“The hard thing isn't setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal.” Ben Horowitz · The Hard Thing About Hard Things, 2014
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.” Bill Gates · The Road Ahead, 1995
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” Elon Musk · Interviews
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” Andrew Grove · Only the Paranoid Survive, 1996
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” Henry Ford · Widely attributed
“If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.” Steve Jobs
“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” Steve Jobs
“The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it.” Jeff Bezos
“Microsoft's early mobile strategy was clearly a mistake. There's a lot of things like cellphones where we didn't get out in the lead early. We didn't miss cellphones, but the way that we went about it didn't allow us to get the leadership.” Bill Gates
“The greatest mistake ever is the whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is, meaning Android is the standard non-Apple phone form platform.” Bill Gates
“I think we’ve got the risks pretty well characterized. I think we are at least avoiding the mistakes that have been made in the past.” Elon Musk
“I want to be able to make sure that we have enough capital to survive at least three consecutive failures. If you want to make a small fortune in the launch vehicle business, start with a large one.” Elon Musk
“When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, "Nah, what's wrong with a horse?" That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.” Elon Musk
“The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.” Peter Drucker
“Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again. There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail.” Henry Ford
“Let them fail; let everybody fail! I made my fortune when I had nothing to start with, by myself and my own ideas. Let other people do the same thing. If I lose everything in the collapse of our financial structure, I will start in at the beginning and build it up again.” Henry Ford
“Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.” Thomas Edison
“I became an entrepreneur by mistake. Ever since then I've gone into business, not to make money, but because I think I can do it better than it's been done elsewhere. And, quite often, just out of personal frustration about the way it's been done by other people.” Richard Branson
“Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.” Ben Horowitz
“The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination [putting off important things to do unimportant things], because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.” Paul Graham
“Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won't be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)” Paul Graham
“What other people label or might try to call failure, I have learned is just God's way of pointing you in a new direction.” Oprah Winfrey
“[Winfrey attributes this aphorism to Jeff Weiner, founder of Linkedin] Failure is what’s going to humble you.” Oprah Winfrey
“If you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous.” Malcolm Gladwell
“It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“To be popular is easy; to be right when right is unpopular, is noble... I repudiate with scorn the immoral doctrine, 'Our country, right or wrong'.” Andrew Carnegie
“If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.” Steve Jobs
“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” Steve Jobs
“The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it.” Jeff Bezos