Quotes About Decision-making

Agreeable people will go along with whoever makes a suggestion, instead of insisting, at least sometimes, on their own way.

When you don't know what to do, you must be prepared to do anything and everything, in case it becomes necessary. You're sitting in your car with the gas and brake pedals both punched to the mat. Too much of that and everything falls apart.

Part of moving Beyond Order is knowing when you have such a reason. Part of moving Beyond Order is understanding that your conscience has a primary claim on your action, which supersedes your conventional social duty.

If the answer is no, here's something to try: Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don't waste time questioning how you know that what you're doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is.

You must shepherd your limited resources carefully. Seeing is very difficult, so you must choose what to see, and let the rest go.

Maybe following the dictates of conscience is in fact the best possible plan that you have—at minimum, otherwise you have to live with your sense of self-betrayal and the knowledge that you put up with what you truly could not tolerate. Nothing about that is good.

just because you know a bunch of things doesn't give you an unerring guide to know what to do about those things

When people think, they simulate the world, and plan how to act in it. If they do a good job of simulating, they can figure out what stupid things they shouldn't do. Then they can not do them. Then they don't have to suffer the consequences. That's the purpose of thinking.

You could ask yourself, "Is there anything at all that I might be willing to do about that pile of paper? Would I look, maybe, at one part of it? For twenty minutes?" Maybe the answer will be, "No!" But you might look for ten, or even for five (and if not that, for one). Start there. You will soon find that the entire pile shrinks in significance, merely because you have looked at part of it.

Given that you just raised Bill's level of logical certainty to at least a 9 and his emotional certainty to at least a 7, does it make sense for you to take a shot and ask for the order again? After all, if it turns out that Bill has a low action threshold, isn't there a shot that you could slide in under the wire, as the phrase goes, and close him? The answer is no, absolutely not.

Just one final point with this—and that's to never forget the ethical side of the equation, which is that you do not want to use pain to disempower people; you want to use it to empower people by helping them make good buying decisions, so they can have the things that they truly need.

Practically speaking, the implications of this are staggering. After all, if you can lower a person's action threshold, then you can turn some of the toughest buyers into easy buyers—which is something that we do with great effect in the latter stages of the sale, and that sets up the possibility of being able to close anyone who is closeable.

Mathematicians can be persnickety about logical niceties. We're the kind of people who think it's funny, when asked, "Do you want soup or salad with that?" to reply, "Yes.

the interesting thing about the slime mold is that it makes pretty good decisions.

Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends on where you already are. This insight isn't new.

Working an integral or performing a linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense—or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place—requires a guiding human hand.

At bottom, one might say that human wisdom consisted in the protraction of all things, in saying "no" before saying "yes," for one could manage people only by trifling with them.

Football is a game about feelings and intelligence.

The reduced sense of responsibility and the absence of effective volition in turn explain the ordinary citizen's ignorance and lack of judgement in matters of domestic and foreign policy which are if anything more shocking in the case of educated people and of people who are successfully active in non-political walks of life than it is with uneducated people in humble stations.

Guilt can make you doubt yourself at the very moment when you need to proceed with certainty.

The chief reason why marriage is rarely a success is that it is contracted while the partners are insane.

The question is, if we already know what the right and the wrong answers are to moral questions, prior to the formulation of an abstract principle, what is the point of formulating the principle?

This in no way implies the existence of multiple executives, each with their own planning and decision-making capacities. Instead, it suggests that the various component executive functions are achieved by a set of interconnected circuits that are spread over several brain regions in the frontal cortex, and even other regions,

Squirrelflight would be a good leader