Quotes About Decision-making

Douglas W. Hubbard

Conformity can be costly in a world of uncertainty.

MAKING WISE DECISIONS: When GOD brings something to your mind-----Don't let it pass without dealing with it.

Never do anything that you aren't prepared to face the true consequences of.

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time.

With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

My trouble was I had a mind but I couldn't make it up!

Sometimes I bust out and do things so permanent. Like tattoos and marriage.

I'm a total control freak and love to participate in the design of every single aspect of life.

The 'wisdom of the crowds' is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb.

A truly effective leader, however, must be able to see the shades of gray inherent in a situation in order to make wise decisions as to how to proceed. The essence of thinking gray is this: don't form an opinion about an important matter until you've heard all the relevant facts.

if you were to lead successfully, whether a kingdom or a ship's company, the only standards worth bothering with were those you set yourself; those of others were—well, those of the mob; those who were led, who had neither the ability nor the courage to sit alone and make the decisions.

Commenting on an early paper by the Nobel laureate Gary Becker, the economist James Duesenberry famously quipped that "economics is all about choice, while sociology is about why people have no choices.

The real problem with relying on experts, however, is not that they are appreciably worse than nonexperts, but rather that because they are experts we tend to consult only one at a time.

Plans fail, in other words, not because planners ignore common sense, but rather because they rely on their own common sense to reason about the behavior of people who are different from them.

if we want to understand why people do what they do, we must understand the incentives that they face, and hence their preference for one outcome versus another. When someone does something that seems strange or puzzling to us, rather than writing them off as crazy or irrational, we should instead seek to analyze their situation in hopes of finding a rational incentive.

I don't know why I do stuff sometimes. Sometimes I go by the numbers. Sometimes I go on what I feel. Sometimes I go on what I hope.

I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem - and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

Never send a battalion to take a hill if a regiment is available.

Life is filled with problems to be solved and tensions to be managed. Sometimes it helps to know which is which.

You can't really conduct your life by one or two phrases.

I have these new policies toward my life, like 'I will not accelerate when I see the yellow light.'

After all, we are not children. It's time we planned our life.

Everyone carries a bucket of water and a bucket of gas in life. A leader has learned to throw the right one at the right time.