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Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
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Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
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In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower
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Whenever I am in a difficult situation where there seems to be no way out, I think about all the times I have been in such situations and say to myself, "I did it before, so I can do it again.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
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When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
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The money you make is a symbol of the value you create.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
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Can you define "plan" as "a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, held together by panic, indecision, and ignorance"? If so, it was a very good plan.
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Jonathan Stroud (The Ring of Solomon (Bartimaeus, #0.5))
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Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack.
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Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
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Today is a new day and it brings with it a new set of opportunities for me to act on.
I am attentive to the opportunities and I seize them as they arise.
I have full confidence in myself and my abilities.
I can do all things that I commit myself to.
No obstacle is too big or too difficult for me to handle because what lies inside me is greater than what lies ahead of me.
I am committed to improving myself and I am getting better daily.
I am not held back by regret or mistakes from the past.
I am moving forward daily.
Absolutely nothing is impossible for me.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
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So the plan wasn't a clusterfuck, it was just circling the clusterfuck target zone, getting ready to come in for a landing.
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Martha Wells (Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries, #4))
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A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.
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Joanne Harris (Runemarks (Runemarks, #1))
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Life is like butter - when things cool down it can be reshaped
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Alan Sheinwald (Alan Sheinwald is Building a Perfect Home)
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Success in life is not for those who run fast, but for those who keep running and always on the move.
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Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
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Do you understand the plan?”
They all stared for a few silent moments. Then Simon pointed. “What’s that wobbly thing?” he said. “Is it a tree?”
“Those are the gates,” Jace said.
“Ohh,” said Isabelle, pleased. “So what are the swirly bits? Is there a moat?
“Those are trajectory lines - Honestly, am I the only person who’s ever seen a strategy map?”, Jace demanded, throwing his stele down and raking his hand through his blond hair. “Do you understand anything I just said.”
“No,” Clary said. “Your strategy is probably awesome, but your drawing skills are terrible; all the Endarkened look like trees, and the fortress looks like a frog.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6))
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Jayden laughed grimly. 'Press the attack and hope for the best.'
'Hope is not a strategy,' said Kira
'It's not plan A,' said Jayden, 'and it shouldn't be plan B, but it is every plan C that has ever been made.
”
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Dan Wells (Partials (Partials Sequence, #1))
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If you're reading this, I hope God opens incredible doors for your life this year. Greatness is upon you. You must believe it though.
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Germany Kent
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No one else knows exactly what the future holds for you, no one else knows what obstacles you've overcome to be where you are, so don't expect others to feel as passionate about your dreams as you do.
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Germany Kent
“
The vocation of pastor(s) has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans.
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Eugene H. Peterson (The Pastor: A Memoir)
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The definition of a professional is one who does a job well even when they don't like it.
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Alan Sheinwald (Alan Sheinwald is Building a Perfect Home)
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If you want to succeed and leave your competitors behind, you need great plans and even greater strategies.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Not planning enough is like preparing for failure even if you are extremely passionate about your idea.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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A good marketing plan can’t be formed in just four hours. Plans are formed on extensive research.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Strategy is your war plan. If you go to a war without your strategy, you might not be able to defeat the enemy.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
A strategy is not permanent. It’s like water, it will keep changing itself as the obstacles come.
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”
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
Incorrect results of the market research when fed to the marketing strategy and action plans produce disastrous results.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
first lay plans which will ensure victory, and then lead your army to battle; if you will not begin with stratagem but rely on brute strength alone, victory will no longer be assured
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Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
“
Rich or poor it’s nice to have money
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Alan Sheinwald (Alan Sheinwald is Building a Perfect Home)
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poor cash planning leads to a loss of investment.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
If we were left to ourselves with the task of taking the gospel to the world, we would immediately begin planning innovative strategies and plotting elaborate schemes. We would organize conventions, develop programs, and create foundations… But Jesus is so different from us. With the task of taking the gospel to the world, he wandered through the streets and byways…All He wanted was a few men who would think as He did, love as He did, see as He did, teach as He did and serve as He did. All He needed was to revolutionize the hearts of a few, and they would impact the world.
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David Platt (Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream)
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You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented.
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Clayton M. Christensen (How Will You Measure Your Life?)
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You gotta make it a priority to make your priorities a priority.
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Richie Norton
“
The success of a strategy largely depends on it's implementation. You can have a good strategy, you can have a winning game plan, but ultimately you and your team have to implement the strategy and execute and put the game plan into action if your business is going to succeed.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
A strategy is an action plan of what you want to achieve and how. It defines where you want to see yourself in the long-term and how you are going to use your resources, skills and competencies to achieve that.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior’s approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.
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Chögyam Trungpa
“
Be stern in the council-chamber, [Show no weakness, and insist on your plans being ratified by the sovereign.] so that you may control the situation.
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Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
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Positive thinking is powerful thinking. If you want happiness, fulfillment, success and inner peace, start thinking you have the power to achieve those things. Focus on the bright side of life and expect positive results.
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Germany Kent
“
Listen to people from your heart, as if your life depended on it, and you will find that in turn people will listen to you with all of theirs.
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Chris Murray (The Extremely Successful Salesman's Club)
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Take the challenge of your life.
Reach out to your goals.
There is no limit to what you can achieve.
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Lailah Gifty Akita
“
Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.
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Alfie Kohn (Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes)
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Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial. God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idolized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands set up by their own law, and judge one another and God accordingly. It is not we who build. Christ builds the church. Whoever is mindful to build the church is surely well on the way to destroying it, for he will build a temple to idols without wishing or knowing it. We must confess he builds. We must proclaim, he builds. We must pray to him, and he will build. We do not know his plan. We cannot see whether he is building or pulling down. It may be that the times which by human standards are the times of collapse are for him the great times of construction. It may be that the times which from a human point are great times for the church are times when it's pulled down. It is a great comfort which Jesus gives to his church. You confess, preach, bear witness to me, and I alone will build where it pleases me. Do not meddle in what is not your providence. Do what is given to you, and do it well, and you will have done enough.... Live together in the forgiveness of your sins. Forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts.
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Strategy is not really a solo sport – even if you’re the CEO.
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Max McKeown (The Strategy Book)
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You’re a clever strategist, but not all battles require tricks. Sometimes the simplest way to kill something is to swim up to it and bite it in half.
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Shaun Hick (The Ghost And Its Shadow)
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Many problems can be solved by a man not frightened by them.
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Robert A. Heinlein (Have Space Suit—Will Travel)
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If we want to be more than conquerors, reading the Word is not enough. Acting on the Word and applying it—mixing it with faith—will destroy the enemy’s game plan for your life.
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John Ramirez (Unmasking the Devil: Strategies to Defeat Eternity's Greatest Enemy)
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The choices you make from this day forward will lead you, step by step, to the future you deserve.
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Chris Murray (The Extremely Successful Salesman's Club)
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An entrepreneur is a man who knows he can fail, but he does not accept to fail before he actually fails, and when he fails he learns from his errors and moves on.
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Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
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7 keys to getting more things done:
1 start
2 dont make excuses
3 celebrate small steps
4 ignore critics
5 be consistent
6 be open
7 stay positive
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Germany Kent
“
When thinking about what to do next with your life, don’t ask yourself what you would succeed at, but what you would most enjoy failing at.
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Clifford Cohen
“
Compounding works best when you can give a plan years or decades to grow. This is true for not only savings but careers and relationships. Endurance is key. And when you consider our tendency to change who we are over time, balance at every point in your life becomes a strategy to avoid future regret and encourage endurance.
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Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
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Jews believe that people are creators, not consumers. The role of humans is to improve and perfect God's creations through work, creation, and innovation.
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H.W. Charles (The Money Code: Become a Millionaire With the Ancient Jewish Code)
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Thinking and planning is one side of life; doing is another. A man cannot be doing all the time.
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Mary Stewart (The Crystal Cave (Arthurian Saga, #1))
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The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Magic always happens when you direct your inner powers to the object you want to change.
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Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
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You see it as me going back. I see it as me staying on track.
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Germany Kent
“
Hope is not a strategy,” said Kira.
“It’s not plan A,” said Jayden, “and it shouldn’t be plan B, but it is every plan C that has ever been made.
”
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Dan Wells (Partials (Partials Sequence, #1))
“
Be creative while inventing ideas, but be disciplined while implementing them.
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Amit Kalantri
“
Whilst people have answered questions, I have only heard my own voice thinking of the next question.
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Chris Murray (The Extremely Successful Salesman's Club)
“
Finding a balance between living in the present and planning for the future is a key to navigating uncertainty. It's about aligning our mindset with the understanding that expectations and strategies should be adaptable and fluid, not rigid or dogmatic. ("Life had taken them by Surprise “)
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Erik Pevernagie
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Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it's a part of the procreational strategy. It's Nature's Plan. Women know that instinctively. Why did they buy so many different clothes, in the old days? To trick the men into thinking they were several different women. A new one each day.
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Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
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A good strategy should dictate the right actions. Any action mustn't be impulsive, but analyzed along with all its possible outcomes. A solid plan always includes many backups and alternatives.
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Diane Ackerman (The Zookeeper's Wife)
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When the vision is clear, the results will appear. Keep your mindset positive as you work your plan, flourish, and always remember why you started.
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Germany Kent
“
Profitability. Growth. Quality. Exceeding customer expectations. These are not examples of values. These are examples of corporate strategies being sold to you as values.
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Stan Slap
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If the hare makes too many minor missteps and has to keep adjusting, the tortoise wins. If the tortoise spends too much time planning each step, the hare wins.
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Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
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Spend your time designing the greatest reputation a man could possess.
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Chris Murray (The Extremely Successful Salesman's Club)
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Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth. —Mike Tyson
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Lawrence Freedman (Strategy: A History)
“
Ultimately, under the veneer of data-driven assumptions, strategic planning can be arbitrary in our deeply uncertain world.
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Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
“
I was so sure that I knew what they needed and what I wanted to sell them that I never stopped long enough to find out what it was they wanted to buy.
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Chris Murray (The Extremely Successful Salesman's Club)
“
Following the rules of your industry will only get you so far.
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Max McKeown (The Strategy Book)
“
People who made their dreams come true didn’t simply go after it. They changed the person they were, in order to fit the type of person that would live that type of dream.
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Shannon L. Alder
“
When the bullets start flying, you may find I’m nice to have around. Those pretty pictures aren’t going to keep you alive.”
“We need these plans. And in case you’ve forgotten, one of my flash bombs helped get us out of the Ketterdam harbor.”
Jesper blew out a breath. “Brilliant strategy.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“You blinded our guys right along with the Black Tips.”
“It was a calculated risk.”
“It was cross-your-fingers-and-hope-for-the-best. Believe me, I know the difference.
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Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
“
Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.
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Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
“
. . . what matters in combat is adaptability, boldness and maintaining A cool exterior, whilst penetrating your enemy's soul with An icy cold stare
- Diary of A Combat Fiend
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Soke Behzad Ahmadi (Dirty Fighting : Lethal Okinawan Karate)
“
The problem with most strategic planning processes is they are not designed to create strategy. They are designed to create consistency and predictability.
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Kaihan Krippendorff
“
On the feed the humans settled some details of what I was designating as Operation Not Actually A Completely Terrible Plan.
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Martha Wells (Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries, #4))
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The more segmentation you do, the more groups will be formed and your sample size will increase in response to that.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
“
Your current marketing plan, strategy, and research objective are also going to play an important role in defining your sample size.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
“
Systematic sampling is like random sampling, except the members are not chosen totally randomly. You can choose members at regular intervals here.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
“
Before you start your research, you need to know where to look for that data.
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”
Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
“
Internal sources of information are those sources that you can find within your own organization.
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”
Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
“
You can segment your market according to demographics, psychographics, a combination of these two, or something else. In the end, it is all going to depend on your current marketing plan.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
“
Understanding the world too well, you see too many options and become as indecisive as Hamlet.
No matter how far we progress, we remain part animal, and it is the animal in us that fires our strategies, gives them life, animates us to fight. Without the desire to fight, without a capacity for the violence war churns up, we cannot deal with danger.
The prudent Odysseus types are comfortable with both sides of their nature. They plan ahead as best they can, see far and wide, but when it comes time to move ahead, they move. Knowing how to control your emotions means not repressing them completely but using them to their best effect.
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Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies of War)
“
The sample includes who are you planning to study and how many participants will be there for this study as you can’t study everyone. You will be required to further divide them into various groups.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
“
A sampling plan is all about how you’re planning to gather data for your market research. It is going to include a sample of all those people who can represent your target audience and can also be easily studied.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
“
If you’re segmenting based on gender and your target audience is made up of all the genders, then make sure that people from all the genders form a part of your study. This way, you will get more accurate results.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
“
The Warrior knows that no man is an island.
He cannot fight alone; whatever his plan, he depends on other people. He needs to discuss his strategy, to ask for help, and, in moments of relaxation, to have someone with whom he can sit by the fire, someone he can regale with tales of battle.
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Paulo Coelho (Warrior of the Light)
“
If the research is done for brand awareness and the results don't show any rosy picture, then maybe you want to share those results with your marketing head who can include more brand awareness strategies in her marketing plan.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
“
You have to spend a lot of time with your customers and competitors to know what’s going on in their lives. You don’t want to be the last one to know that your customers’ needs have changed and now they want to break up with your brand.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
“
Thriving through change requires clear strategy. But ironically, it also requires the willingness to toss all of your existing plans out the window if the business is presented with new data or new circumstances that delegitimize the clear strategy.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Chess is all about maintaining coherent strategies. It’s about not giving up when the enemy destroys one plan but to immediately come up with the next. A game isn’t won and lost at the point when the king is finally cornered. The game's sealed when a player gives up having any strategy at all. When his soldiers are all scattered, they have no common cause, and they move one piece at a time, that’s when you’ve lost.
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Kazuo Ishiguro (A Pale View of Hills)
“
life can be organized like a business plan. First you take an inventory of your gifts and passions. Then you set goals and come up with some metrics to organize your progress toward those goals. Then you map out a strategy to achieve your purpose, which will help you distinguish those things that move you toward your goals from those things that seem urgent but are really just distractions. If you define a realistic purpose early on and execute your strategy flexibly, you will wind up leading a purposeful life. You will have achieved self-determination, of the sort captured in the oft-quoted lines from William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus”: “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.
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David Brooks (The Road to Character)
“
We all look for strategies or techniques that will free us from the pain of relationships and the hard work good relationships demand. We hope that better planning, more effective communication, clear role definitions, conflict resolution strategies, gender studies, and personality typing--to name just a few -- will make the difference. There may be value in these things, but if they were all we needed, Jesus' life, death, and resurrection would be unnecessary or, at best, redundant.
Skills and techniques appeal to us because they promise that relational problems can be fixed by tweaking our behavior without altering the bent of our hearts. But the Bible says something very different. It says that Christ is the only real hope for relationships because only he can dig deep enough to address the core motivations and desires of our hearts.
Most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but your delusions of strength. Self-reliance is almost always a component of a bad relationship.
”
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Paul David Tripp
“
**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.**
That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision.
[first-line bold by author]
[2002] p.23
”
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Gary Hamel (Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life)
“
To acknowledge the existence of the bully and his accompanying risks is not the same as accepting him as a permanent feature of our world. I know that if we accept trauma and fear, it wins.
"Bullies don’t just go away. Their legacies don’t just disappear. The bully must be confronted intentionally, his impact named and addressed. Even so, it seems there’s no clear consensus on how to deal with the bully on our blocks. Do we confront him? Match violence with violence? Do we ignore him, or try to kill him with kindness? I don’t think there’s a silver bullet to handling the bully, no one-size-fits-all strategy. But the right strategy has to be rooted in a context bigger than the immediate one, has to be rooted in more than aiming to end the presence of the bully himself. We must focus on the type of world we want to live in and devise a plan for getting there, as opposed to devising a strategy centered on opposition.
”
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DeRay Mckesson (On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope)
“
What rewards and punishments do is induce compliance, and this they do very well indeed. If your objective is to get people to obey an order, to show up on time and do what they’re told, then bribing or threatening them may be sensible strategies. But if your objective is to get long-term quality in the workplace, to help students become careful thinkers and self-directed learners, or to support children in developing good values, then rewards, like punishments, are absolutely useless. In fact, as we are beginning to see, they are worse than useless—they are actually counterproductive.
”
”
Alfie Kohn (Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes)
“
Understand: the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present moment. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this “friction”: the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to changing circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be. The more we lose ourselves in predigested theories and past experiences, the more inappropriate and delusional our response.
”
”
Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies of War)
“
Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction. In reaction to a war that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism, and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lost the courts and wait for a White House scandal.
And increasingly we feel the need to match the Republican right in stridency and hardball tactics. The accepted wisdom that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists these days goes like this: The Republican Party has been able to consistently win elections not by expanding its base but by vilifying Democrats, driving wedges into the electorate, energizing its right wing, and disciplining those who stray from the party line. If the Democrats ever want to get back into power, then they will have to take up the same approach.
...Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we're in. I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country. It's what keeps us locked in "either/or" thinking: the notion that we can have only big government or no government; the assumption that we must either tolerate forty-six million without health insurance or embrace "socialized medicine". It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off of politics.
”
”
Barack Obama (The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream)
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One of the basic questions that we need to look at is how to convert merely rebellious attitudes into revolutionary ones in the process of the radical transformation of society. Merely rebellious attitudes or actions are insufficient, though they are an indispensable response to legitimate anger. It is necessary to go beyond rebellious attitudes to a more radically critical and revolutionary position, which is in fact a position not simply of denouncing injustice but of announcing a new utopia. Transformation of the world implies a dialectic between the two actions: denouncing the process of dehumanization and announcing the dream of a new society. On the basis of this knowledge, namely, “to change things is difficult but possible,” we can plan our political-pedagogical strategy.
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Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Critical Perspectives Series: A Book Series Dedicated to Paulo Freire))
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God’s plan to suicide himself could not work, though, as long as He existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking to nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into nothingness, he shattered Himself—Big Bang-like—into the time-bound fragments of the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms that have been accumulating here and there for billions of years. In Mainländer’s philosophy, “God knew that he could change from a state of super-reality into non-being only through the development of a real world of multiformity.” Employing this strategy, He excluded Himself from being. “God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and His death was the life of the world.” Once the great individuation had been initiated, the momentum of its creator’s self-annihilation would continue until everything became exhausted by its own existence, which for human beings meant that the faster they learned that happiness was not as good as they thought it would be, the happier they would be to die out.
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Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror)
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KEYS TO WARFARE The world is full of people looking for a secret formula for success and power. They do not want to think on their own; they just want a recipe to follow. They are attracted to the idea of strategy for that very reason. In their minds strategy is a series of steps to be followed toward a goal. They want these steps spelled out for them by an expert or a guru. Believing in the power of imitation, they want to know exactly what some great person has done before. Their maneuvers in life are as mechanical as their thinking. To separate yourself from such a crowd, you need to get rid of a common misconception: the essence of strategy is not to carry out a brilliant plan that proceeds in steps; it is to put yourself in situations where you have more options than the enemy does. Instead of grasping at Option A as the single right answer, true strategy is positioning yourself to be able to do A, B, or C depending on the circumstances. That is strategic depth of thinking, as opposed to formulaic thinking.
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Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies Of War (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene Book 1))
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Let’s say you’re playing chess against someone who’s got more pieces on the board and decades more experience than we do. How do you win?”
“You don’t,” Rose said. “Unless you cheat.”
“We already tried cheating,” I said. “Getting him in trouble, risking his job. He’s apparently planning a response tonight.”
“Change the game, then,” Rose said.
“Again, we tried that. There’s no winning. Not really. So what I’m proposing is pretty simple.”
“Do tell,” Rose said. “Also, you do know that we’re being followed?”
“We’re surrounded,” I said. “But she wants to deal badly enough that she’ll hear us out before she murders us. Nevermind that. Our analogy here. I’m proposing the pigeon strategy. Knock over all of the pieces, shit on the board, and then strut around like we’re the victors.
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Wildbow
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sodoyouthinkyoucouldtrustmetogotothedancetonight?" she blurted before losing her nerve.
Viktor and Viveka exchanged a quick glance.
Are they considering it? They are! They trust -
"No," they said together.
Frankie resisted the urge to spark. Or scream. Or threaten to go on a charging strike. She had prepared herself for this. It had always been a possibility. That's why she'd read 'Acting For Young Actors: The Ultimate Teenage Guide' by Mary Lou Belli and Dihah Lenney. So she could act like she understood their rejection. Act like she accepted it. And act like she would return to her room with grace. "Well, thanks for hearing me out," she said, kissing them on the cheeks and skipping off to bed. "Good night."
"Good night?" Viktor responded. "That's it? No argument?"
"No argument," Frankie said with a sweet smile. "You have to see this punishment through or you're not teaching me anything. I get it."
"O-kay." Viktor returned to his medical journal, shaking his head as if he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing.
"We love you." Viveka blew another kiss.
"I love you, too." Frankie blew two back.
Time for Plan B.
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Lisi Harrison (Monster High (Monster High, #1))