When The Odds Are Stacked Against You Quotes

I believe in love,” I said, “I just don’t think it’s worth the risk. Like when you’re dating someone, you’re either going to end up marrying that person or having your heart broken. It’s a fifty-fifty chance. And even if you do marry them, there’s another fifty percent chance you’ll end up divorced. At what point do people realize the odds are always stacked against them?

Because you were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want. No one can be blamed for that. And the odds had been stacked against us from the start: we had no manual, no one to show us the way. Not one example of a happy couple made up of boys. How were we supposed to know what to do? Did we even believe that we deserved to get away with happiness?

When the odds are stacked against you, throw something at that stack! If nothing else, it will be fun to watch it topple.

When the odds are stacked against you, break them down, deal one on one with each odd, you'll have a better chance, eventually you'll end up with an even slate

The odds may be stacked against you. But I believe when you tap into your unique gifts and abilities, while combining them with a sense of purpose, passion, and perseverance you will not only defy those odds, you will help create a better life for yourself and rest of us.

You can't just give up on a movie during the dark night of the soul, he'd said. What's that? I asked. That's the point in a film when all hope is lost and the protagonists must dig deeper than ever before to prevail against the odds stacked against them.

As I was editing this chapter, a survey of more than thirty-five hundred Australian surgeons revealed a culture rife with bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment, against women especially (although men weren’t untouched either). To give you a flavor of professional life as a woman in this field, female trainees and junior surgeons “reported feeling obliged to give their supervisors sexual favours to keep their jobs”; endured flagrantly illegal hostility toward the notion of combining career with motherhood; contended with “boys’ clubs”; and experienced entrenched sexism at all levels and “a culture of fear and reprisal, with known bullies in senior positions seen as untouchable.”68 I came back to this chapter on the very day that news broke in the state of Victoria, Australia, where I live, of a Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission report revealing that sexual discrimination and harassment is also shockingly prevalent in the Victorian Police, which unlawfully failed to provide an equal and safe working environment.69 I understand that attempts to identify the psychological factors that underlie sex inequalities in the workplace are well-meaning. And, of course, we shouldn’t shy away from naming (supposedly) politically unpalatable causes of those inequalities. But when you consider the women who enter and persist in highly competitive and risky occupations like surgery and policing—despite the odds stacked against them by largely unfettered sex discrimination and harassment—casual scholarly suggestions that women are relatively few in number, particularly in the higher echelons, because they’re less geared to compete in the workplace, start to seem almost offensive. Testosterone

I HATE your family!” The audience started laughing. “I HATE your daddy for thinking she looked good that night! I HATE your momma for knowing what he likes. I HATE your daddy for blowing his top. I HATE your momma for ovulating that month. I HATE that the timing of their love was so perfect that night that nine months later you were born into this world. I HATE your father for not sticking it out, and being the first man to break your heart and dooming the rest of his kind. I HATE your momma for not teaching you what a GOOD man looks like. How to LOVE him, how to KEEP him, HOW TO BE FAITHFUL! I HATE your family! I have to HATE them because its hard to HATE you! I LOVED you and wanted our love to last forever and ever. But who could succeed when the odds were stacked so high against us. They say young love never last, but I didn’t want to believe that! I knew we would last, I knew we would soar! Shot down in our prime our love is now a statistic. I gotta blame someone and I know it wasn’t me. So I blame your family!

It goes against everything we believe in," Gavner sighed. "Sometimes we have to abandon old beliefs in favor of new ones," Kurda said. While Gavner agonized over his decision, I spoke up. "I'll go back if you want me to. I'm afraid of dying, which is why I let Kurda talk me into fleeing. But if you say I should return, I will." "I don't want you to die," Gavner cried. "But running away never solved anything." "Nonsense!" Kurda snorted. "Vampires would be a lot better off if more of us had the good sense to run from a fight when the odds are stacked against us. If we take Darren back, we take him back to die. Where's the sense in that?

You want to cut off my leg.” His face tightened and a bead of sweat ran down his forehead to soak into the pillow. “It is our only option,” I said. “The only way you are going to live.” “Live?” He snorted. “Even if this works, what good will I be?” he asked bitterly. “What good is a miner with one leg – you’d be saving me from death only to see me sent off to feed the sluag.” “Don’t say that,” I snapped, rising to my feet. “Your worth isn’t determined by your leg – it is determined by your heart and your mind. It is determined by what you do with your life.” “Pretty words.” He turned his head away from us. “Just let me die.” “No!” I shouted. “You listen to me, Tips, and you listen well. It isn’t your leg that can smell gold. It isn’t your leg that has ensured your gang never missed quota. And it isn’t your leg that all your friends chose to have as their leader. They need you, Tips. Without you, it will be your friends who will be facing the labyrinth.” I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. “The odds have been stacked against you from the day you were born, yet here you are. Alive. And having persevered through all of that, how dare you turn your head and tell me to let you die. You’re better than that.” My voice trembled. “You once told me that power doesn’t determine worth. Well, neither does a leg.” He kept his head turned away from me, and the silence hung long and heavy. “You make a compelling argument.” His voice was choked, and when he turned his head, I could see the gleam of tears on his cheeks. “Do it then.

Sometimes the journey ahead can feel so daunting and so implausible that we lack the courage to take the first step. And there is never a shortage of good excuses: it’s not the right time; the odds are too stacked against me; or no one like me has ever done it before. I’m also willing to bet that Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Everest, or even Thomas Edison, trying thousands and thousands of times to make the light bulb work, had a good list of excuses that they could have used, too. And I can promise you they all felt inadequate at many times along their path. You know what the sad thing is? It’s that most people never find out what they are truly capable of, because the mountain looks frightening from the bottom, before you begin. It is easier to look down than up. There’s a poignant poem by Christopher Logue that I’m often reminded of when people tell me their ‘reasons’ for not embarking on a great adventure. Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It’s too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came, And we pushed, And they flew.

Sometimes Vinnie wonders why any woman ever gets into bed with any man. To take off all your clothes and lie beside some unclothed larger person is a terribly risky business. The odds are stacked almost as heavily against you as in the New York State lottery. He could hurt you; he could laugh at you; he could take one look at your aging naked body and turn away in ill-concealed embarrassed distaste. He could turn out to be awkward, selfish, inept – even totally incompetent. He could have some peculiar sexual hangup: a fixation on your underclothes to the exclusion of you, for instance, or on one sexual variation to the exclusion of all else. The risks are so high that no woman in her right mind would take such a chance – except that when you do take such a chance you're usually not in your right mind. And if you win, just as with the state lottery (which Vinnie also plays occasionally), the prize is so tremendous.

When the odds are stacked this high against you, you take the peace you can find.

She didn’t fight because she was too afraid. Because it took a stupid kind of courage to keep fighting even when you knew all odds were stacked against you.

The odds may be stacked against you. Yet, I believe, when you tap into your unique gifts and abilities, while combining them with a sense of purpose, passion, and perseverance, you will not only defy those odds, you will help create a better life for yourself and the rest of us.

It’s through challenges that winners’ thoughts are invoked. Through challenges, winners are inspired to think. Through challenges winners turn their dreams into reality. Through challenges, winners begin to lead. Through challenges, winners set forth towards victory, for nothing is sweeter than winning, especially when the odds are stacked against them.

Because this is how it feels when your elders turn their backs, when institutions fall from grace, when the world moves on even as you’re standing still, when something you believe in turns out to be a lie. Because you’re no longer a child, and you’re realizing the world you live in operates in shades of gray. Sometimes, there isn’t a right or a wrong—there’s only doing the best you can in spite of the odds stacked up against you and forgiving yourself when you fall short.

Because this is how it feels when your elders turn their backs, when institutions fall from grace, when the world moves on even as you’re standing still, when something you believe in turns out to be a lie. Because you’re no longer a child, and you’re realizing the world you live in operates in shades of gray. Sometimes, there isn’t a right or a wrong—there’s only doing the best you can in spite of the odds stacked up against you and forgiving yourself when you fall.

That’s how you know you’re doing the right thing. When the odds are severely stacked against you,

A fellow CEO laid this out for me graphically once when we were talking about M&A deals. “Think of M&A as having four quadrants defined by size and risk,” he said. “Big, low-risk deals are the ones everyone wants, but they don’t exist. Small, low-risk deals do exist, but you can’t make much money from them because of their size. Small, hairy deals are the worst quadrant, because the reward is limited and the odds are stacked against you, so why bother? The bingo quadrant is the big, hairy deals. If you can find a big, hairy deal with solvable problems, that’s where the real money is.

character is the only guarantee you have of succeeding in life, and that strength of character matters most when the odds are stacked against you.

Was that ethical?" Benteley asked. "That kicks over the board, doesn't it?" "I played the game for years," Cartwright said. "Most people go on playing the game all their lives. Then I began to realize the rules were set up so I couldn't win. Who wants to play that kind of game? We're betting against the house and the house always wins." "That's true," Benteley agreed. After a time he said, "No, there's no point in playing a rigged game. But what's your answer? What do you do when you discover the rules are fixed so you can't win?" "You do what I did: you draw up new rules and play by them. Rules by which all the players have the same odds. And the M-game doesn't give those odds. The M-game, the whole classification system, is stacked against us. So I said to myself, what sort of rules would be better? I sat down and worked them out. From then on I played according to them, as if they were already in operation.

Tell me about a time in your life when the odds were stacked against you but you overcame them and succeeded. Tell me three or four things of which you are most proud. Have you ever practiced and reached a high level in any area beyond just getting by in life? Areas of achievement might include music, sports, writing, or art. Many top producers have other areas of overachievement. Sports are a big one.

True bravery had nothing to do with looking your opponent in the eye before you knocked him to the ground and pummeled him with your fists. True bravery was looking into the eyes of the woman you loved and promising them forever. Despite the odds stacked against you, you’d be willing to risk it all for one more day, one more year, or if you got really lucky, an entire lifetime.

There was nowhere they could go; nowhere that the truth of who they were, the forbiddenness of their love, wouldn’t come chasing them. Maybe love wasn’t enough after all. Not when every last obstacle was arrayed against you, all the odds stacked to make you fail. When the entire world was keeping you apart. “Okay,” Avery said, as the universe quietly rent itself in two.

Sometimes Vinnie wonders why any woman ever gets into bed with any man. To take off all your clothes and lie down beside some unclothed larger person is a terribly risky business. The odds are stacked almost as heavily against you as in the New York state lottery. He could hurt you; he could laugh at you; he could take one look at your naked aging body and turn away in ill-concealed, embarrassed distaste. He could turn out to be awkward, selfish, inept—even totally incompetent. He could have some peculiar sexual hangup: a fixation on your underclothes to the exclusion of you, for instance, or on one sexual variation to the exclusion of all else. The risks are so high that really no woman in her right mind would take such a chance—except that when you do take such a chance you’re usually not in your right mind. And if you win, just as with the state lottery (which Vinnie also plays occasionally) the prize is so tremendous.

Train like a scientist. Even though it may be possible that anyone can make a new scientific discovery, and anyone can win a fight against a professional fighter, the truth of the matter is the odds are against you. In fact, the odds are so unfavorably stacked against you, if you don’t train efficiently and push yourself to the very limits of what the human body and mind can endure, your chances of success are slim at best. While there is nothing new about pushing limits and training hard when it comes to fighting, successful modern fighters are starting to train with skepticism. I still remember the first day of one of my undergraduate physics classes, when the professor said, “Don’t trust me. If you don’t question everything I say here in class, if you don’t go home and check it yourself because you’re skeptical and refuse to take my word for it, then you don’t belong here, and you’re going to have a hard time making it in physics.” I remember it because at first it seemed like the opposite of what a professor should say, but once it sunk in, I realized he was right. Real mastery of physics does not come from memorization and repetition. Real mastery comes from understanding how well the laws of physics hold up when you try your best to break them. The same thing is true in fighting. You will never really master a choke until you have tried to choke out someone who does not want you to succeed at it. During an actual fight, on the street or in the ring, there is far too much chaos for anyone to succeed just by listening in class and repeating techniques. Everyone needs to have some rough personal failures to learn from. Everyone should have that awkward moment when your opponent’s only reaction to your attempted wristlock is a blank stare, and everyone needs to get knocked over once or twice because an opponent kicked right through the perfect block. Of course, sometimes there are techniques we do not have the luxury of testing out, either because they are too dangerous or the opportunities to use them in sparring may not come very often. You can’t learn everything the hard way, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still be a skeptic.