Quotes About Foresight

The plan is useless; it's the planning that's important.

I don't want to look back-I want to keep looking ahead. I'd hate for my defining moment to be my past.

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

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

In life, as in chess, forethought wins.

If you go through life being casual, you will end up a casualty

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but foresight is better, especially when it comes to saving life, or some pain!

Front offices are more interested in players that are far than players that are near.

Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and—quite literally—accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of "Let's just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.

Instead, I've got the Hewitt boys down on paper. So that 100 years from now some reader I don't know can see how dumb they were!

Maybe I'm getting precognitive in my old age.

Unless you go before you go, you'll need to go while you're going.

La madurez consiste en saber posponer el placer inmediato para conseguir mejorar la situación a largo plazo.

A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.

Poetry is a presentiment of the truth.

There's a time in your life when you have to stop looking back and start looking forward because otherwise you're going to walk down the road one day and bump into a lamppost. But it's not easy.

this idea of casting yourself into the future, imagining a failure, and then looking back to try to figure out why is called a premortem. Using a premortem is a great tool to help develop high-quality kill criteria.

You know that Chinese proverb, "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step"? Turns out, if we were contemplating a thousand-mile walk, we'd be better off imagining ourselves looking back from the destination and figuring how we got there. When it comes to advance thinking, standing at the end and looking backward is much more effective than looking forward from the beginning.

Remember, the likelihood of positive and negative futures must add up to 100%. The positive space of backcasting and the negative space of a premortem still have to fit in a finite amount of space. When we see how much negative space there really is, we shrink down the positive space to a size that more accurately reflects reality and less reflects our naturally optimistic nature

Unlesses can get us out from under the forces that will keep us playing in the short run, chasing a win, and align our behavior more closely with our long-term best interests.

A premortem is an investigation into something awful, but before it happens.

Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early. If you quit on time, it's not going to seem like anything particularly dire is happening at that particular moment. That's because quitting is a problem of being able to glimpse at the range of ways the future might play out and see that the likelihood that things will turn out poorly is too high to make it worth your while to continue.

When we make in-the-moment decisions (and don't ponder the past or future), we are more likely to be irrational and impulsive.* This tendency we all have to favor our present-self at the expense of our future-self is called temporal discounting.

Backcasting and premortems complement each other. Backcasting imagines a positive future; a premortem imagines a negative future. We can't create a complete picture without representing both the positive space and the negative space. Backcasting reveals the positive space. Premortems reveal the negative space. Backcasting is the cheerleader; a premortem is the heckler in the audience.