My highlights from the book:

1. He refused to settle for the pragmatic dictum of maturity. Issy also skipped skepticism and "Let's be sensible." People said he was naïve, with a kind of glandular optimism. Perhaps. But as it turned out naïveté served him well.

2. Early on he made some audacious statements that sounded like pipe dreams. He told me once that his aim was to make the name Four Seasons a worldwide brand, synonymous with luxury, like Rolls-Royce.

3. When I built my first hotel I knew nothing about the hotel business.

4. Once, when Dad was excavating a basement with horse and plough, he broke his shoulder. But he shrugged it off and uncomplainingly kept on working, something I never forgot.

5. We will not be all things to all people. We will specialize.

6. All business proceeds on belief: Trying to run a company without a set of beliefs is like trying to steer a ship without a rudder.

7. I decided to go ahead. I foresaw only one difficulty, but it loomed large: How do you build a two-hundred-room resort without any money? This was literal fact. My earnings barely covered my rising family costs.

8. I asked Sir Gerald Glover, "How do you keep your lawn so perfect?"  “No problem”, he replied. “You just cut it every week for three hundred years.”

9. The experience made me realize what I would really like to do: create a group of the best hotels in the world. And what we really want to do is usually what we do best.

10. I owe my success to my freedom. I think for me independence has an incalculable value.

11. He made a lot of brash decisions—against the trends and the pundits' advice—stubbornly trusting in intuition.

12. The only thing you can control is your attitude.

13. I never made the mistake of putting profit ahead of people.

14. I decided what to build and how to operate by asking myself: What would the customers consider important? What will the customers recognize as value?

15. A culture cannot be mandated as a policy. It must grow from within, based on the actions of the company's people over a long period of time.

16. By the time I reached my mid-teens, we had moved some fifteen times. That meant changing schools: as always, on our own. And being trusted that we knew what to do made us, I believe, independent at a very early age.

17. They were a family of six and a dog, as we were, and for six months we all lived together in a small three-bedroom house with only one bathroom, and my aunt never complained of overcrowding.

18. Dad, too, taught me in his own inimitable way. I was building two steps for a house, making wooden forms to be filled with concrete. Dad, who was watching, never told me I was building them wrong; and it wasn't until I had poured the concrete that I saw my mistake: the first step was too big and the top step too small. Dad handed me a sledgehammer, and all he said, then or later, was, "Break it, and do it the right way next time." He could have saved a little time and money by telling me beforehand, "Measure twice, cut once." But the method he chose was unforgettable.

19. He did teach me to swim. He took me and my sisters out in a boat, threw us overboard, and said, "Now swim."

20. Rosalie never complained, never tried to change me, though she once left me a note so succinctly pertinent that I still keep the original in my notebook: "Overachievers suffer loss of intimacy. No time for fun. Relationships starve on a diet of self-absorption. Home is the place to express the playful part of oneself."

21. I recognized the drawbacks while envisioning the possibilities, which created a subconscious belief in success.

22. In building our first hotel, I had been concentrating on customers: What would our customers want most? I had little hotel experience but enough to know what most people wanted: a quiet room, a good night's sleep, and an invigorating morning shower.

23. This would be one of the world's great hotels, and I don't know why I thought I could build it. I had neither the experience nor the money such a hotel required.

24. Here I was, with no money and not much experience, up against the smartest people of one of the biggest and richest companies in the world.

25. Why don't we just pay you $2 million and all your expenses, anything you've paid or invested up until now, and we'll take over. "No, that's not what we're here for. We're here to become a partner."

26. We are only what we do, not what we say we are.

27. To compete, we'd all have to feel about service the way Ray Kroc, head of McDonald's worldwide, felt about hamburgers. Explaining why his company led competitors around the world, Kroc had said, "We take the hamburger more seriously than they do."

28. If quality is your edge, you can't compromise it.

29. Remembering that César Ritz made his hotels world-famous by hiring some of the foremost chefs, we decided to do something similar.

30. Excellence is often just a capacity for taking pains.

Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs by listening to Founders. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work.