Quotes About Process

War, compared the selection process he went through in 1946 to a slave market: Everyone was ordered to the courtyard and told to strip. When your name was called you appeared before a medical team for a health inspection. The exam consisted of

Forgiveness doesn't work that way. You may want to forgive, but you can't do it yet. Forgiving someone can take weeks, months, years. Sometimes it takes a lifetime.

If what Picasso proposed is true, that the first stroke on the canvas is always a mistake, it is best to get on with the mistake, without delay, earlier rather than later. Write one sentence, make one choice or point at something and say "Yes." And then, as the process unfolds, and as long as I keep at it and stay attentive and resolute, making adjustments to each mistake, things eventually fall into place.

Taste as you go. When you taste the food throughout the cooking process you can make adjustments as you go.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

I am not seeing anyone or writing anyone—I'm on my 8th draft of this play and how many more—God knows.

There is no great writing, only great rewriting.

We begin to see that the completion of an important project has every right to be dignified by a natural grieving process. Something that required the best of you has ended. You will miss it.

Life is a process. We are a process. The Universe is a process.

What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of "I'm not sure.

Outcomes don't tell us what's our fault and what isn't, what we should take credit for and what we shouldn't. Unlike in chess, we can't simply work backward from the quality of the outcome to determine the quality of our beliefs or decisions. This makes learning from outcomes a pretty haphazard process.

And this feeling that the result of the decision tells you something significant about the quality of the decision process is so powerful that even when the description of the decision is identical (you quit your job and take a new position), your view of that decision changes as the quality of the result changes.

When the outcome turns out poorly, it's easy to focus on the details that suggest the decision process was poor. We think we are seeing the decision quality rationally because the bad process is obvious.

What is hopefully (crystal ball) clear by now is that your beliefs create a bottleneck to good decision-making. It doesn't matter how good the quality of your decision process is if the input into that process is junk. That input is your beliefs, and there is a lot of junk in there.

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.

Success means following a good decision process, not just crossing a finish line, especially if it is the wrong one to cross. That means appropriately following kill criteria, listening to our quitting coaches, and recognizing that the progress we've made along the way counts for a lot.

It doesn't so much matter where we end up as how we got there. What has happened in the recent past drives our emotional response much more than how we are doing overall. That's how we can win $100 and be sad, and lose $100 and be happy.

Mais le processus de stagnation de la douleur est enclenché, semble-t-il.

At this very moment, out in the streets, the open spaces, on the metro, in lecture halls, and inside millions of heads, millions of novels are being written chapter by chapter, erased and revised, and all of them die and a result of becoming, or not becoming reality.

Think of the task not in linear terms—tracing a direct line from point A to point B—but rather as a cycle: think, draw, look, rethink, redraw. Likewise, don't envision the mind telling the pencil what to do; instead, allow a conversation to develop between eye and hand,

If you open up the mind, the opportunity to address both profits and social conditions are limitless. It's a process of innovation.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

Painting is profoundly emotional. When I finish a painting, I'm usually extremely sad.

Frankenstein' was more programmed, but 'Dracula' we did as it came along because at the beginning we weren't sure how it was going to end - it wasn't written in the script.