Dan Gilbert quotes: quote quickies from Mr. Quicken Loans.
“If we truly believe in something, we can – and will – affect the outcome. If we believe in ourselves first, we dramatically increase our odds of success. If we believe it can happen, then it will.”
“It takes both ideas and execution to make things happen. Great ideas get you to the 50-yard line; outstanding execution gets you into the end zone.”
“You will always invest your time somewhere doing something. As long as you are alive, it’s not a choice whether you invest your time or not; the only choice is what you will do with it. Time, not money, is the most valuable commodity of all. Time can never be replaced. Never trade significant amounts of time for small sums of money. How will you invest the 31,536,000 seconds you are gifted each year? Choose wisely.”
“Your uncle’s advice, ‘A penny saved is a penny earned!’ is the worst financial advice ever given in history. Choose to value your time. Invest it chasing pennies, and you will find pennies – and pennies never add up. Invest it in ideas, improving your skills, innovation, developing your talent, design, marketing, and technology, and your return will be more than just pennies. Stop wasting your time with the silly pursuit of pennies. Instead, invest your valuable time creating dollars. The choice is yours.”
“Money and numbers are a measurement of actions. They are neither the ends nor the means. Ironically, the vast majority of those who chase money will never end up with much of it. Instead, chase the skills that will make you great. Those who are motivated by building, improving and developing unique skills, trades and knowledge are the ones who acquire wealth. Become an expert. Pursue your vision with uncompromising passion, and become the best. Numbers and money follow successful accomplishments. Become great at something or build something great. Chasing numbers and money first will leave you chasing your tail.”
“The basis of all wealth is found in the strength of the relationships you make. Create them. Seek them out. Build upon them. Be loyal to them. If your level of awareness is high, you will find an endless amount of ‘dog food’ around you. The more you give to these relationships, the more you will get from them. So start giving – now.”
“Sometimes the ‘intellects’ of the world believe that if it’s too simple, it can’t be good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Simplifying things in this fast-moving, complicated world isn’t just good – it’s great. Simple design. Simple process. Simple communication. When we communicate with others, we cannot assume they know exactly what we know. You are you, and they are them. We must start at chapter one, not chapter five. Simplicity doesn’t just clarify; it creates wealth in the process. Because if there is anything in this world that everyone can agree upon… it’s that simplicity makes things better for everybody.”
“The high road is not a shortcut. Stick to the highest standard of integrity, without compromise. Character is what you do when no one is looking over your shoulder! Doing the wrong thing is never worth it. How can you go wrong doing the right thing? Remember, eventually three things always come out: the sun, the moon and the truth.”
“We live in the land of growth, possibilities, ideas, innovation, positive impact and results. The only path to that place is through openness to the unknown. So ‘yes’ before ‘no,’ and ‘no’ only if we have done the work and exhausted all the potential of ‘yes’ first.”
“There’s nobody you can point to in the world that doesn’t make a mistake. The best players, the best businesspeople, the best coaches – so one thing is not going to make or break a person.”
“In today’s world, social media, people get judged so much by the last thing that happened, I almost feel, in a way, young people get to see that not only is it okay to fail – that’s the way you get to championship success, whether it’s sports or business or life.”
“Your passion and drive for greatness in all that you do is going to act as a formidable force that will counter the natural state of chaos. The nearly infinite possibilities in any given situation of random outcomes outnumber the handful of outcomes that you would interpret as order or progress. There are so many more ways for things to be f’ed up than not f’ed up.”
“On this planet, there is no perfection. If you chose to end relationships because of one mistake, you’re going to be alone.”
“You can see a lot just by looking. Keep your head up. Look. Be curious. Notice what is actually happening around you. Really notice. Listen. Listen to your clients. In fact, listen to everyone. Everything starts with awareness. Being alert. Being awake. Tuning in to the frequency. It’s a perpetual choice to both stay aware and raise your level of awareness.”
“The first thing is to hang on to everybody who is talented, who is entrepreneurial, who wants to make an impact and a change… and start attracting ones.”
“If a company does one big thing better than their competition, it becomes fairly easy for their competition to level the playing field: they can just imitate that one thing. But, if a company does thousands of little things better than anyone else, they become nearly impossible to imitate. We call those thousands of little things ‘inches.’ We’d never be able to foresee all the things that should be noticed or improved. Instead, we drive a culture that motivates our team members to find the inches we need all around us. We are all empowered to find the opportunities to make an impact everywhere; one inch at a time, these inches all add up to greatness.”
“We’ve found it’s not always skill and long hours that lead to greatness. It’s also the ability to ignore the noise. Noise could be from naysayers, something going wrong, sun in your eyes, ball took a bad bounce, dog ate your homework, someone cut you off on the way to work, etc. A lot of things that seem serious at first glance turn out to be noise. Will you allow it to keep you from winning? The noise may fluctuate in volume, but your determination to press on in spite of it (ignore it!) will make all the difference to you.”
“Trust yourself to make decisions, and, if you make an honest mistake, it’s okay! Trust that you will learn from your mistakes. It’s a foreign concept to most organizations.”
“Perfection is not the goal when it’s time to make a decision. Focus instead on constant improvement and innovation. Over-analyzing can kill an idea and make you miss an opportunity. Don’t fear failure. If our environment did not tolerate failure, then innovation would die, creativity would die.”
“When there’s a decision to be made, there are three possible outcomes: you make the right one; you make the wrong one – hopefully you learn something valuable from it; you make no decision – you haven’t made the right one, and you haven’t learned a thing. Always make new mistakes. Make decisions. And, when you believe that roast is pretty much done, pull it out of the oven.”
“We know that building something new or creating something special is messy, and that greatness doesn’t always come in nice, tidy packages. This is an advantage, not a hindrance. As long as we continue to love the idea and trust the process, then we truly believe we’ll figure it out.”
“Clients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Could it be any clearer? A great company is built one client at a time. If you amaze every client every chance you get, then they are satisfied and so are you. Every client means 100% of our clients. Amaze them every time. No exceptions. No excuses!”
“One of the biggest deceptions in the world is self-inflicted by so-called ‘conservative’ people who, through their myopic lens, are only comfortable when everything remains the same, consistent and reliable. The vast majority of our planet lives in this fantasy state where they convince themselves that they must delay any decision until there is 100% certainty.”
“Without energy, determination or a counter to these powerful forces, the ‘status quo’ is meaningless. When everything is connected to everything else, you can’t leave one thing alone and expect it to remain the same. The lesson here is this: when you accept the universal law that ‘sh*t is the default setting,’ you will no longer feel a need to waste your valuable energy, focus and attention being frustrated by it. You will invest your time and attention in the far more productive approach of countering what is just the natural state of the universe: disorder.”
“Don’t fear change. Fear those who espouse the delusion of the status quo.”
“In my view, if you want to get ahead and build wealth, you have to get over your delusion that something only has value if you can measure it.”
“Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind. Synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for.”
“If you were blessed with a fortunate position… why wouldn’t you want to impact the world around you as much as possible?”
“I just think that everything is symbolic, and who you are determines everything that you do – small moves and big moves.”
