Quotes About Observation

The concept of luck is very straightforward. Some people notice opportunities and others don't.

People Watch Luck Go by Them and They're Blind - They Never Reach out and Grab It.

Let one of your first decisions be to keep a closed mouth and open ears and eyes

Bystanders In life you are either on the Side Lines or else in the Game. If you are on the Side Lines you are merely watching. You are inactive. You are contributing to your personal pleasure. If you are in the Game you are playing hard, you are getting pleasure and you are rendering Service. You will always get more pleasure out of the Game if you are a Player instead of a Bystander.

Watch the one ahead of you, and you'll learn why he is ahead. Then emulate him.

It is a well known fact that an observant person can accurately analyze a man by seeing his workbench, desk or other place of employment. A well organized desk indicates a well organized brain. Show me the merchant's stock of goods and I will tell you whether he has an organized or disorganized brain, as there is a close relationship between one's mental attitude and one's physical environment.

A master salesperson knows what thoughts are in people's minds by the expressions on their faces, by the words they speak, by their silence, and by the "feeling" you get from within while you are in their presence. A master salesperson can predict the future by observing what has happened in the past. A master salesperson is the master of others because he or she masters himself or herself.

Keep your eyes and ears wide open— and your mouth closed, if you wish to acquire the habit of prompt decision.

observes and analyzes accurately what the prospective buyer does and says, but also what the prospective buyer does not do or say.

profits by their own mistakes and, through observation, by the mistakes of others. In every failure and mistake may be found the seed of an equivalent success.

More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.

If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.

First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

The observation of the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments, or to admire a man's happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come, with all variety of future; and to him only to whom the divinity has [guaranteed] continued happiness until the end we may call happy.

It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.

In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

It takes considerable effort to see facts (and remember them) while withholding judgment and resisting explanations. And

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong.

Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they develop political ideas that are very similar). Psychologists give it a fancier name, but my friend Marty has no training in behavioral sciences.

One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.*

Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.

Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. However

Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they

never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact—and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings." Likewise, never ask a trader if he is profitable; you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.