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Yogi Berra
Baseball Hall of Fame
I just like to hit, and the fun of the game is hitting. Well, you got to play a little defense, too. But hitting, I was very fortunate. You know, a lot of guys, "You're a bad ball hitter." I said, "No, the ball looked good to me. I swung at it." I could leave a pitch alone the first time like that. The next time, I hit at it, and I do something with it. I have fun with [Derek] Jeter. You know, sometimes he strikes out on that ball up here. And, I get on him. I say, "What'd you swing at that ball for?" I says. "It looks good." And he says, "You used to swing at it." I said, "Yeah, but I hit it. You don't."
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
In 1998 and 1999 you could raise $60 million for an Internet idea without a business plan with a single phone call. It was a very different era, but back in 1995 it was very difficult to raise money. And, by the way, it wasn't more difficult than it had been for the previous 20 years to raise money, it just was sort of normally hard. It's supposed to be hard to raise a million dollars. So, with a lot of hard work we raised that million dollars from about 20 different angel investors who invested about $50,000 each, and that was the original money that really funded Amazon.com.
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
Once you are looking at the odds in a realistic way -- it's very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic -- and so if you believe on that first day while you're writing the business plan that there's a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt. It's sort of like, I don't have any doubt about whether we're going to fail. That's the likely outcome. It just is, and to pretend that it's not will lead you to do strange and unnatural things. So, what you do with those early investment dollars -- if you have $300,000 and then you have a million dollars -- what you do with those early precious capital resources is you go about systematically trying to eliminate risk. So, you pick whatever you think the biggest problems are, and you try to eliminate them one at a time. That's how small companies get a little bit bigger, and then a little bit bigger, and a little bit bigger, until finally, at a certain stage, you reach a transition where the company has more control over its future destiny.
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Benazir Bhutto
Former Prime Minister of Pakistan
Benazir Bhutto: In life there are challenges, but I think leadership is very much predicated on the capacity to absorb defeat and overcome it. Now, after having been in politics for more than two decades, I have come to the strong conclusion that the difference between somebody who succeeds and somebody who fails is the ability to absorb a setback. Because on the road to success there will be setbacks, and there are those who give up, and those who say that, "No, we are going to go on." So it's that capacity to absorb a failure.
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