Paul Orfalea Quotes

What makes America great is in our imagination, not in memorization. We are not a memorization-fixated culture. We can’t compete with the Chinese and Japanese in memorization. Where we have been competitive is in creativity.

Make your customers comfortable and they will give you their lives.

All my life I knew I would have a big business. That’s what I wanted from the time I was in second grade; there was never a doubt in my mind.

One day I’d like to go to the Moon and look at the planet Earth and say, ‘Wow, there’s part of my portfolio.’

If you go on vacation for one week, you’ll come back to two weeks of work. If you go on vacation for two weeks, you’ll come back to four weeks of work. If you go on vacation for three weeks, people seem to figure it out for themselves.

Accountants are in the past, managers are in the present, and leaders are in the future.

The people in the front lines are my customers. I need to keep them happy. And, the best way to take care of your customers is to take care of your workers.

Kids that are allegedly better students are in an elitist class in first and second grade and then they go to their high schools, they go to their universities and the normal dumb shits like me are down at the bottom. These people go to elitist schools and they replicate their elitist thoughts in the corporations.

If I reformed school, I would do two things: We can improve a child’s IQ by three percent by teaching them a foreign language by seven-years-old. We shouldn’t be waiting until high school when they are neurologically not ready to learn it. Second, we emphasize reading too young.

Whenever I felt down, whenever I started wondering what homeless shelter I would die in, [my mother] would buck me up by telling me: you know, Paul, the A students work for the B students, the C students run the companies, and the D students dedicate the buildings.

If you’re going to enjoy the picnic that life really is, you’d better learn to like yourself not despite your flaws and so-called deficits, but because of them.

My motto has always been that anybody can do it better than me.

I think everybody should have dyslexia and ADD.

Happy wife, happy life.