Warren Buffett Quotes

Just because a company falls doesn't invalidate what we can learn by studying that company when it was at its historical best.

In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option. We need to change this attitude toward failure - and celebrate the idea that only by falling on our collective business faces do we learn enough to succeed down the road.

As a small business owner, you may not have the luxury to throw good money after bad, but if you can ascertain the 'why' of the failure, you can draw some significance from it and then turn it into something that clients will buy.

I've really thought a lot about why other companies fail or succeed. I had to be a student of failure and find out why things went off the rails. I did that at a fairly deep level, and it's still something I do.

My axiom is, to succeed in business: avoid my example.

In business, when you fail at something, when something doesn't work, you say okay, we've learned that that's not a path to go down.

You learn a lot about vital corporations through non-vital corporations.

Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.

I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?

I have had some great successes and great failures. I think every entrepreneur has. I try to learn from all of them.

Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.

Every successful businessman will have experienced set-backs and failures - they're lying if they say they haven't. Virgin has had some tremendously successful businesses and some that have not quite worked out. Virgin Cola springs to mind - the product wasn't distinct enough from Coca-Cola.

When companies are successful or not successful, they almost immediately jump to the wrong conclusions about how they got there or why they got there.

The person who failed often knows how to avoid future failures.

The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn't fail. It still didn't really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal.

If you can't come clean and tell investors how and why you failed, that raises a red flag. They need to see that you learned from it and came back stronger.

Study people's success stories hard. Study their failures even harder.

Failure is part of discovering the problem you need to be working on. If, as an entrepreneur, you are afraid to fail or to admit the failure of your efforts, then you completely lose any chance at being able to adapt and succeed at finding the problem that needs solving.

It is a common mistake to think of failure as the enemy of success. Failure is a teacher-a harsh one, but the best. Pull your failures to pieces looking for the reason. Put your failure to work for you.

One great cause of failure of young men in business is lack of concentration.

When new pages are sent to editors and see rejection, we should ask for the reasons. We must study the reasons for failure and learn. It's not about struggle with our limitations or with public or the publishers. It's more about treating it like in aikido; the strength of the attack is used to defeat him with the same effort.

Admit to and make yourself accountable for mistakes. How can you improve if you're never wrong?

Cultivate the ability to make decisions and think alone. Do not be afraid of failure, but learn from it.

If you look at the Company Register, maybe that's what we should say to that business consultant or analyst. If you look at the Company Register with the Department of Trade and Industry, one of the remarkable things that you will see over the last few years is, in fact, the growth of small and medium business, many of whom depend on these services to succeed.

It's too bad failures don't give seminars. Wouldn't that be valuable? If you meet a guy who has messed up his life for forty years, you've just got to say, 'John, if I bring my journal and promise to take good notes, would you spend a day with me?'