Boone Pickens Quotes

Be willing to make decisions. That's the most important quality in a good leader. Don't fall victim to what I call the Ready- Aim-Aim-Aim Syndrome. You must be willing to fire

I may have been born at night, but it wasn't last night

A plan without action isn’t a plan, it’s a speech.

The First Billion is the Hardest

They throw cash at programs and expect results. And if they don’t get them, the money stops. There’s a real question as to who is actually running these programs: the school’s athletic director or the wealthy few writing the checks. All you need to do is google “T. Boone Pickens” and “Oklahoma State University” to get the general idea.

People feel ashamed of being depressed, they feel they should snap out of it, they feel weak and inadequate. Of course, these feelings are symptoms of the disease. Depression is a grave and life-threatening illness, much more common than we recognize. As far as the depressive being weak or inadequate, let me drop some names of famous depressives: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sigmund Freud. Terry Bradshaw, Drew Carey, Billy Joel, T. Boone Pickens, J. K. Rowling, Brooke Shields, Mike Wallace. Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, Mark Twain.

Boone Pickens, who cemented his fortune with bets on oil companies, said the price of oil would likely hit $75

Whenever a once powerful thing loses an advantage, it is tempting to ridicule the mistakes of its leaders. But it’s easy to overlook how many forces pull you away from a competitive advantage once you have one, specifically because you have one. Success has its own gravity. “The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more you can see his ass,” oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens used to say. Five big things tend to eat away at competitive advantages. One is that being right instills confidence that you can’t be wrong, which is a devastating characteristic in a world where outlier success has a target on its back, with competitors in tow. Size is associated with success, success is associated with hubris, and hubris is the beginning of the end of success.

It was as if the Reagans felt the rules were never meant to apply strictly to them or to the people who worked for their administration. But in a decade whose cultural heroes included Donald Trump, Lee Iacocca, and T. Boone Pickens, Jr., Reagan's blurring of the distinctions between wealth and commonwealth caused him no political damage. If anything, it simply underlined the extent to which he was the consummate man of his time.