Quotes About Control

Elegance is a kind of control.

Sad old blokes, I'm told, now dream of me with a whip in hand.

Sleep without pills? impossible. take pills! death? have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.

She froze. He reached up and took her hand in his, pulling the knife away, making her drop it on the floor. "Show me how much you hate me," he whispered against her mouth. "Prove it to me.

Nature can destroy us in a blink. We live on only at its pleasure.

Everything felt better when you knew what time it was. Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. There was always order, if you knew where to look.

Whole areas of knowledge and information have been defined into nonexistence because the system cannot know, understand, control, or measure them.

Our fear is like the first tile in a string of dominoes. Our denial of fear causes us to lie, to cheat, and to become people we don't even respect in order to maintain our illusion of control.

ALL OF US are afraid sometimes, that's human. When our life is ruled by fear, that's obsession.

What? You don't want any boiled beef tongue? Ha-ha. Eat the fucking tongue. We are the parents, they said, and you are the child.

Of the world's 175 largest nation-states and private firms, 112 are corporations.

The truth of Voltaire's observation offers itself perpetually," he told Bellini, that every man in Europe "must be either the hammer or the anvil.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim.

Identifying a negative outcome doesn't have the same personal sting if you turn it into a positive by finding things to learn from it. You don't have to be on the defensive side of every negative outcome because you can recognize, in addition to things you can improve, things you did well and things outside your control. You realize that not knowing is okay.

As Nietzsche points out, regret can do nothing to change what has already happened. We just wallow in remorse about something over which we no longer have any control. But if regret happened before a decision instead of after, the experience of regret might get us to change a choice likely to result in a bad outcome.

In that narrative, taking credit for something good is the same as saying we made the right decision. And being right feels good. Likewise, thinking that something bad was our fault means we made a wrong decision, and being wrong feels bad. When our self-image is at stake, we treat our fielding decisions as 100% or 0%: right versus wrong, skill versus luck, our responsibility versus outside our control. There are no shades of grey.

We have this thin layer of prefrontal cortex made just for us, sitting on top of this big animal brain. Getting this thin little layer to handle more is unrealistic." The prefrontal cortex doesn't control most of the decisions we make every day. We can't fundamentally get more out of that unique, thin layer of prefrontal cortex. "It's already overtaxed,

In the movie, the matrix was built to be a more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable: our beliefs are nearly always correct; favorable outcomes are the result of our skill; there are plausible reasons why unfavorable outcomes are beyond our control; and we compare favorably with our peers. We deny or at least dilute the most painful parts of the message.

Luck exerts its influence between your decision and which of the possible paths you end up on. It is the element you have no control over that determines which of the possible outcomes you actually observe in the short run.

If you had a navigation app for your goals and decisions, it would work like a premortem and a backcast and its output would look like the Decision Exploration Table. You've identified two broad categories of future events (those within and outside your control) that could decrease or increase your chances of failure or success and made an educated guess about their likelihood. You now have a good map of what might lie in the path on the way to your goal.

Because there are only two things that determine how your life turns out: luck and the quality of your decisions. You have control over only one of those two things.

our brains evolved to create certainty and order. We are uncomfortable with the idea that luck plays a significant role in our lives. We recognize the existence of luck, but we resist the idea that, despite our best efforts, things might not work out the way we want. It feels better for us to imagine the world as an orderly place, where randomness does not wreak havoc and things are perfectly predictable.

When possible, divide and conquer. Have the people who make the decisions to start things be different from the people who make the decisions to stop those things. For clients of mine who are institutional investors, I have suggested that type of strategy as a way to improve their sell-side decisions. Have the committee approving what to buy be different from the committee approving what and when to sell.

there are only two things that determine how your life turns out: luck and the quality of your decisions. You have control over only one of those two things.