Top 50 Richard Koch Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. A few things are important; most are not.”

— Richard Koch

2. “Strive for excellence in few things, rather than good performance in many.”

— Richard Koch

3. “To be strategic is to concentrate on what is important, on those few objectives that can give us a comparative advantage, on what is important to us rather than others, and to plan and execute the resulting plan with determination and steadfastness.”

— Richard Koch

4. “Make the choice that you want to be happy. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to other people too.”

— Richard Koch

5. “It is not shortage of time that should worry us, but the tendency for the majority of time to be spent in low-quality ways.”

— Richard Koch

6. “The key is to work out the few things that are really important, and the few methods that will give us what we really want.”

— Richard Koch

7. “Only do the thing we are best at doing and enjoy most.”

— Richard Koch

8. “Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.”

— Richard Koch

9. “There is no rush. If we think intelligently about what we can achieve with our time, we can be relaxed, even lazy. In fact, being lazy – having plenty of time to think – may actually be a precondition for achieving a great deal.”

— Richard Koch

10. “Laziness is the road to progress, but only when it is allied to intelligent thought and high ambition.”

— Richard Koch

11. “The way to create something great is to create something simple.”

— Richard Koch

12. “Hard work leads to low returns. Insight and doing what we want lead to high returns.”

— Richard Koch

13. “What could you achieve that would make you proud, that no one else could do with the same ease?”

— Richard Koch

14. “Use all the willpower at your disposal to make yourself happy. Construct the right stories about yourself – and believe them!”

— Richard Koch

15. “People think that creativity is largely a matter of talent, experience, or luck. They are wrong. Talent, experience, and luck are all key elements, but there is something more fundamental, accessible, and powerful that you can use to multiply your creative effect.”

— Richard Koch

16. “Creation occurs when ideas and individuals collide and collude.”

— Richard Koch

17. “Those who seize the day become seriously rich.”

— Richard Koch

18. “Progress is personal; it comes from individuals demanding more of themselves and everyone else.”

— Richard Koch

19. “The few things that work fantastically well should be identified, cultivated, nurtured, and multiplied.”

— Richard Koch

20. “Chose the niche that you enjoy, where you can excel and stand a chance of becoming and acknowledged leader.”

— Richard Koch

21. “To get useful new ideas, we must go beyond our immediate circle and make contact with distant parts of the social system.”

— Richard Koch

22. “The road to hell is paved with the pursuit of volume. Volume leads to marginal products, marginal customers, and greatly increased managerial complexity.”

— Richard Koch

23. “Our current use of time is not rational. There is therefore no point in seeking marginal improvements in how we spend our time. We need to go back to the drawing board and overturn all our assumptions about time.”

— Richard Koch

24. “Most of us don’t work out what we want. And most of us end up with lopsided lives as a result.”

— Richard Koch

25. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

— Richard Koch

26. “Marketing, and the whole firm, should devote extraordinary endeavour towards delighting, keeping for ever and expanding the sales to the 20 per cent of customers who provide 80 per cent.”

— Richard Koch

27. “Celebrate exceptional productivity, rather than raise average efforts.”

— Richard Koch

28. “I make it a personal rule never to do anything that I don’t really care about. It is surprising how much this cuts out.”

— Richard Koch

29. “If we want to sum up the theory of evolution by natural selection in two words, which have great relevance for all societies and businesses, we should simply remember: diversity works.”

— Richard Koch

30. “If we did realize the difference between the vital few and the trivial many in all aspects of our lives, and if we did something about it, we could multiply anything that we valued.”

— Richard Koch

31. “Where a chunk of business is simple, the chances are that it is.”

— Richard Koch

32. “Instead of expending time to train yourself not to be afraid of snakes, avoid them altogether.”

— Richard Koch

33. “We can change the way that we think about external events, even where we cannot change them. And we can do something more. We can intelligently change our exposure to events that make us either happy or unhappy.”

— Richard Koch

34. “It may be that you will be happiest in the rat race; perhaps, like me, you are basically a rat.”

— Richard Koch

35. “Creativity,” Einstein famously said, “is more important than knowledge.”

— Richard Koch

36. “Not only is happiness not money, it is not even like money.”

— Richard Koch

37. “Innovation is the name of the game;.”

— Richard Koch

38. “If a species is diverse, it can survive and prosper. If a species is homogeneous, it is vulnerable.”

— Richard Koch

39. “The most successful people change the world not through sweat and tears but through ideas and passion. It is not a matter of hard work or time on the job; it is having a different view, an original idea, something that expresses their individuality and creativity. Success comes from thinking, then acting on those thoughts.”

— Richard Koch

40. “Who you work for is more important than what you do.”

— Richard Koch

41. “Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product. 4 Henry Ford.”

— Richard Koch

42. “Think, think, think.”

— Richard Koch

43. “There are people who want to achieve – and then there are sane people.”

— Richard Koch

44. “Things that matter most Must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”

— Richard Koch

45. “I give people the latitude to express their imagination.”

— Richard Koch

46. “Scientists working with relativity, or quantum theory, or modern mathematics, or systems theory, or chaos, or complexity are at the top of their fields.”

— Richard Koch

47. “Anything that just yielded an average degree of satisfaction for the time or effort should be discarded.”

— Richard Koch

48. “All the time we tell ourselves stories about ourselves. We have to: there is no objective truth. You might as well choose positive rather than negative stories. By doing so you will increase the sum of human happiness, starting with yourself and radiating out to others.”

— Richard Koch

49. “You might get much better value and happiness out of a simpler and cheaper lifestyle.”

— Richard Koch

50. “You are more likely to win again where you have won before. You are more likely to win when you are selective about the races you enter.”

— Richard Koch