Keith Ferrazzi · 309 pages
Rating: (31.1K votes)
“Success in any field, but especially in business is about working with people, not against them.”
“Identify the people in your industries who always seem to be out in front, and use all the relationship skills you've acquired to connect with them. Take them to lunch. Read their newsletters. In fact, read everything you can. Online, there are hundreds of individuals distilling information, analyzing it, and making prognos-tications. These armchair analysts are the eyes and ears of innovation. Now get online and read, read, read. Subscribe to magazines, buy books, and talk to the smartest people you can find. Eventually, all this knowledge will build on itself, and you'll start making connections others aren't.”
“real networking was about finding ways to make other people more successful.”
“I’ve come to believe that connecting is one of the most important business—and life—skill sets you’ll ever learn. Why? Because, flat out, people do business with people they know and like. Careers—in every imaginable field—work the same”
“Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone. —MARGARET WHEATLEY”
“Poverty, I realized, wasn’t only a lack of financial resources; it was isolation from the kind of people who could help you make more of yourself.”
“It’s better to give before you receive. And never keep score. If your interactions are ruled by generosity, your rewards will follow suit.”
“Your network is your destiny, a reality backed up by many studies in the newly emergent fields of social networking and social contagion theory. We are the people we interact with.”
“by giving your time and expertise and sharing them freely, the pie gets bigger for everyone.”
“Human ambitions are like Japanese carp; they grow proportional to the size of their environment. Our achievements grow according to the size of our dreams and the degree to which we are in touch with our mission.”
“There is only one place to find real peace, real harmony. That place is within,”
“I believe that every conversation you have is an invitation to risk revealing the real you.”
“Today’s most valuable currency is social capital, defined as the information, expertise, trust, and total value that exist in the relationships you have and social networks to which you belong.”
“Business is a human enterprise, driven and determined by people.”
“Living a connected life leads one to take a different view. Life is less a quest than a quilt. We find meaning, love, and prosperity through the process of stitching together our bold attempts to help others find their own way in their lives. The relationships we weave become an exquisite and endless pattern.”
“Who you know determines who you are—how you feel, how you act, and what you achieve.”
“Wherever you are in life right now, and whatever you know, is a result of the ideas, experiences, and people you have interacted with in your life,”
“His statement flew in the face of everything I knew. He thought of relationships as finite, like a pie that could only be cut into so many pieces. Take a piece away, and there was that much less for him. I knew, however, that relationships are more like muscles - the more you work them, the stronger they become.”
“Samuel Beckett wrote, “Fail, fail again. Fail better.”
“connecting. It’s a constant process of giving and receiving—of asking for and offering help. By putting people in contact with one another, by giving your time and expertise and sharing them freely, the pie gets bigger for everyone. This karma-tinged vision of how things work may sound naïve to those who have grown cynical of the business world. But while the power of generosity is not yet fully appreciated, or applied, in the halls of corporate America, its value in the world of networks is proven.”
“Our careers aren't paths so much as landscapes that are navigated.”
“I remind myself how people with a low propensity for success whose behavior is guided by fear, have a low propensity for success.”
“Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.”
“Be sincere - the surest was to become special in other's eyes is to make them feel special”
“Friendship is created out of the quality of time spent between two people, not the quantity.”
“A goal is a dream with a deadline.” That”
“SUCCESS IN LIFE = (THE PEOPLE YOU MEET) + (WHAT YOU CREATE TOGETHER).”
“Creativity begets more creativity, money begets more money, knowledge begets more knowledge, more friends beget more friends, success begets even more success. Most important, giving begets giving.”
“The problem, as I see it, isn't what you're working on, it's whom you're working with.
You can't feel in love with your life if you hate your work; and more times than not, people don't love their work because they work with people they don't like.”
“There is something fresh and crisp about the first hours of a Caribbean day, a happy anticipation that something is about to happen, maybe just up the street or around the next corner.”
“Mother Mary wants to draft two more kids,” Astrid told Sam.
“Okay. Approved.”
“Dahra says we’re running low on kids’ Tylenol and kids’ Advil, she wants to make sure it’s okay to start giving them split adult pills.”
Sam spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “What?”
“We’re running low on kid pills, Dahra wants to split adult pills.”
Sam rocked back in the leather chair designed for a grown man. “Okay. Whatever. Approved.” He took a sip of water from a bottle. The wrapper on the bottle said “Dasani” but it was tap water. The dishes from dinner—horrible homemade split-pea soup that smelled burned, and a quarter cabbage each—had been pushed aside onto the sideboard where in the old days the mayor of Perdido Beach had kept framed pictures of his family. It was one of the better meals Sam had had lately. The fresh cabbage tasted surprisingly good.
There was little more than smears on the plates: the era of kids not eating everything was over.
Astrid puffed out her cheeks and sighed. “Kids are asking why Lana isn’t around when they need her.”
“I can only ask Lana to heal big things. I can’t demand she be around 24/7 to handle every boo-boo.”
Astrid looked at the list she had compiled on her laptop. “Actually, I think this involved a stubbed toe that ‘hurted.’”
“How much more is on the list?” Sam asked.
“Three hundred and five items,” Astrid said. When Sam’s face went pale, she relented. “Okay, it’s actually just thirty-two. Now, don’t you feel relieved it’s not really three hundred?”
“This is crazy,” Sam said.
“Next up: the Judsons and the McHanrahans are fighting because they share a dog, so both families are feeding her—they still have a big bag of dry dog food—but the Judsons are calling her Sweetie and the McHanrahans are calling her BooBoo.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding,” Astrid said.
“What is that noise?” Sam demanded.
Astrid shrugged. “I guess someone has their stereo cranked up.”
“This is not going to work, Astrid.”
“The music?”
“This. This thing where every day I have a hundred stupid questions I have to decide. Like I’m everyone’s parent now. I’m sitting here listening to how little kids are complaining because their older sisters make them take a bath, and stepping into fights over who owns which Build-A-Bear outfit, and now over dog names. Dog names?”
“They’re all still just little kids,” Astrid said.
“Some of these kids are developing powers that scare me,” Sam grumbled. “But they can’t decide who gets to have which special towel? Or whether to watch The Little Mermaid or Shrek Three?”
“No,” Astrid said. “They can’t. They need a parent. That’s you.”
“And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.”
“Raffe looks over at the bloody knife in my hand. "If I still had any doubts that it was you, that would do it.”
“What do you mean, Araluen? Death?"
Halt made a careless gesture. "The usual, I suppose: the sudden cessation of life. The end of it all. Departure for a happier place. Or oblivion, depending upon your personal beliefs.”
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.