Quotes About Decision-making

I'm just kind of taking a break now and enjoying the freedom of making my own choices. When you're on a television show for six years, they run your schedule.

You're in a profession in which absolutely everybody is telling you their opinion, which is different. That's one of the reasons George Lucas never directed again.

The issue is not abortion. The issue is whether women can make up their own mind instead of some right-wing pastor, some right-wing politician telling them what to do.

I tell all the young guys, don't make choices because somebody else is telling you it's good from a career-maintenance perspective.

I believe that businesses will do what is best for their business. I don't know that the government needs to be stepping in and telling them, 'This is what you will do.'

I only do what my gut tells me to. I think it's smart to listen to other people's advice, but at the end of the day, you're the only one who can tell you what's right for you.

There's a voice inside you that tells you what you should do.

The older I get, the more I realize the importance of maintaining an even temperament - not getting too emotional, focusing on the task at hand. You don't want to make a business deal based on your emotions.

Quite frankly, I don't want someone with the temperament of a middle school pubescent boy in the president's office.

The government should not be guided by Temporary Excitement, but by Sober Second Thought.

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three people, two of whom are absent.

Understanding the OODA loop enables a commander to compress time - that is, the time between observing a situation and taking an action. A commander can use the temporal discrepancy (a form of fast transient) to select the least-expected action rather than what is predicted to be the most effective action. The enemy can also figure out what might be the most effective. To take the least-expected action disorients the enemy. It causes him to pause, wonder, to question.

Here Boyd says that to shape the environment, one must manifest four qualities: variety, rapidity, harmony, and initiative. A commander must have a series of responses that can be applied rapidly; he must harmonize his efforts and never be passive. To understand the briefing, one must keep these four qualities in mind.

The art of diplomacy is finding a reasonable route among imperfect alternatives.

They are pretty good at improvising, but God help us if they are given time to think. Dean Atchison

I will say that again in a different way: the persistent unethical and ignorant emphasis on secrecy and on making decisions for partisan advantage or to pay off campaign contributors and select insiders is not sustainable. We the People have an opportunity to embrace this manifesto of Open-Source Everything and bury 'rule of secrecy.' This is why I am optimistic about the future.

the brass and the bean counters look at the bottom line.

Just stop pursuing the subject we know is going to lead to disaster. Pro 17:14 - The idea is not to sweep the matter under the rug but it gives a little time for the water to recede behind the dam.

Recent scholarship confirms the portrait of John F. Kennedy sketched by his brother in Thirteen Days: a remarkably cool, thoughtful, nonhysterical, self-possessed leader, aware of the weight of decision, incisive in his questions, firm in his judgment, always in charge, steering his advisers perseveringly in the direction he wanted to go. "We are only now coming to understand the role he played in it," writes John Lewis Gaddis, the premier historian of the Cold War.

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

Courage is the human virtue that counts most--courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence. That's all any of us have

Before I built a wall I'd ask to knowWhat I was walling in or walling out.

The size of an investor's brain is less important than his ability to detach the brain from the emotions.