Quotes About Decision-making

The captain strikes me as a competent officer, and competent officers are never given enough information to work with.

Thinking deeply about your choices and actions from the stance of your future self can serve as both a motivational and a corrective force.

No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

I don't think there's a single dumbass thing I've done in my adult life that I didn't know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always.

we must help ourselves. That after destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives. We can choose to fling our kids into the grass or we can take deep breaths and walk up and down the hall.

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

Girls are strategic. They will talk about love and romance and all that crap but when it comes to doing the deal they will choose the fattest chicken.

Statistics is a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty.

Voting is a civic sacrament, which should not be exercised carelessly.

Voting is people power.

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences...

Making up his mind is a chore no less strenuous to the average Libran male than taming a wild buffalo...

A mugwump is a man in politics who never votes for anybody, but who is always voting against somebody.

And nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.

No doctor is better than three.

I learnt early that always being analytical is important for a business. Being analytical as an attitude is more important than just having the aptitude.

I told the others which trees to chop, where to get the mud, even though I was not the official leader. My father used to say, 'Thing like a boss, not like a worker.' He meant that it is better to use your brain and be active than to be sullen and passive, as most workers are. I worked harder than anyone in the crew because it kept my mind sharp and because it kept me from thinking about other things.

Therefore, Simon argues, when they make their choices, human beings satisfice, that is, we look for 'good enough' solutions rather than the best ones, as in the Neoclassical theory.25

The world is too complex, Simon argued, for our limited intelligence to understand fully. This means that very often the main problem we face in making a good decision is not the lack of information but our limited capability to process that information – a point nicely illustrated by the fact that the celebrated advent of the internet age does not seem to have improved the quality of our decisions, judging by the mess we are in today.

very often the main problem we face in making a good decision is not the lack of information but our limited capability to process that information

There was once a merchant who was so rich that he might have paved the whole street, and a little alley besides, with silver money. But he didn't do it--he knew better how to use his money than that.

No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.

War is absolutely the last card any national leader should play, and only when every other alternative has been exhausted. If the hand was being played by an old soldier, a war veteran, I can assure you he would guard that war card to the bitter end and play it reluctantly and with the fear and trepidation of experience.

Management manages by making decisions and by seeing that those decisions are implemented.