If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.
Paul NewmanRead
I wasn't running toward the theater but running away from the sporting goods store. Of course now that I'm selling spaghetti sauce (with Newman's Own), I begin to understand the romance of business.. the allure of being the biggest fish in the pond and the juice you get from beating out your competitors.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the transition from a conventional career path to finding passion in entrepreneurship.
Paul Newman reflects on his unexpected journey from the sporting goods industry to selling spaghetti sauce, illustrating how business can be both a romantic venture and a competitor-driven landscape. He acknowledges the excitement and thrill that comes from competition in the business world, likening it to being the 'biggest fish in the pond' while recognizing the allure that drives entrepreneurs.
In practice
This quote could be used in a business seminar to inspire entrepreneurs.
If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.
Twenty-five years ago I couldn`t walk down the street without being recognized. Now I can put a cap on, walk anywhere and no one pays me any attention. They don`t ask me about my movies and they don`t ask me about my salad dressing because they don`t know who I am. Am I happy about this? You bet.
A dollar won is twice as sweet as a dollar earned.
I like racing but food and pictures are more thrilling. I can't give them up. In racing you can be certain, to the last thousandth of a second, that someone is the best, but with a film or a recipe, there is no way of knowing how all the ingredients will work out in the end. The best can turn out to be awful and the worst can be fantastic. Cooking is like performing and performing like cooking.
Dreams without movement are delusions, escapes, kid’s play. You have to put your feet into your dreams if they’re ever going to be reality. The dreamers we know and love today are the ones who worked the hardest
I respect generosity in people, and I respect it in companies too, I don't look at it as philanthropy; I see it as an investment in the community.
In the vast majority of businesses, there is simply no such thing as “the best.”
When we started the e-commerce, nobody believed that China would have e-commerce because people believed in 'guang-shi,' face-to-face, and all kinds of network in traditional ways. There's no trust system in China.
It's so important for startups to get their culture right at the start. They need to feel unique and that they are on their own important mission in the world.
Growth makes management easier. In particular, it makes making labor concessions seem easy. It's when growth stops because you're being disrupted that managing becomes really, really hard, and as a result, most disrupted companies simply disappear.
Business is what concerns us. If you care about something enough to do something about it, you're in business
If you want to invest in us, we believe customer number one, employee number two, shareholder number three. If they don't want to buy that, that's fine. If they regret, they can sell us.
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