Paul Orfalea Quotes

Happy wife, happy life.

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.

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

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.

The goal of management is to remove obstacles.

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

You can either complain or look for opportunity in every problem. I prefer opportunity.

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.

I called it Kinko’s because of my nickname — because I had this really kinky hair. If you think about it, the first thing a baby learns is ‘Googoo, gaga,’ and if you think of good businesses like Kodak, Xerox, Google, people remember consonants — which was why Kinko’s was a good name. But really I had this big head of curly hair and before being called ‘Kinko’ I was ‘Pube Head.’ So I thought Kinko’s was better than Pubo’s.

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.

With ADD, you’re curious. You’re eyes believe what they see. Your ears believe what others say. I learned to trust my eyes.

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.

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.'

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

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.

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 find a great idea, I work on it at the beginning, then bring in other people to make things work. Actually, I've always been good at getting out of work.

There's no point in bragging in the good times. Your friends don't need to hear it and your enemies won't believe it anyway.

Boys do not have the language skills of little girls. Boys go to school feeling like idiots. We wonder why fifty-six percent of the enrollment at universities is female. I might consider having same-sex education. Boys from day one are pampered and feel good about themselves and then when they go to school, they feel like idiots. I would have exercise in the morning at eight. They clearly learn better after they open up their brain. Why can't we accommodate the brain and not the school?

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.

I think everybody should have dyslexia and ADD.

Soon we will be addicted to the federal government, and we will not want to support our local police force. I have been a believer that the government that governs best is the government that governs least.

I would get rid of the Department of Education. I would get rid of the state departments of education and let the local people control the schools.