Michelle Obama

Find people who will make you better.

My last year in high school, I worked at a bindery, side by side with grown-ups who had been there their entire lives. Knowing that I, as a 16-year-old, was getting the same income and doing the same work… it gave me respect for those workers. But it also gave me an understanding that more is needed for folks to be able to cobble together a decent life on minimum wage.

It was sort of important for us not to deal with a specific policy change, or a specific sort of approach, but to deal with cultural change.

I learned in those eight years is that home is where you make it, and we were in the White House for eight years, but it wasn’t the house. It was us in it. It was our value and our love for each other.

One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.

What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way!

Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

The well-satisfied customer will bring the repeat sale that counts.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.

Set exorbitant standards, and give your people hell when they don’t live up to them. There is nothing so demoralizing as a boss who tolerates second rate work.

The more predictable the business, the more valuable it is.

In the long run people are going to buy the cheapest and the best article no matter where it is made.

Change is vital, improvement the logical form of change.

…capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.

Do not spend too much time planning or trying to anticipate and solve problems before they happen. That is just another kind of excuse for procrastination. Until you start, you won’t know where the problems will occur. You won’t have the experience to solve them. Instead, get into action, and solve the problems as they arise.

Entrepreneurs are always taking feedback, especially from their customers, bankers, workers, and sales force. Without straightforward feedback, entrepreneurs cannot make sound decisions.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your own family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by. If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out — either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time. Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don’t think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.

No matter what his position or experience in life, there is in everyone more latent than developed ability; far more unused than used power.

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves. but they can get very excited by those who do. That is why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest, the greatest and the most spectacular.

I never insisted that I was a good student.

Clock watchers never seem to be having a good time.