Quotes About Choice

One of the steps to becoming a better quitter is to not accept "I'm not ready to make a decision right now" as a sentence that makes sense. At every moment of your life, you have a choice about whether to stay or whether to go. When you choose to stay, you are also choosing to not go. When you choose to quit, you are also choosing to not continue.

An accurate picture of the odds is important when you're choosing a path. But once you've already made your choice, then you should switch into irrational optimism for the execution phase.

That's why, if I had to skill somebody up to get them to be a better decision-maker, quitting is the primary skill I would choose, because the option to quit is what allows you to react to that changing landscape.

The corollary of this is also true. When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.

This is consistent with the idea that the scale is gaffed against quitting. It turns out that our psychology puts a thumb on the scale such that by the time we think the options of quitting and sticking are 50-50, it's not even in the vicinity.

most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.

When you make a decision, the decision makes certain paths possible (even if you don't know where they lead) and others impossible. The decision you make determines which set of outcomes are possible and how likely each of those outcomes is. But it doesn't determine which of that set of outcomes will actually happen.

But this is irrational. If you wouldn't buy a stock today, you ought not hold it today, because a decision to hold is the same as a decision to buy.

I'm certainly not knocking these books. But whether you say "pivot" or "moving on to the next chapter" or "strategic redeployment," all of these things are, by definition, quitting. After all, stripped of its negative connotation, quitting is merely the choice to stop something that you have started.

was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome.

Have you ever had a moment of regret after a decision where you felt, "I knew I should have made the other choice!"? That's an alternative version of you saying, "See, I told you so!

When we're choosing among new options, loss aversion causes us to favor the ones that have the lowest absolute loss associated with them, even if those options come at a lower expected value. In other words, our aversion to taking a loss causes us to make decisions a rational actor would not.

Even when you make a good decision, that doesn't mean that it was the best decision. In fact, it rarely is. Striving to improve means being willing to fight the complacency that can come from a good decision leading to a good result.

In every domain, the outcome tail is wagging the decision dog.

Aldous Huxley recognized, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

You can't tell that much about the quality of a decision from a single outcome, because of luck. When you make a decision, you can rarely guarantee a good outcome (or a bad one). Instead, the goal is to try to choose the option that will lead to the most favorable range of outcomes.

There are many possible futures, but only one past. This makes the past feel inevitable, as even the tiniest of twigs now looks like the thickest of branches because it's the only thing you can see.

The next time that you find yourself saying, "I'm just not ready to decide yet," what you should actually say is "For now I think that the status quo is still the best choice." Maybe you need more information to know whether to switch. But what shouldn't stop you from quitting (or getting that information) is that it's too scary to switch because loss aversion is too intense.

By asking her if she would be happier in the new job more than 0% of the time, that helped her see that there was some certainty in changing jobs. Specifically, she had a better chance of getting to where she wanted to go faster if she switched. In that moment, she realized the devil that she didn't know was the better choice.

Neither of us had mentioned the word abortion, not even once. This thing had no place in language.

Voilà. Ce soir, j'ai horreur d'être allée à ce film soviétique inepte. Peut-être n'avait-il pas envie que je vienne. Et peut-être ne me téléphonera-t-il pas. Le seul point positif : le risque qu'il a pris en me suivant, alors que tous venaient de me voir partir. Vraiment le seul. Bien. Et moi ? Quelle conduite tenir ? Rompre Ã¢â'¬â€œ menacer de rompre Ã¢â'¬â€œ ne rien dire. Le choix est là.

Si tuviera que representar en un cuadro aquel acontecimiento de mi vida, pintaría una mesita de formica pegada a la pared y, encima de ella, una palangana esmaltada en la que flota una sonda roja. Ligeramente a la derecha se encuentra un cepillo de pelo. No creo que exista un solo Taller de la abortera en ningún museo del mundo.)

la libertad tenía rostro de centro comercial

All'inizio ho creduto che avrei scritto in fretta. In realtà passo molto tempo a interrogarmi sull'ordine delle cose da dire, la scelta e la disposizione delle parole, come se esistesse un ordine ideale, l'unico capace di restituire una verità su mia madre – ma non so in cosa consista –, e nel momento in cui scrivo non conta nient'altro per me che la scoperta di quell'ordine.