Quotes About Decisions

If you had a navigation app for your goals and decisions, it would work like a premortem and a backcast and its output would look like the Decision Exploration Table. You've identified two broad categories of future events (those within and outside your control) that could decrease or increase your chances of failure or success and made an educated guess about their likelihood. You now have a good map of what might lie in the path on the way to your goal.

Chapter 6 offers up strategies to improve decisions about when to quit, including the importance of tackling the hardest part of a project first, as well as ways to develop benchmarks, criteria, and signals, called kill criteria, that will help ensure you quit sooner when persisting is no longer in your best interest.

Because there are only two things that determine how your life turns out: luck and the quality of your decisions. You have control over only one of those two things.

Even though the importance of making quality decisions seems obvious, it's surprising how few people can actually articulate what a good decision process looks like.

By treating decisions as bets, poker players explicitly recognize that they are deciding on alternative futures, each with benefits and risks. They also recognize there are no simple answers. Some things are unknown or unknowable.

No matter how far we get from the familiarity of betting at a poker table or in a casino, our decisions are always bets. We routinely decide among alternatives, put resources at risk, assess the likelihood of different outcomes, and consider what it is that we value. Every decision commits us to some course of action that, by definition, eliminates acting on other alternatives. Not placing a bet on something is, itself, a bet.

Job and relocation decisions are bets. Sales negotiations and contracts are bets. Buying a house is a bet. Ordering the chicken instead of the steak is a bet. Everything is a bet.

That we make both types of errors, sometimes sticking too long and sometimes giving up too early, shouldn't be that surprising because whether to stick or quit aren't separate decisions. They are one and the same. Whenever you choose to stick, you are, by definition, not quitting. The reverse is true when you choose to quit.

Small changes in how much you notice the luck that you would otherwise overlook will have a big influence on the way your life turns out. Those small changes act like compounding interest that pays big dividends on your future decision-making.

The real advice we should give people is more complicated than you can fit in a four-word slogan: Quit while you're ahead . . . when the game you are playing or the path you are on is a losing proposition. If you are in a situation that carries with it a negative expected value, by all means quit. But keep going when you have a positive expected value.

We can't just "absorb" experiences and expect to learn. As novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley recognized, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." There is a big difference between getting experience and becoming an expert. That difference lies in the ability to identify when the outcomes of our decisions have something to teach us and what that lesson might be.

there are only two things that determine how your life turns out: luck and the quality of your decisions. You have control over only one of those two things.

there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck.

Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck.

I'm a professional athlete. I've been paid since I was in my early 20s to go out there and fight with guys who were 40 or 50 pounds heavier than I am and fight for my life. I got into a business where people make decisions based on some of the most stupid things.

Judges wear legal professionalism and precedent as a mantel that secures legitimacy for their decisions. It's how they distinguish themselves from politicians or administrative agencies, while wielding power that is sometimes much greater than those democratically accountable actors.

I'd like to see the health care professionals making decisions, not some bureaucrat in Indianapolis working for an insurance company.

The SEC and CFTC are expert agencies blessed with immensely capable professionals. Judges value and defer to that expertise - when it's exercised to make the hard decisions that Congress entrusts to an agency.

I'm sure a majority of farmers do their best to follow safe practices, to read carefully chemical labels, to follow the law, and to try and ensure that they are making both safe and profitable decisions for their business.

Nothing communicates with the people who make real decisions in Hollywood like spending your own money and showing that you can make profitable films.

The government would be making decisions about what type of care is given, what procedures can be performed, and the kind of medications prescribed. It would be a very profound change from the ideal to which we aspire.

BRICS meetings are keenly watched world over, and our decisions have profound impact globally.

I hate delaying a project that's already seen so many delays, but I have to go with my instincts on what I think will be exciting and interesting, and what I think the fanbase will really want to see.

When the Americans are behind you, they're behind you 100%, and this gives you real confidence as an architect. They expect you to lead a building project - to make the kind of big and costly decisions that, in Britain, have been handed over to project managers and cost-cutters.