Quotes About Flexibility

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,"[ 49] he was inviting us to be free.

there is no one right way of handling storms at sea. There is only what works for different boats and their captains in different storms, an improvised alchemy of conditions and intuition.

Few things in war can be as costly as doctrinal rigidity.

It's hard to stay the same while everything keeps changing around you.

It is always worth asking yourself: "how could I be wrong?

Seibel: One way to resolve that is the way Lisp does—make everything uniformly semiconcise. Where the uniformity has the advantage of allowing users of the language to easily add their own equally uniform, semiconcise, first-class syntactic extensions.

I think it is always going to be true that a person who manages programmers should not expect it to be predictable.

There are several major improvisation principles. One is that you should "accept every offer.

Just as Wiseman's research demonstrates that we can make our own luck, including by lowering our rigid expectations and being open to new ones, Tim Russert made his own luck.

Effective plussing requires that people let go of the need to control every detail.

Practicing little bets frees us from the expectation that we should know everything we need to know before we begin.

The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a period of worry and depression.' John Harvey Jones

I don't do terribly well when someone has an exact idea of how one of my goals should be accomplished. That doesn't allow me any latitude to make adjustments to suit my own style. I do well when I can draw my own map.

there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all survival strategy

If teams keep playing us this way, it's going to be like this

Approach the game with no preset agendas and you'll probably come away surprised at your overall efforts.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.

Scientists must be able to answer the question "What would convince me I am wrong?" If they can't, it's a sign they have grown too attached to their beliefs.

Maxims Hidden in the Text Try, fail, analyze, adjust, try again. John Maynard Keynes cycled through these steps ceaselessly. 178 An imperfect decision made in time is better than a perfect one made too late. 215-216 Plans are merely a platform for change. Israeli Defense Forces slogan. 222 If we ask many tiny pertinent questions, we can close in on an answer for the big question. 263

A forecaster who doesn't adjust her views in light of new information won't capture the value of that information, while a forecaster who is so impressed by the new information that he bases his forecast entirely on it will lose the value of the old information that underpinned his prior forecast. But the forecaster who carefully balances old and new captures the value in both—and puts it into her new forecast. The best way to do that is by updating often but bit by bit.

glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) liberalized

Plans are merely a platform for change. Israeli Defense Forces.

Alfred the Great] possessed the supreme military virtue of willingness to be taught by the enemy.

Avoid those persons who claim always to have believed the same thing and demand you do the same. What they are really saying is that they have refused to permit their encounters with God to reshape their lives.