“
When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
“
Advertising is like a stock market for your business investment.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Many invest wisely in business matters, but fail to invest time and interest in their most valued possessions: their spouses and children.
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Billy Graham (Nearing Home: Life, Faith, and Finishing Well)
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[on the future of hand-drawn animation] I'm actually not that worried. I wouldn't give up on it completely. Once in a while there are strange, rich people who like to invest in odd things. You're going to have people in the corners of garages making cartoons to please themselves. And I'm more interested in those people than I am in big business.
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Hayao Miyazaki
“
The best way to protect an asset is with systems that self organize and self execute behaviors which function as protective to the asset.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
At Mayflower-Plymouth, we like to invest holistically. We consider profitability, we consider peoples wellbeing, we consider the environment and so much more.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Marketing is an investment. Don’t treat it like sales.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.
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Warren Buffett
“
War is good business Invest your son
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Allen Ginsberg (The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971)
“
Equity without income is unnatural.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
The best gift you can give to yourself is to invest in yourself.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
To make sure you don’t run out of your funds before your business starts generating a profit, you need to practice caution on how you plan to spend your limited money.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Marketing is an investment that generally generates long term results.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
Our Investments should be consistent with our values.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
“
Paying more attention to the needs of students becomes way more important than any other investment.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
Investing in things that will give you long term growth is always a good idea.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Unrealistic profit projections are not going to win you the trust of your investors.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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When you invest in your employees’ development, they’ll spend their skills in your company’s development.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
poor cash planning leads to a loss of investment.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
If you'd like to gain a better understanding of investment yield, get into gardening.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
When we look at asset protection from a natural perspective, we realize that in nature, assets are protected not with fences or walls but with internal and external immune systems. So the best way to protect an asset is with systems that self organize and self execute behaviors which function as protective to the asset.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
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Never depend on single income. Make investment to create a second source.
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Warren Buffett
“
If you'd like to gain a better understanding of Return On Investment, get into gardening.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Mayflower-Plymouth is a company, and it's an ecosystem. We are an Investment Holdings company that holds mostly small and medium sized businesses in our portfolio. And we also provide a variety of resources and business services such as consulting - in the interest of helping businesses to be better.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
We need a moderately-priced stock market… The market, like the Lord, helps those who help themselves. But, unlike the Lord, the market does not forgive those who know not what they do. For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments.
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Warren Buffett
“
The basic and most fundamental element to business is creating value - creating value for others and making their lives better in some way. If you can do that, put a price on it, communicate it clearly and get it to buyers….. you’re in business.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Trust is like insurance—it’s an investment you need to make up front, before the need arises.
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Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
“
Our Investments should be consistent with our values.
It’s simple. If we value health, we shouldn’t have our money plugged into businesses and systems that promote disease. If we value spirituality, we shouldn’t have our money plugged into businesses and systems that promote a perversion of the spirit.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
If you wanna learn about investment yield, go meditate in a forest.
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”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Before we invest, we ask ourselves ’What kind of value is this business creating and how do its customers and prospective customers appraise that value?
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
The utilization of productive assets is what investing is about.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
In addition to building a strong team, you also have to motivate that team when their spirits are down, show your pride in them when they perform well, and be there when they make mistakes. You have to invest in their training and start treating them as partners in your business’ success.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
If you can’t communicate it, you can’t file a proper application. If you can’t file properly, you can’t secure a patent.
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JiNan George (The IP Miracle: How to Transform Ideas into Assets that Multiply Your Business)
“
One of the most important types of decision making is deciding what you are not going to do, what you need to eliminate in order to make room for strategic investments.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
“
Being an investor is very different than being an entrepreneur or businessperson. They require different skill sets. They aren’t the same.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
Our Investments should be consistent with our values.
If we value the environment, we should have our money invested in businesses and systems that improve the condition of the environment and add value to nature. If we value health, we should have our money invested in businesses and systems that help people to live healthier lives in some way.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Businesses are at all times and in different ways accountable to employees, suppliers, customers and community.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
A business is like a living being. It’s more of a process than a stagnant thing. The way you manage your business today shouldn’t be the same way you managed it ten years ago or even ten months ago. Because your business should have evolved and changed and adapted in some way during that time - just like living beings evolve and change and adapt to their environments.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Arbitrage is not investing.
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”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Business management requires its own skill set separate from being skilled at whatever service or product the business provides.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Warren Buffett said that he would not invest in any business where the owner hasn’t failed at least twice. I love that truly wealthy and successful people understand that failure is part of the process.
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Steve Harvey (Act Like a Success, Think Like a Success: Discovering Your Gift and the Way to Life's Riches)
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The first priority of the business is to add value to the customers lives, in exchange for payment.
At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business figure this out, and to provide holistic solutions.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Time Progression: Wasting >>Spending >> Managing >> Investing
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Elizabeth Grace Saunders (The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment: Achieve More Success with Less Stress: Foreword by Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can't Ignore You)
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Business ideas are sensitive to market conditions, culture, technological development and other things. What maybe was a bad business idea ten years ago may be a great business idea today. Give it a try. Mayflower Plymouth.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Invest in the future because that is where you are going to spend the rest of your life.
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Habeeb Akande
“
If you wanna better understand capital productivity, study trees. They can turn a bare plot of earth into massive amounts of materials consistently and endlessly. Imagine if we can mimic that in business and investing.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
If you run a business, it’s essential that you love whatever the business is selling. What you have with the business is similar to what you have with any other relationship - it will experience more success when love and passion is poured in.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
On the Ideal Business - Buffett: “Something that costs a penny, sells for a dollar and is habit forming.
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Daniel Pecaut (University of Berkshire Hathaway: 30 Years of Lessons Learned from Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger at the Annual Shareholders Meeting)
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Be creative while inventing ideas, but be disciplined while implementing them.
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Amit Kalantri
“
I don't waste food, water, money, time and talent.
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Amit Kalantri
“
Leaders who want to show sensitivity should listen often and long and talk short and seldom. Many so-called leaders are too busy to listen. True leaders know that time spent listening is well invested.
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J. Oswald Sanders (Spiritual Leadership (Commitment To Spiritual Growth))
“
To hedge effectively, you have to reject the silo mentality and instead embrace the systems thinking mentality.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Nature is great at hedging investments. Nature doesn’t hedge by betting for and against the same things. Nature hedges by cultivating resilience.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
There's a quick and easy way to test whether an activity involves skill: ask whether you can lose on purpose.
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Michael J. Mauboussin (The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing)
“
The richest people in the world build networks and invest in people; everyone else looks for work and invests in survival.
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Abhysheq Shukla (KISS Life "Life is what you make it")
“
If a business isn’t efficiently utilizing resources, then it’s a bad investment. A wasteful business is an unprofitable business. That may or may not show on their P&L for the current year, but you better believe it shows somewhere.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
It’s better to have one huge filing with lots of detail, data, and use cases than a dozen failed filings of five to ten pages each. Minimum filing requirements are not minimum requirements to secure a patent. Who does your patent keep out, and how? Your goal in creating IP is for it to be valuable, to be connected to the company, to be linked to your products or service, and to keep out competitors.
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JiNan George (The IP Miracle: How to Transform Ideas into Assets that Multiply Your Business)
“
At Mayflower-Plymouth, we like to invest multiple kinds of Capital into businesses — financial capital, social capital, intellectual capital and more. We have a holistic approach to investing and Asset Management.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
All I do know is that the plant manager himself took me outside to the gate, waved down a passing police open-top jeep, greased the palm of the officer who was driving, and pushed me into the back next to a man dressed in camouflage with an automatic rifle on his lap. Sirens blaring, I was driven to the airport, scared out of my skin.
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”
Oliver Dowson (There's No Business Like International Business: Business Travel – But Not As You Know It)
“
If a product’s future is unlikely to be remarkable – if you can’t imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product – it’s time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.
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Seth Godin (Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable)
“
I presumably lost $150,000 in the depression of 1937—on my one stock investment—because I did everything Lehman Brothers told me. I said, well, this is a fool’s procedure . . . buying stock in other people’s businesses.
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Studs Terkel (Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression)
“
Real investors talk more about business than about stock prices. Real investors are reading company P&L statements and Balance Sheets and getting on Earnings Calls. Real investors are learning about customers and attending meetings and getting involved.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Many people object to “wasting money in space” yet have no idea how much is actually spent on space exploration. The CSA’s budget, for instance, is less than the amount Canadians spend on Halloween candy every year, and most of it goes toward things like developing telecommunications satellites and radar systems to provide data for weather and air quality forecasts, environmental monitoring and climate change studies. Similarly, NASA’s budget is not spent in space but right here on Earth, where it’s invested in American businesses and universities, and where it also pays dividends, creating new jobs, new technologies and even whole new industries.
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Chris Hadfield (An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth)
“
I think I screamed. She certainly did. I started to walk away, she followed. We continued to scream at each other. We were in the middle of a busy square. People stopped to look at us. A lot of people. I wonder now what they thought. That Jin-Ae was my wife? My lover? Surely not an ambitious employee haranguing her boss!
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Oliver Dowson
“
Businesses need to save and invest just like individual people do. Every business should be accumulating capital and cultivating growth.
At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business figure this out, and to provide holistic solutions.
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”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Sonny would tell Marcus about how America used to lock up black men off the sidewalks for labor or how redlining kept banks from investing in black neighborhoods, preventing mortgages or business loans. So was it a wonder that prisons were still full of them? Was it a wonder that the ghetto was the ghetto?
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Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing)
“
IP is an intangible asset—an idea converted into transferable personal property rights through patents, trademarks, copyrights, service marks, and trade secrets. IP covers every famous animated character you’ve ever heard of, the logos on your clothing. IP covers products and services you use every day—from flashlights to mobile phones, packaging to cars, food and beverage products, to smart thermostats. IP is not only for big businesses. Most start-ups and event microbusinesses have IP of some kind.
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JiNan George (The IP Miracle: How to Transform Ideas into Assets that Multiply Your Business)
“
Efficiency is a major key to business success. It’s good when a business can do more with less. Not out of scarcity but out of efficiency. When a business does more with less, the result is more revenues produced from less investment… More revenues produced with less expenses… more customers attracted with less marketing activity…. More savings with less trade-off… Businesses that do more with less are rewarded with greater profits and greater capital.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
“
A business that doesn’t respect human life, animal life and the ecosystem of our planet earth… that’s a business we don’t want in our portfolio. If the business does more harm than good, facilitates more death than life, and causes more destruction than creation… then we view them as a bad investment.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
No matter how busy we may believe we are, we have the wonderful opportunity presently of investing time with loved ones. For those are the great investments we will be glad we made, when time begins to slow and the ability to tend turns tender.
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”
Tom Althouse (The Frowny Face Cow)
“
Sir Gerald Moore: I was at dinner last evening, and halfway through the pudding, this four-year-old child came alone, dragging a little toy cart. And on the cart was a fresh turd. Her own, I suppose. The parents just shook their heads and smiled. I've made a big investment in you, Peter. Time and money, and it's not working. Now, I could just shake my head and smile. But in my house, when a turd appears, we throw it out. We dispose of it. We flush it away. We don't put it on the table and call it caviar.
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Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities)
“
At Mayflower-Plymouth, we approach Asset Management from a network and systems perspective as opposed to from just an entity perspective. We learn from nature and we look at how the mycorrhiza network is a manager of Capital and an allocator of Capital, both a means and a method - and we try to operate in the same way.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
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Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma with Award-Winning Harvard Business Review Article ?How Will You Measure Your Life?? (2 Items))
“
The code-of-ethics playlist:
o Treat your colleagues, family, and friends with respect, dignity, fairness, and courtesy.
o Pride yourself in the diversity of your experience and know that you have a lot to offer.
o Commit to creating and supporting a world that is free of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.
o Have balance in your life and help others to do the same.
o Invest in yourself, achieve ongoing enhancement of your skills, and continually upgrade your abilities.
o Be approachable, listen carefully, and look people directly in the eyes when speaking.
o Be involved, know what is expected from you, and let others know what is expected from them.
o Recognize and acknowledge achievement.
o Celebrate, relive, and communicate your successes on an ongoing basis.
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”
Lorii Myers (Targeting Success, Develop the Right Business Attitude to be Successful in the Workplace (3 Off the Tee, #1))
“
Maintaining good accounting records is vital to the successful management of a business. It's really good to be able to assess business-specific financial data to inform decisions. So every business should invest in good accounting software like Intuit, Quicken, or Freshbooks... Or any of the many apps out there.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
If you’re not filing patents, but your competitors are, all you have is risk. You’re taking a huge chance that no one else will enter your space and kick you out. That’s the benefit of patents; you don’t have to let everybody in. You can let just a few major players in because you want what they have, or you don’t want to worry about them. Remember, you’re not at the big boys’ lunch table. But if you partner with their competitor, they’ll be worried. Then they’ll want to see if your patent protection is strong or if they can exploit a weakness.
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JiNan George (The IP Miracle: How to Transform Ideas into Assets that Multiply Your Business)
“
...After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are the moving impulses of our life. But it is only those who do not understand our people, who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.
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”
Calvin Coolidge
“
Suddenly, ahead of us, a group of men ran out of the forest and pulled a thick rope across the road. There was no time to look at them properly, but they didn’t look friendly. I still don’t know why, but my reflex reaction was to foot the accelerator and drive straight through – never a good idea on a dirt track, except perhaps for rally drivers. I’m not sure who was more surprised, me or them, but I found myself looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing men lying on the road, I suppose pulled down by the force of the rope.
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”
Oliver Dowson (There's No Business Like International Business: Business Travel – But Not As You Know It)
“
Nature is great at hedging. All kinds of natural disasters can hit a forest - from hurricanes to heat waves to floods to freezing temperatures - and yet the forest can remain intact and continue to thrive year after year and decade after decade. At Mayflower-Plymouth we aim to hedge our funds the way nature hedges - by cultivating resilience through systems design.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
So, putting my faith in other passengers who told me it was definitely going to the city, I boarded a bus and spent well over an hour standing, swaying and trying to look out of the window to guess where we were. Traffic was solid, as expected. When we moved, we crawled. Eventually the bus reached somewhere that seemed significant – at least, somewhere a lot of people were getting off – and, sure enough, I was in the city, and there were taxis. The wrong side of the city, as it transpired, so a long taxi ride ensued. Nearly four hours from leaving the factory to reaching the hotel. I wasn’t doing that again.
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”
Oliver Dowson (There's No Business Like International Business: Business Travel – But Not As You Know It)
“
No,” I whisper. “You said I wasn’t invested that night. And you were right. I wasn’t. I wasn’t invested in anything. Not the job, not JD, not the business, not even you. So I had to let you go, Blue. Because you deserve better than that. You deserve the kind of love that has no conditions. You deserve the kind of love that’s free. You deserve devotion. So I left so I could find a way to give you all those things.
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”
J.A. Huss (Three, Two, One (321))
“
With managing a business, you need to Invest in good software and or good data mining systems. Run your numbers routinely. Take a look at your revenues - when is the money typically coming in, from where, can you identify any patterns in your revenues? Then take a look at your expenses - analyze the numbers and identify patterns. Why? Because Identifying patterns and extracting actionable items from your revenue and expense data will result in the clarity you need to make good business decisions.
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”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
“
If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people… Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue
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”
Jeff Bezos
“
The most important thing to understand is that while we courted, Americans dated, a pragmatic custom whereby a male and a female set a mutually agreeable time to meet, as if to negotiate a potentially profitable business venture. Americans understood dating to be about investments and gains, short or long term , but we saw romance and courtship as being about losses. After all, the only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.
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”
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1))
“
If you are investing in your education and you are learning, you should do that as early as you possibly can, because then it will have time to compound over the longest period.
And that the things you do learn and invest in should be knowledge that is cumulative, so that the knowledge builds on itself.
So instead of learning something that might become obsolete tomorrow, like some particular type of software [that no one even uses two years later], choose things that will make you smarter in 10 or 20 years.
”
”
Warren Buffett
“
Profit is good.
Profit compells people to be:
(a) efficient - to do more with less, to consume fewer resources, to reduce and reuse waste.
(b) productive - to allow for bigger profit margins.
(c) Valuable - income, and therefore profit is only possible when we add value to our customers lives. When the value of our product or service is worth more to them than what it cost us to provide it, we profit.
And there’s no scarcity of possible profits. Every business should be profiting. When every business is profiting, that’s a lot of increased value going around.
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”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
In this modern era, Panama should be considering new ways to invest in and profit from global commerce, logistics and supply chains. It's not just about widening the canal, but widening the ways in which the nation can add value to and extract value from the movement of products and services globally.
I'm a citizen of Panama just like I am of The US and The Bahamas. So I'd like to see Panama's evolution with this.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Companies that are made up of clusters of leaders will actually accelerate their growth by speeding up their rate of innovation as their competition pulls back, build better teams by investing in people while their rivals shrink training budgets, and pick up top talent as their industry peers lay people off. And so fast companies get that unsettling times are actually gifts for them and periods to get so far ahead of the competition that they can never catch up.
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”
Robin S. Sharma (The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in)
“
Research published in 2018 by Boston Consulting Group found that although on average female business owners receive less than half the level of investment their male counterparts get, they produce more than twice the revenue.9 For every dollar of funding, female-owned start-ups generate seventy-eight cents, compared to male-owned start-ups which generate thirty-one cents.
”
”
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
“
The names we use to describe personality traits - such as extrovert, high achiever, or paranoid - refer to the specific patterns people have used to structure their attantion. At the same party, the extrovert will seek out and enjoy interactions with others, the high achiever will look for useful business conacts, and the paranoid will be on guard for signs of danger he must avoid. Attention can be invested in innumerable ways, ways that can make life eihther rich or miserable.
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”
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
“
As important as your obligations as a doctor, lawyer or business leader will be, you are a human being first. And these human connections with spouse, with children and with friends are the most important investments you will ever make. At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict, or closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child or a parent. One thing will never change. Fathers and Mothers, if you have children, they must come first. You must read to your children, you must hug your children and you must love your children…. Your success as a family, our success as a society depends not what happens at the White House, but what happens inside YOUR house.
”
”
Barbara Bush
“
On me personally what has been the most important was to understand the value of time -- and this is something that has come from observing him, learning his story and that time compounds. What you do when you are young (and as you use time over your life) can have an exponential effect so that if you are thoughtful about it, you can really have powerful results later, if you want to.
Also, that is a reason to be hopeful, because compounding is something that happens pretty quickly. If you are 50 or 60, it is not too late. He said to me one time, if there is something you really want to do, don't put it off until you are 70 years old. ... Do it now. Don't worry about how much it costs or things like that, because you are going to enjoy it now. You don't even know what your health will be like then.
On the other hand, if you are investing in your education and you are learning, you should do that as early as you possibly can, because then it will have time to compound over the longest period. And that the things you do learn and invest in should be knowledge that is cumulative, so that the knowledge builds on itself. So instead of learning something that might become obsolete tomorrow, like some particular type of software [that no one even uses two years later], choose things that will make you smarter in 10 or 20 years. That lesson is something I use all the time now.
”
”
Alice Schroeder (The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life)
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Going forward, Panama should expand on the canal business in new ways. That means not only widening the physical canal, but investing more broadly in global logistics and supply chains. So Panamanian leadership should ask, how can we extract more value from the canal by adding more value to it. Or how can we create or plug into new platforms which facilitate global trade.
As a citizen of Panama, I'd like to see this happen.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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Reading for me, was like breathing. It was probably akin to masturbation for my brain. Getting off on the fantasy within the pages of a good novel felt necessary to my survival. If I wasn't asleep, knitting, or working, I was reading. This was for several reasons, all of them focused around the infititely superior and enviable lives of fictional heroines to real-life people.
Take romans for instance. Fictional women in romance novels never get their period. They never have morning breath. They orgasm seventeen times a day. And they never seem to have jobs with bosses.
These clean, well-satisfied, perm-minty-breathed women have fulfilling careers as florists, bakery owners, hair stylists or some other kind of adorable small business where they decorate all day. If they do have a boss, he's a cool guy (or gal) who's invested in the woman's love life. Or, he's a super hot billionaire trying to get in her pants.
My boss cares about two things: Am I on time ? Are all my patients alive and well at the end of my shift?
And the mend in the romance novels are too good to be true; but I love it, and I love them. Enter stage right the independently wealthy venture capitalist suffering from the ennui of perfection until a plucky interior decorator enters stage left and shakes up his life and his heart with perky catch phrases and a cute nose that wrinkles when she sneezes.
I suck at decorating. The walls of my apartment are bare. I am allergic to most store-bought flowers. If I owned a bakery, I'd be broke and weigh seven hundred pounds, because I love cake.
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Penny Reid (Beauty and the Mustache (Knitting in the City, #4; Winston Brothers, #0))
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THE FIVE LAWS OF GOLD I. Gold cometh gladly and in increasing quantity to any man who will put by not less than one-tenth of his earngs to create an estate for his future and that of his family. II. Gold laboreth diligently and contentedly for the wise owner who finds for it profitable employment, multiplying even as the flocks of the field. III. Gold clingeth to the protection of the cautious owner who invests it under the advice of men wise in its handling. IV. Gold slippeth away from the man who invests it in businesses or purposes with which he is not familiar or which are not approved by those skilled in its keep. V. Gold flees the man who would force it to impossible earnings or who followeth the alluring advice of tricksters and schemers or who trusts it to his own inexperience and romantic desires in investment.
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George S. Clason (The Richest Man in Babylon)
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The assault on education began more than a century ago by industrialists and capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie. In 1891, Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.” The industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has a right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness… is those who are useful.” The arrival of industrialists on university boards of trustees began as early as the 1870s and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business offered the first academic credential in business administration in 1881. The capitalists, from the start, complained that universities were unprofitable. These early twentieth century capitalists, like heads of investment houses and hedge-fund managers, were, as Donoghue writes “motivated by an ethically based anti-intellectualism that transcended interest in the financial bottom line. Their distrust of the ideal of intellectual inquiry for its own sake, led them to insist that if universities were to be preserved at all, they must operate on a different set of principles from those governing the liberal arts.
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Chris Hedges (Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle)
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A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact, and say: “This is not just.” It will look across the oceans and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing to prevent us from paying adequate wages to schoolteachers, social workers and other servants of the public to insure that we have the best available personnel in these positions which are charged with the responsibility of guiding our future generations. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
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Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (King Legacy Book 2))
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The Profit function: Individual profits cause collective growth and prosperity. It is necessary for individual people and businesses to profit in a Permaculture Economy where justice is maintained and fairly applied. Profits are earned when efficiency is mastered. With profits, individuals invest in (a) new and innovative means of production which will allow more profits, or (b) buying products and services from other individuals who are also seeking profit by providing value.
Profits also incentivize individuals to be productive participants in society to begin with. If there will be no profit in an activity, business or industry, then individuals will decline participation in that activity, business or industry. Since profits are only possible when buyers are satisfied with the productivity of sellers, then it is also true that an individuals willingness to participate in an activity, business or industry is preceded by the buyers satisfaction which allows the seller to profit. But when buyers are dissatisfied and decline participation, it forces sellers to decline participation. Inversely, if profits are eradicated through the force of price-controls by the government, then sellers will decline participation which then causes buyers to decline participation. And when both sellers and buyers decline participation, then whole industries and economies collapse.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Principles of a Permaculture Economy)
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Individual profits cause collective growth and prosperity. It is necessary for individual people, businesses, and companies to profit, in a Permaculture Economy where justice is maintained and fairly applied. Profits are earned when efficiency is mastered. With profits, individuals invest in (a) new and innovative means of production which will allow more profits, or (b) they use profits to buy products or services from other individuals who are also seeking profit by providing value. Profits also incentivize individuals to be productive to begin with. If there will be no profit in an activity, business or industry, then individuals will decline participation. Since profits are only possible when buyers are satisfied with the productivity of sellers, then it is also true that an individual's willingness to participate in an activity, business or industry is preceded by the buyers satisfaction which allows them to profit. So, when buyers decline participation it forces sellers to decline participation. Inversely, if profits are removed through force of price controls by the government, then sellers will decline participation which then causes buyers to decline participation.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Principles of a Permaculture Economy)