Patrick Bet David Quotes

Close your eyes. Focus on making yourself feel excited, powerful. Imagine yourself destroying goals with ease.

Your vision must align with who you want to be. Your choices must align with your vision. Your effort must align with the size of your vision. Your behavior must align with your values and principles.

Every master, both in chess and in business, learns more from studying the moves that led to defeat than the ones that led to victory.

If you always make the right decision, the safe decision, the one most people make, you will be the same as everyone else.

You're going to use experiences to become either bitter or better. To get better you must reflect on your mistakes.

The downside is that a person spends $20 to watch that hero instead of being that hero himself.

Studying others gives us knowledge, but studying yourself ultimately leads to an incredible amount of freedom.

The less your business depends on you, the more valuable it is. The more your business depends on you, the less valuable it is. There’s no exit opportunity if the business relies on your personality.

You must act like a great company (or a great entrepreneur/intrapreneur) long before you ever become one.

Your anger at others dies out once you see that no one but you controls your fate.

A talented entrepreneur with bad habits eventually becomes an employee. An average employee with great habits can eventually become a great entrepreneur.

The most dangerous unhappy people I’ve met are those who are both extremely ambitious and extremely lazy. What this combination produces is envy, which is a deadly sin that will make your life a living hell. These are people who think big and want to do something big, but they’re not willing to put in the work to earn it. They’ll cheat. They’ll throw you under the bus. They’re constantly looking for shortcuts. And if someone else has what they want, it eats away at their very soul. If someone is winning at a higher level than you are, either lower your expectations to match your work ethic or increase your work ethic to exceed your expectations. If you do neither, you’ll be miserable. What it all boils down to is that alignment is the key to fulfillment

Change will come ONLY when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.” —​Dora Lee Scott

If experts say you have ADHD use that God-given gift to ignore naysayers. Learn to use your crutches in life as secret weapons.” — Patrick Bet-David

I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion. —Alexander the Great

I cannot teach you desire. If you prefer to avoid hard work, if you feel no desire to do something important with your life, there’s not much I can do for you.

When you study the most important person (you), you will begin to learn how to conquer the most important person who is holding you back (you).

Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” — Napoleon Hill

Any entrepreneur who wants to stay sane needs to let go of the silly notion that challenges are scary. Challenges never stop coming, so you’d better learn to love them and thrive on them. Every struggle is an opportunity to grow and improve.

increase your income is a formula. If you’re not fulfilled and happy with the current results in different areas of your life, it’s most likely due to your needing to make some adjustments in some of the formulas you’ve been using for a while.

If you use too much leverage and overplay your hand to maximize your profit from a particular deal, you may win the battle but lose the war.

The person who really has the leverage is the person who needs the deal the least.

If you can walk away from a deal, you’re in the best position to negotiate the best terms.

We never feel completely ready for life’s big decisions; but in taking the leap, we push ourselves to the next level.

In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.

Studying yourself helps you reach self-acceptance, which liberates you from self-judgment.

You really need to get clear about what you can sacrifice and what you absolutely will not sacrifice.

People who don’t think more than one move ahead are driven by ego, emotion, and fear.

Reading an hour a day is only 4% of your day. But that 4% will put you at the top of your field within 10 years. Find the time.

Wealth and success are not waiting for most of us at the top of anyone else’s ladder. A richer life—financially, emotionally, intellectually—is possible only when you take responsibility for your own success.

You are going to have to endure more anguish than you can imagine to get there. Those who can tolerate pain the most—the ones with the most endurance—give themselves the highest chance of winning in business.

You want to choose a path that puts the odds of winning in your favor; in poker, it’s called game selection. What determines if you win in any game (or business) isn’t how good you are; it’s how good you are relative to your competition. That’s why it’s so important to know your own strengths and weaknesses and find a market in which you have an inherent advantage.

What determines if you win in any game (or business) isn’t how good you are; it’s how good you are relative to your competition. That’s why it’s so important to know your own strengths and weaknesses and find a market in which you have an inherent advantage.

What it all boils down to is that alignment is the key to fulfillment. Keep these things in mind: Your vision must align with who you want to be. Your choices must align with your vision. Your effort must align with the size of your vision. Your behavior must align with your values and principles.

I came to Canada as a teenager with no money, no contacts, and no knowledge of English.

If ONE out of 15 ideas succeed that’s better than 99% of your friends who never start a single idea.

Don't buy things you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you don't like it.

A good Instagram account is better than day game and standing in the mall doing cold approaches.

Going silent during a crisis is an example of making the easy choice instead of the effective choice.

Without passion you don’t have energy, without energy you have nothing.” — Donald Trump

If you want to get to the top, there’s always the risk that it will isolate you from other people.

Awareness shows you that you are at the center of all your problems (and solutions).

If Shawn notices envy creeping in, it will be a powerful indicator that he should reexamine his goals.

When you’ve decided what your best life looks like and execute that vision, you won’t be envious.

Don’t underestimate the power of shame to motivate you.

Building trust in employees and partners creates profitable alliances, speeds up all parts of your business, and helps you sleep at night.

I believe that having questions is better than having answers because it leads to more learning.

After all, isn’t the point of learning to help you get what you want? Don’t you have to start with what you want and figure out what you have to learn in order to get it?

it’s foolish to believe you can win at somebody else’s game.

Before you climb the next mountain or conquer your next demon… Take a moment to acknowledge and celebrate your wins!

I knew I always wanted to be 50 percent social media and 50 percent traditional media. Because I believe the stars of the future will need both.

I believe you should focus your life on observing the little things because one day you look back and realize they were the big things.

True wealth is being able to drop whatever it is your doing and go do something else or travel somewhere else without any worry.

If the people around you are giving you advice to slow down or to take it easy – you are surrounded by the wrong people.

You just get pickier. I think that's true of everything. Money, toys, girls - all the hedonistic stuff. You just raise the bar

the key to an organization’s long-term success is its practice of accountability and the degree to which its leaders hold themselves and their teams accountable for the decisions they make.

The irony is that each time you step up, you have to start at the bottom. The king of grade school becomes low man on the totem pole the day he goes to middle school. When he finally climbs back up to the top of the ladder, high school starts and he’s back at the bottom again. Your career is going to feel similar: each time you advance, you’ll officially be at the bottom of the next level.

Last, keep that chart of what drives people close by. Remember that everyone is motivated by different things and that your job as a leader is not to drive them (or, worse, fix them), it’s to understand

The moment you understand who you will have to spend the rest of your life with and learn to accept it, you’ll eliminate self-judgment, which will empower you to make more bold moves. It will minimize overthinking and increase execution.

Processing Steps to Take When Someone Ticks You Off 1. Take responsibility for your role in what happened. 2. State specifically what you did to create the problem. 3. Channel your frustration into getting better and preventing future problems.

In his insightful book Principles: Life and Work, Ray Dalio said, “I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.

Envy is an indicator that alerts you if you’re being honest with yourself. If you can look at someone who has things you don’t and say, “You know what. I really don’t want that,” you know you’re in a good place. If you say you don’t want something but don’t mean it, envy will eat away at you. What it’s telling you is that you really do want it but are afraid to work for it.

I’ve met many unfulfilled, unhappy people. The most dangerous unhappy people I’ve met are those who are both extremely ambitious and extremely lazy. What this combination produces is envy, which is a deadly sin that will make your life a living hell. These are people who think big and want to do something big, but they’re not willing to put in the work to earn it. They’ll cheat. They’ll throw you under the bus. They’re constantly looking for shortcuts. And if someone else has what they want, it eats away at their very soul.

Traits of Companies That Attract Intrapreneurs 1. Their executives are comfortable taking calculated risks and encouraging creativity. 2. Their compensation plan incentivizes innovation and outstanding performers. 3. Their executives play offense (improve) instead of just playing defense (cover their asses). 4. Their executives elevate potential stars rather than hold them back. 5. Their executives actively seek out ideas from all layers of the organization. 6. Their executives actively look for young talent to keep the company vibrant and innovative.

What differentiates mediocre people from exceptional ones is how deeply they process. Most people are surface-level processors, but the best of the best go much deeper. Long-term thinking versus short-term thinking is the difference between a grand master and an amateur. Surface-level processors are looking for a quick fix. They are thinking only one move ahead, and their goal is to make the issue disappear for now. Deep-level processors look beneath the surface for causes. They are thinking several moves ahead and planning a sequence of moves to make sure the issue doesn’t happen again.

received a message on LinkedIn from an IBM executive who wrote, “Pat, I’ve been at IBM for a while and I have been following your content for a few years. I make good money, but I really want to be an entrepreneur. However, I have a wife and three kids and I’m kind of worried about them. What should I do?” We emailed back and forth for a while, and I asked him questions about who he wanted to be. He began to see that intrapreneurship looked like the ideal choice for him. This is when you’re part of a company and create a new business unit, lead a new initiative, or work out incentives that reward you for driving growth and innovation. In some cases, it might just mean being so indispensable that a company has to pay you equity to retain you.

Roger Banister said his 4:03.6 mile in 1953 “made [him] realize that the four-minute mile was not out of reach.” Part of daring to achieve the impossible is letting failure motivate you rather than discourage you.

It’s not playing while hurt itself that separates us from the rest; it’s how we choose to play while hurt.

Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process.

When you decide on the award in advance of achieving your dream, you are programming your mind to believe I’m willing to pay a price because this reward is going to happen.

You can’t build a world-class headquarters or license the slickest software until you have cash flow.

A phrase I use all the time is future truth. It means to live in the present as if your future truth has already become a reality.

Despite what some people would have you believe, no one is born a salesperson. Stop trying to find “naturals.” Rather than looking for salespeople, look for people who believe in your vision and want to build relationships.

I mean that every day you fight for something, every day you live according to your future truth, every day you guide people to be their best, you will feel the rewards.

Everybody likes you until you’re a competitor, especially if you’re a formidable one.

I don’t get excited about ideas. I get excited about entrepreneurs. I don’t put my faith in technology. I put it in a CEO.

What holds people back is the fear of being judged.

Stop trying to fix people. Thinking you can change or fix people is delusional behavior. When I started in business, I was guilty of this

An amateur panics, but a grand master doesn’t.

Know how to process issues.

People who don’t think more than one move ahead are driven by ego, emotion, and fear. Your top salesman threatens to quit if you don’t give him a raise. The emotional amateur responds by saying “Nobody threatens me” or “We don’t need him anyway.” The practical strategist, on the other hand, is plotting his next moves.

Choose a new and more powerful enemy. The process never ends which is why you must graduating to new enemies. When most people reach a certain level of success, they flatline. Without new enemies to drive them, not only do they get complacent, but they also stop solidifying each building block.

If there is one guarantee in life, it is that there will be heartbreak and then more heartbreak. People will let you down, and it will hurt more when it is people you love and trust...

If you’re going to lose, don’t lose the lesson.

#15 “Reading an hour a day is only 4% of your day. But that 4% will put you at the top of your field within 10 years. Find the time.” -Patrick Bet-David

Winners also use phrases such as “This mistake is on me” and “We have no one to blame but ourselves.

Contrast victims to winners. They are easy to spot. They’re the ones who take ownership of issues.

A pro who has been processing issues for decades understands that nobody does anything to him without his allowing it.

And don’t tell me that we have only one option. If you think that, you’ll inflate rather than stretch your dollars.

Those who have a system for making better decisions win. Some decisions are quick, while others take time.

Investment Time Return (ITR) is a tool that becomes more valuable the more you use

IT projects almost always take longer and cost more money than you expect. You need to err on the conservative side when making your time and cost assumptions.

The Latin root of the word “decision” means “to cut off.” When you make a decision, you are cut off from taking some other course of action. Now, that may sound limiting, but it’s not; it’s liberating.

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team. —Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn

No matter what your line of work, staying successful means working well with other people, whether they are clients, customers, employees, investors, partners, or outside vendors.

Senna once said in an now famous interview, "Being a racing driver means you are racing with other peeople and if you no longer go for a [pass] that exists, you are no longer a racing driver because we are competing - - competing to win and the  main motivation for all of us is to compete for victory, not to come finish 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th.

You cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.” — Albert Einstein

Reading English frustrated me back then, but I could not get enough of numbers. For hours and hours, I pored over box scores like a mad scientist. Of all the sports, on paper at least, baseball presented the most perplexing puzzle.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting freedom, but it may feel empty once you’ve attained it.

This book is about taking the vision and mindset of a chess master and applying it to business.