Martha Beck Quotes

It's very difficult to decide. And I'm very open to proposals.

We need to talk about what we are going to do and see and decide. We'll have to wait and see.

All through my life, when faced with a difficult decision, I always ask myself - where can I learn more. Make the choice to learn.

Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

The woman that deliberates is lost.

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both.

I think people have all faced decisions at times where you never know.

I get more choices of things, projects, which is a blessing and a curse. I can only do one at a time. Sometimes you don't know which way to go.

You've heard the saying, 'Analysis creates paralysis.' You can't be 100 percent sure of anything.

I'm not making up my mind about anything right now. Things are happening so quickly for me, and I'm still in the thinking stage.

A great many decisions just can’t be made with confidence because the data just doesn’t exist …. [however] just because we don’t have the information doesn’t mean that we can’t get it.

To remove or not to remove? That is the question.

That’s one difficulty about a democracy. Nothing ever gets decided—even after its been decided.

As an intelligence analyst you have to tell the president what you know, what you think you know and what you don’t know.

Today, whenever I'm under pressure to make a decision on a transaction but I don't know what the right one is, I try desperately to postpone it. I'll insist on more information - on doing extra laps around the intellectual parking lot - before committing. I take the same approach with people, too.

When you have no idea what to do or how to do it, you just need to see and absorb as much as you possibly can and just fill your vocabulary and your brain with as much as humanly possible.

It's very personal to me and doesn't work for everybody, but what I have found in my experience is that when I make pro and con lists, it's usually because I am trying to talk myself out of a good idea or talk myself into a really bad one.

It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.

When "Why not do it?" barely outweighs "Why do it?" — don't do it.

So when somebody asks me to make a decision about a situation, I don't offer a solution, I ask a question: What are our options? Give me the good, give me the bad, give me the pretty, give me the ugly, give me the impossible, give me the possible, give me the convenient, give me the inconvenient. Give me the options. All I want are options. And once I have all the options before me, then I comfortably and confidently make my decision.

Doubt is a very important trait. Out of doubt comes thinking, decisions, choices. We learn stuff. We learn to make mistakes. Or not to.

First, study the present construction. Second, ask for all past experiences ...study and read everything you can on the subject.

My friend Terry says that when you need to make a decision, in your work or otherwise, and you don’t know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake.

He saw before him two roads, both equally straight ; but he saw two; and that terrified him — him, who had never in his life known but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory.