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" When we start a new store, we make sure that we transfer enough starter culture from other stores that are already Whole Fooders, who've already incorporated our values and our culture within themselves into the... into the store. "

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" You have to understand: the narrative that people have about business and capitalism is that they are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and exploitative. Of course, I don't agree with that narrative. "

John Mackey

Business

People

Selfish

" Not everyone is born to run a $4 billion company. There is no magic formula. I've learned, and I've grown by learning. That's why I've enjoyed being in business so much: It's stretched me. "

John Mackey

Business

Magic

" I always like to say that our brand or our philosophy has always been kind of this marriage between the 'food as indulgence,' and it's also been about 'food as health,' that food is vitality. "

" Use the energy that fear creates to focus the mind more intently on the present moment - where fear doesn't exist. "

" The way yogurt works is you take the old yogurt culture and you put it in milk. You have to put enough of the old culture in, and then that old culture will convert the milk into yogurt. "

" At a lot of companies founded on principles, the notion of making money is almost antithetical to the ethos of the place. From the very beginning, our business has existed to meet the needs and desires of multiple constituencies: customers, team members, vendors, shareholders, the community. "

" Amazon is certainly not a perfect company. However, doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists, politicians, and labor unions are also on a continuum of consciousness, and none are perfect either. It is easy to judge and find fault with any company if that is what one's ideological biases wish to see. "

" One of the sad things about retiring is that you just become increasingly irrelevant. The world flows around you, and you don't seem to be impacting it any longer. "

" Starting my own business was kind of a wakeup call in a number of different ways. I had to meet a payroll every week, and we had to satisfy customers, and we had competitors that we had to compete with in order to have those customers come into our stores, and we had to compete with other employers for our employees. "

" Healthier team members get a bigger food discount. We give our sickest team members an option to go through what we call the Total Health Immersion, where we take them off for a week, and we do intensive diet-and-lifestyle education. "

John Mackey

Health

Week

" Some of the greatest businesses operating from a deeper purpose have a real commitment to service, like Four Seasons, Joie de Vivre hotels, Southwest Airlines, and JetBlue. "

" At Whole Foods, we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. "

" I reject the premise that liberal and libertarian values are necessarily in conflict. In fact, I often self-identify as a 'classical liberal.' "

" If you have a mental model that says big corporations are fundamentally greedy and selfish and exploitative, you don't really want to have an exception to that model. It's much easier to say, 'Yes, Whole Foods has been corrupted.' "

" In many companies, the person who talks the best usually gets the job. I got snowed by a few of those people over the years. I still think communication is important, but I don't think there's always a correlation between being a great communicator and other virtues that make for a great leader. "

" Customers want high-quality food, good service, and good store experience, and most retailers fail to deliver on those. "

" The great thing about a culture is that once you really get it going, it evolves on its own. It's self-organizing. It's dynamic. It just feeds on itself. "

" I kind of have this sense of mission now when we talk about success: I'd really like Whole Foods to contribute to the healing of America, and the success of that may be measured in decades rather than in months, but I think we're on the way to doing it. "

" I've always thought the main argument for organic was more environmental than a health argument. I just don't think spraying a lot of pesticides into the environment on a routine basis is a good thing. "

John Mackey

Think

Environmental

" You can't live if you don't eat, but you don't live to eat. And neither does business exist primarily to make a profit. It exists to fulfill its purpose, whatever that might be. "

" The more profit we make, the more stores we can open, the more donations we can make to our community, the more responsible citizens we can be for the environment. It's all interactive. It's all connected together. There's no separation. "

" At the end of the day, the quality of life is all we have, and it's just as important to that lobster, the quality of life that it lives - even if it's not as long - as the quality of your life. "

" More than once in the history of Whole Foods Market, the company was unable to collectively evolve until I myself was able to evolve - in other words, I was holding the company back. My personal growth enabled the company to evolve. "

" If you're growing very rapidly, it doesn't matter if you make mistakes, in a way, because the growth kind of bails you out. "

" I was in my early 20s and open to alternative lifestyles. I thought, 'I bet you get a lot of attractive, interesting women in a vegetarian co-op.' "

" Food is intensely pleasurable, and people are afraid that if they change the way they eat, they'll stop having pleasure. "

" Every man, woman and child consumes, on average, 43 teaspoons of sugar a day. In 13 days, that adds up to a five-pound bag of sugar. "

" Snatam Kaur is a yogini, and I find her music deeply spiritual. I feel more love and I feel more peace when I listen to her music. "

" I love my cooking tools because I enjoy cooking - a Vitamix for smoothies and a rice cooker for steel-cut oats. I travel with a small rice cooker. I soak oats overnight, and when I get up, I just turn the rice cooker on, and it cooks the oats perfectly every time. "

" Operating under the conscious capitalism model will show that businesses are the true value creators that can push all of humanity upward for continuous improvement. "