You have to see the pattern, understand the order and experience the vision.

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!

A martial arts practice hall, a dojo, is a place you go to practice being the best you can be. But the true combat in a dojo is not between one person and another as most people believe it to be. The true combat in a martial arts practice hall is between the people within ourselves.

The true start-up of a business is what happens before you start-up.

Organize around business functions, not people. Build systems within each business function. Let systems run the business and people run the systems. People come and go but the systems remain constant.

Systems permit ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results predictably.

The problem with most failing businesses is not that their owners don?t know enough about finance, marketing, management, and operations - they don?t, but those things are easy enough to learn - but that they spend their time and energy defending what they think they know. My experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren?t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.