Quotes About Assumptions

I call the riskiest elements of a startup's plan, the parts on which everything depends, leap-of-faith assumptions. The two most important assumptions are the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis.

Every business plan begins with a set of assumptions. It lays out a strategy that takes those assumptions as a given and proceeds to show how to achieve the company's vision. Because the assumptions haven't been proved to be true (they are assumptions, after all) and in fact are often erroneous, the goal of a startup's early efforts should be to test them as quickly as possible.

Every business plan begins with a set of assumptions.

identify the elements of the plan that are assumptions rather than facts, and figure out ways to test them.

Innovation accounting begins by turning the leap-of-faith assumptions discussed in Chapter 5 into a quantitative financial model. Every business plan has some kind of model associated with it, even if it's written on the back of a napkin. That model provides assumptions about what the business will look like at a successful point in the future.

When one is choosing among the many assumptions in a business plan, it makes sense to test the riskiest assumptions first. If you can't find a way to mitigate these risks toward the ideal that is required for a sustainable business, there is no point in testing the others.

People assume that computers will do everything that humans do. Not good. People are different from each other and they are all really different from computers.

good summary: to hire people who are a good fit for your vision, your organization, and the job itself; to listen to them, challenge your limiting assumptions about them, and deal with them as individuals; to create clear agreements with them, provide balanced behavioral feedback, and delegate appropriately and well; to coach them to develop in areas where they have potential and interest.

Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.

everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.

Abigail gave me a withering look. But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.

This was all news to us lower ranks who, while we'd theoretically known Seawoll had parents, had always assumed that he'd been assembled in a factory somewhere outside Wakefield.

But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.

the more thoroughly I liberate myself from prevailing cultural assumptions—around education, wealth, ambition, and success, to name but a few—the more choice I actually have. The more freedom I have.

The myth of Aryan dominance, initially an attempt to trace the lost language of the Aryas, began as a set of undemonstrable racial assumptions, and ended in a colossal, perfectly unscientific lie: "I decide who is Jewish and who is Aryan," announced Goebbels. That is what the Nazis meant by natural selection.

There is a rich vein of jokes about economists and their assumptions. Take the old one about the engineer, the physicist, and the economist. They find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island with nothing to eat but a sealed can of beans. How to get at them? The engineer proposes breaking the can open with a rock. The physicist suggests heating the can in the sun, until it bursts. The economist's approach: "First, assume we have a can opener....

I think we assume a lot about both genders. But in particular I think we assume that only boys play games and that boys are only interested in playing games that reflect their narratives and their interests.

My role on television is one of helping people reexamine the assumptions that they hold. I regard Dr. King. You would never hear me get up and speak without in some way, shape or form, referencing, Dr. King.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, and I feel like everyone judges people: regardless of whether they know someone or not, they have an opinion based on the persona of the person. I guess you can only have a real opinion of who they are as a person once you meet someone.

I think we are progressing with race relations but assumptions hold us back.

People assume that computers will do everything that humans do. Not good. People are different from each other and they are all really different from computers.

People judge. Fast

Don't underestimate the significance of this principle. Today in our media-fashioned world many good and talented leaders face the constant temptation to begin believing the text of their own publicity releases. And if they do, a messianic fantasy gradually infects their personalities and leadership styles. Forgetting who they are not, they begin to make dangerous assumptions about who they are.

I was looking around this room, this sea of industry folk. If I had have worn black and white, somebody would have asked me to get them a cocktail; the only other people of colour there were servers.