘and the weak died along the way - that leaves us.’”

“People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”

“Fight not to win, but to avoid losing. A surefire losing strategy.”