11 Quotes & Sayings By Ari Gold

Ari Gold, a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author and former professional basketball player, is the CEO and President of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) and also serves as a member of the league's Executive Committee. Gold has been named one of the NBA's 50 greatest players in 1996 and is a four-time All-Star selection. He was selected to play in three consecutive All-Star Games from 1998 to 2000, winning the 1998 Three-Point Shootout competition. He was an All-NBA First Team selection in 1998.

1
Unless you're in an early seventies-era Eagles cover band, a founding member of a religious cult, or sleeping under a bridge in Seattle, lose the beard and get a haircut. Power doesn't have time for any form of hirsute hipster self expression. Ari Gold
2
To be successful, you need friends. To be very successful, you need enemies. Ari Gold
3
Hookers, Hondas and Hollywood all approach customers with a different mindset than the rest of the business world. Whereas most businesses talk about the importance of "customer service, " agents, mechanics and people of the night talk about "servicing customers." It is an important distinction, as customer service is generally a reactive process in which professionals and businesses respond to the needs of their clients, while servicing customers involves exploration to discover what the customer needs in order to start firing all the cylinders. Ari Gold
4
Don’t waste time worrying about work/life balance, or looking for your best self, sham “secrets” or any other snake oil being pushed by sloppy hippies who have never built a business, let alone a bankroll, or you will wake up 20 years from now poor, pissed off and primed for a midlife crisis. Ari Gold
5
Opportunities are like night owls. They like to streak naked and howl at the moon. A lot of success in life comes down to luck. So put yourself in a position to get lucky. Because you know what happens if you don't go out? Nothing. Ari Gold
6
Loving your work doesn’t mean finding a job you can tolerate for eight hours a day, but rather a job that gets you flying out of bed in the morning like a Jack Russell who just had a firecracker stuffed up his ass. Ari Gold
7
Fight, fight, fight and get that money, money, money. ’Cause happiness can’t buy even a nickel. Ari Gold
8
If you were to gather all the minutes wasted on insignificant, immaterial yik yak spent throughout the day and add them up, how much misspent time do you think you'd have? One hour? Two hours? Consider the sunk cost on that. It's unacceptable. One minute wasted is one minute too much. Ari Gold
9
First, if you participate in Movember, fuck you. Second, if you want to raise money for prostate cancer (a noble cause), do it the old-fashioned way, by either begging for it or exerting yourself physically for donations. Sitting on your ass and letting nature take its course above your upper lip is not the same thing as running a 10K at a local high school or breaking out the set of power tools your dad gave you as a housewarming present collecting dust in your garage and using them to go out and build a habitat for humanity. Maybe I can raise money for rectal cancer by getting people to pledge a dollar every time I take a shit. And third no one wants to see that horrific seventies pornstache growing like a caterpillar with cerebral palsy zigzagging across your face; you look like you're about to go door to door informing people that you're a registered sex offender who's just moved in next door and would their kids like to come out and was your windowless van for a dollar? Fuck Movember. And November. Ari Gold
10
There's a reason caveman started to develop sophisticated tools before the meteor wiped them all out: It's so they could fucking shave. Do you know how frustrating it must have been to be hunched over all night trying to start a fire only to finally succeed just to have your beard go up in flames? No aloe vera back then. Ari Gold