Sal Khan Quotes

There is something to this vision thing.

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term planning, and willingness to reconsider core values.

Let us not confuse objectives with methods. Too many so-called leaders of the nation fail to see the forest because of the trees. Too many of them fail to recognize the vital necessity of planning for definite objectives. True leadership calls for the setting forth of the objectives and the rallying of public opinion in support of these objectives.

If you over-plan, you close the door on possibilities.

It's important to have a plan, a big picture. You can deviate from it or change it completely, but it gives you something to work for.

Rather than constantly questioning and challenging our beliefs and being willing to think differently about the opportunities that are out there, we withdraw into what we've done before. And in a world that's rapidly changing, that's a formula for vulnerability.

Show me any top entertainer or top business executive, and I'll show you a guy who has mapped out his life from the very start.

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

I think three-to-five years ahead minimum. I have a short-term plan, a five-year plan and a decade plan.

A lack of realism in the vision today costs credibility tomorrow.

We've plotted through the years of how to get to here, where we are now, or we would have never made it.

I'm just not a purist. You set goals and you have to work with everyone to figure out how to get what you can.

I'm very much a creative person, but you've got to do the follow-through. A lot of people start out with an exciting thing and they want to take over the world, but really the people who do take over the world have a good plan of how to get there and the steps along the way.

Long-term goals are dangerous. They limit you. They hinder you from reacting to new conditions.

It is necessary to develop a strategy that utilizes all the physical conditions and elements that are directly at hand. The best strategy relies upon an unlimited set of responses.

Any leader needs to be constantly interested in what's going on in the world, and constantly ready - even when things are going well - to change.

If I start planning then that's dangerous because then I have a target that I'm blinkered towards and I won't listen to the warning signs quite so much. I'd rather be in shape and then look around and say there's a race next week and jump into that than have it planned.

I'm not dogmatic.

I never had a plan. I have to say, I'm very shocked when people start a company and say, 'In five years I want to launch a perfume, or in 10 years I want to have this.' How can you know?

You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.

There's always some room for improvisation.

You can't predict it all. People will tell you to plan things out as best you can. They will tell you to focus. They will tell you to follow your dreams. They will all be right.

Good plans shape good decisions. That's why good planning helps to make elusive dreams come true.

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

Vision with action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.