Quotes About Standards

Sometimes, you have to remind yourself the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Social scientist Alex Michalos, in his discussion of the perceived quality of experience, argued that people establish standards of satisfaction based on the assessment of three gaps: "the gap between what one has and wants, the gap between what one has and thinks others like oneself have, and the gap between what one has and the best one has had in the past.

Our heightened individualism means that, not only do we expect perfection in all things, but we expect to produce this perfection ourselves.

you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.

The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops.

While maximizers and perfectionists both have very high standards, I think that perfectionists have very high standards that they don't expect to meet, whereas maximizers have very high standards that they do expect to meet. Which may explain why we found that those who score high on perfectionism, unlike maximizers, are not depressed, regretful, or unhappy.

Almost by definition, to be a maximizer is to have high standards, high expectations. Because of this, and because of the role played by expectations in hedonic evaluations, an experience that is on the positive side of the hedonic thermometer for a satisficer may be on the negative side for a maximizer.

So by using rules, presumptions, standards, and routines to constrain ourselves and limit the decisions we face, we can make life more manageable, which gives us more time to devote ourselves to other people and to the decisions that we can't or don't want to avoid.

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There's neither need nor justification to wallow in the trough of mediocrity.

There is no real excellence

you can indulge them. You can go for the golden egg of popularity, of pleasing them, giving them their way all the time. Then they grow up without any internal sense of standards or expectations, without a personal commitment to being disciplined or responsible.

I realized that Sandra and I had been getting social mileage out of our children's good behavior, and, in our eyes, this son simply didn't measure up.

Principles had a nasty way of interfering with results.

The coaching profession has a problem that is two-fold: there is a low bar for entry and a high bar for success.

Mirabelle is attractive; it's just that she is never the first or second girl chosen.

The gap between the best software engineering practice and the average practice is very wide—perhaps wider than in any other engineering discipline. A tool that disseminates good practice would be important. — Fred Brooks

In God's eyes all children are beautiful but here on earth we have higher standards.

Furthermore, in some countries—Finland and Singapore and South Korea, for instance—future schoolteachers are recruited from the best college-bound students, whereas a teacher in the United States is more likely to come from the bottom half of her class.

When I grew up, bullying was considered a natural part of boyhood. It would have strained belief to think that someday the president of the United States would deliver a speech about its evils, as Barack Obama did in 2011. As we care about more of humanity, we're apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.

As educational standards decline and pop culture disseminates the inarticulate ravings and unintelligible patois of surfers, jocks, and valley girls, we are turning into a nation of functioning illiterates [...]. English itself will steadily decay unless we get back to basics and start to respect our language again.

They matters of correct usage pale in importance behind coherence, classic style, and overcoming the curse of knowledge, to say nothing of standards of intellectual conscientiousness. If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents by the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence.

Though obesity surely is a public health problem, by the standards of history it's a good problem to have.

Foremost is reason. Reason is nonnegotiable. As soon as you show up to discuss the question of what we should live for (or any other question), as long as you insist that your answers, whatever they are, are reasonable or justified or true and that therefore other people ought to believe them too, then you have committed yourself to reason, and to holding your beliefs accountable to objective standards.