Quotes About Adaptability

A gentleman, my Lord Father, is such whether he is on earth or on the treetops

Who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself.

People who are successful succeed because they consider each mistake an opportunity to learn - not an excuse to quit.

I'm an impatient guy and tend not to like to stay with one thing for a long time. I'll never be able to write as many scripts as I did for "Felicity" or "Alias" ever again. I'm just too impatient these days. I want to get on to the next project.

Steeple, people, banana-fana-fo-feeple. What the fuck ever. If you don't loosen up, lady, I'll drop your ass on it.

Tommie Aaron taught me how to have a good attitude, to be easy going and not get uptight.

Plan specifically so you can implement flexibly.

Like Mormonism and Jazz, Parentology is a uniquely American, improvisational approach to the raising of children.

Your only "security" is knowing what you do well. Knowing your areas of competence will give you freedom amid corporate politics and unexpected layoffs. Wayne Gretzky was once asked why he was such a great hockey player. He responded with an eloquent morsel of wisdom: "I simply went to where the puck was going to be." An average player would go where the puck was or is.

We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.

I don't have a lot of skills, but one thing I can do is, I can compartmentalize. I can make that a little world that I can go back to, so I can be a waitress, or I can be a teacher, and then go and work on my book.

The world is better served by syncretic economists and policymakers who can hold multiple ideas in their heads than by 'one-handed' economists who promote one big idea regardless of context.

My mother took the measure of what could be built with the material she'd been given, and she built it.

You can't prevent mistakes, but you can solve problems graciously.

This group performed well no matter what he did. Nick said it was mostly because of one guy. You can see this guy is causing Nick to get almost infuriated—his negative moves aren't working like they had in the other groups, because this guy could find a way to flip it and engage everyone and get people moving toward the goal.

High-proficiency environments help a group deliver a well-defined, reliable performance, while high-creativity environments help a group create something new.

But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.

In the new world of sales, being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than producing the right answers. Unfortunately, our schools often have the opposite emphasis. They teach us how to answer, but not how to ask.

We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities of what's rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.

if we stick with a task too long, we lose sight of the goal

A few of us are extraverts. A few of us are introverts. But most of us are ambiverts, sitting near the middle, not the edges, happily attuned to those around us. In some sense, we are born to sell.

What an individual does day to day on the job now must stretch across functional boundaries. Designers analyze. Analysts design. Marketers create. Creators market.

Today, the defining skills of the previous era—the "left brain" capabilities that powered the Information Age—are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the capabilities we once disdained or thought frivolous—the "right-brain" qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning—increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders.

This era doesn't call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.