Quotes About Breakdown

18. Slice and dice the task: Break large, complex tasks down into bite-sized pieces, and then do just one small part of the task to get started.

E]ven laws of Nature are not absolutely certain. There may be new circumstances never before examined – inside black holes, say, or within the electron, or close to the speed of light – where even our vaunted laws of Nature break down and, however valid they may be in ordinary circumstances, need correction.

The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them...

Plans can break down. You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.

Humor can inform and break down stigma, which is a huge issue in the military.

I'm really good a breaking down a problem into small enough parts that everything falls through the cracks & voilá, problem solved. —Problem Solver

The weeds are like sundogs. They thrive on disaster. They move in anywhere systems break down. After this disaster the plants that grow fastest on scorched earth will thrive. . . . ' ¶ 'More weeds,' Vera concluded.

I'm f**king pathetic when it comes to being an entertainer. People come because they want to see me have a nervous breakdown.

To shed light on any continuous shape, object, motion, process, or phenomenon—no matter how wild and complicated it may appear—reimagine it as an infinite series of simpler parts, analyze those, and then add the results back together to make sense of the original whole.

Once that's done, it solves the original problem for all the tiny parts, which is usually a much easier task than solving the initial giant problem. The remaining challenge at that point is to put all the tiny answers back together again. That tends to be a much harder step, but at least it's not as difficult as the original problem was.

Calculus succeeds by breaking complicated problems down into simpler parts. That strategy, of course, is not unique to calculus. All good problem-solvers know that hard problems become easier when they're split into chunks. The truly radical and distinctive move of calculus is that it takes this divide-and-conquer strategy to its utmost extreme — all the way out to infinity.

a big, messy linear problem can always be broken into smaller, more manageable parts. Then each part can be solved separately, and all the little answers can be recombined to solve the bigger problem. So it's literally true that in a linear problem, the whole is exactly equal to the sum of the parts.

Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

More and more, we have been able to present the argument that recruitment of child soldiers is a social breakdown that leads to atrocities, because that's why they get them.

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.

Countries, like people, don't reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking.

During normal, nonemergency times, the capacity of the human mind to rationalize, to compartmentalize, and to be distracted easily is an important coping mechanism. (...) When it comes to rising to the reality of climate breakdown, however, these traits are proving to be our collective undoing. They are reassuring us when we should not be reassured. They are distracting us when we should not be distracted. And they are easing our consciences when our consciences should not be eased.

At a time when unprecedented wildfires engulf suburban homes in Melbourne, when waters from the rising Thames flood homes in London commuter towns, and when Superstorm Sandy transforms the New York subway into a canal system, the barriers that even the most urban and privileged among us have erected to hold back the natural world are clearly starting to break down.

There is a time for all seasons," he quoted Scripture. "A time to break down and a time to build up. You've had your time to break down, and now it's your time to build up. Don't punish yourself for what you didn't do. Just put all that behind you and move forward.

The main interest of most members of the Christian Coalition is the breakdown of the family. I think that's our biggest problem, and if the whole country was as concerned and active in issues of the family as members of the Christian Coalition are, we'd probably be better off as a country.

Listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once.

On the other hand, I believe there's hope, because the breakdown and the repair are happening simultaneously.

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs. —Henry Ford industrialist

Most of you guys can't see the potential in a nervous breakdown. A real collapse. There's more chance of finding yourself in a major depression than there is in a bottle Prozac.