Quotes About Reflection

we all live in the world our questions create.

That's because with each new advance, Thrun said, one must pause to ask, Now that we know what we now know, what's possible now?

That, right there, is a beautiful question for the ages: What do you want to say? Why does it need to be said? What if you could say it in a way that has never before been done? How might you do that?

Great questioners "keep looking"—at a situation or a problem, at the ways people around them behave, at their own behaviors. They study the small details; and they look for not only what's there but what's missing. They step back, view things sideways, squint if necessary.

one of the most important things a leader can do is project a clear and distinctive point of view that others can follow. But that clear vision is arrived at, and constantly modified and sharpened, through deep reflection and questioning.

The answer is, through questioning. Rather than run from a failure or try to forget it ever happened, hold it to the light and inquire, Why did the idea or effort fail? What if I could take what I've learned from this failure and try a revised approach? How might I do that?

in addition to asking what went wrong, you should also ask, In this failure, what went right? (Conversely, when you try out something and it seems to have succeeded, look for what went wrong or could have been better

In analyzing a series of setbacks, a key question to ask is Am I failing differently each time? "If you keep making the same68 mistakes again and again," the IDEO founder David Kelley has observed, "you aren't learning anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.

Basic formula: Q (questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation). On the other hand, Q – A = P (philosophy).

To figure out the internal values, Yamashita urges company leaders to look back in time and consider this question: Who have we (as a company) historically been when we've been at our best? At the finest moments in a company's history, Yamashita holds, its core values usually came shining through. But from time to time it may be necessary to revisit that past to reaffirm the company's higher purpose.

Often the worst thing you can do with a difficult question is to try to answer it too quickly. When the mind is coming up with What If possibilities, these fresh, new ideas can take time to percolate and form. They often result from connecting existing ideas in unusual and interesting ways.

Products come and go, leaders come and go, trends come and go," says Yamashita, "but through all of that, you need to know the answer to the question What is true about us, at our core?

This great quote from Close was featured recently on the site BrainPickings: "Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you'll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.")

Being willing to question is one thing; questioning well and effectively is another.

Cooperrider says that "organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask.

when we want to shake things up and instigate change, it's necessary to break free of familiar thought patterns and easy assumptions. We have to veer off the beaten neural path. And we do this, in large part, by questioning.

Everything that's ever happened to you or occurred to you in your life informs every decision you make—and also influences what questions you decide to ask. So it can be useful to step back and inquire, Why did I come up with that question?" Burton adds, "Every time you come up with a question, you should be wondering, What are the underlying assumptions of that question? Is there a different question I should be asking?

One of the most important things questioning does is to enable people to think and act in the face of uncertainty. As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, forming questions helps us "to organize our thinking around18 what we don't know.

You don't learn unless you question.

questions challenge authority and disrupt established structures, processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think about doing something differently.

Picasso was onto this truth fifty years ago when he commented, "Computers are useless—they only give31 you answers.

when he came home from school, "while other mothers asked their kids 'Did you learn anything today?' [my mother ] would say, 'Izzy, did you ask a good question today?

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in - in 2007, we just didn't know it was uncertain. It was - uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th 1987, you just didn't know it.

I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.