Bob Parsons Quotes

Never stop investing. Never stop improving. Never stop doing something new. Make it your goal to be better each and every day, in some small way. Remember the Japanese concept of Kaizen. Small daily improvements eventually result in huge advantages.

1973 was the year when the United Kingdom entered the European Economic Union, the year when Watergate helped us with a name for all future scandals, Carly Simon began the year at number one with ‘You’re So Vain’, John Tavener premiered his Variations on ‘Three Blind Mice’ for orchestra, the year when The Godfather won Best Picture Oscar, when the Bond film was Live and Let Die, when Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, opened, when Sofia Gubaidulina’s Roses for piano and soprano premiered in Moscow, when David Bowie was Aladdin Sane, Lou Reed walked on the wild side and made up a ‘Berlin’, Slade were feeling the noize, Dobie Gray was drifting away, Bruce Springsteen was ‘Blinded by the Light’, Tom Waits was calling ‘Closing Time’, Bob Dylan was ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, Sly and the Family Stone were ‘Fresh’, Queen recorded their first radio session for John Peel, when Marvin Gaye sang ‘What’s Going On’ and Ann Peebles’s ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’, when Morton Feldman’s Voices and Instruments II for three female voices, flute, two cellos and bass, Alfred Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style for violin and piano and Iannis Xenakis’s Eridanos for brass and strings premiered, when Ian Carr’s Nucleus released two albums refining their tangy English survey of the current jazz-rock mind of Miles Davis, when Ornette Coleman started recording again after a five-year pause, making a field recording in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, when Stevie Wonder reached No. 1 with ‘Superstition’ and ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, when Free, Family and the Byrds played their last show, 10cc played their first, the Everly Brothers split up, Gram Parsons died, and DJ Kool Herc DJed his first block party for his sister’s birthday in the Bronx, New York, where he mixed instrumental sections of two copies of the same record using two turntables.

Eventually, I encountered radical nondualists like Tony Parsons, Leo Hartong, Sailor Bob, Nathan Gill, Chuck Hillig, Karl Renz and Darryl Bailey. From radical nonduality, you get nothing.

You got to go down a lot of wrong roads to find the right one.

March 3: Associated Press columnist Bob Thomas reports Joan Crawford’s comments on Monroe’s appearance at a Photoplay awards dinner: “It was like a burlesque show. Someone should make her see the light; she should be told that the public likes provocative personalities but it also likes to know that underneath it all the actresses are ladies.” Marilyn replies via Louella Parsons’s column in the Herald Examiner: “What hurts me more is what Miss Crawford said, is that I have always admired her to be such a wonderful mother—to have adopted 4 children and have given them a family. I’m well-placed to know what it means not to have a house when you’re a child.

Never minimize damage. Don’t hide it. Bring it forward. I usually don’t care about who did what. Most problems occur by accident, so I don’t care about that. What I do care about is fixing the situation—fast. That’s important. Good news is nice to hear, but bad news is essential to hear.

Within any organization, there are two groups of people you must focus on: your employees and your customers. The most important group is your employees. You need to create enthusiasm among your team members, because they’re the people who are interacting with your customers day in and day out. If they’re happy with their job, their pay, and how they’re treated, and they believe in what the company is doing, they’ll be excited about your products. They’ll be full of enthusiasm. And what do we know about enthusiasm? It’s contagious. We all want to be where enthusiasm is. Employees transfer enthusiasm to customers if they’re in the right position and do their job. And when that happens, customers instill enthusiasm in other prospective buyers by spreading the word on your behalf. That carries much greater weight than any ad.

Here’s what I know for sure: the success or failure of any business revolves around the leader. To be successful, a leader needs to be doing something they really like to do. They need to know more about their business than their competition knows about their own. Remember, when times are good, anyone can make a buck. Your measure is taken by how you deal with adversity, how you solve problems, how you hang in there, and how you react. The way you do those things will determine how successful you’ll be.