Fred Thompson Quotes

You need to decide what problems, what opportunities, what projects you're going to work on.

As all entrepreneurs know, you live and die by your ability to prioritize. You must focus on the most important, mission-critical tasks each day and night, and then share, delegate, delay or skip the rest.

I think we have to focus,on exactly what the priorities are.

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

Take the best action toward your most important goal right now.

No business can do everything. Even if it has the money, it will never have enough good people. It has to set priorities. The worst thing to do is a little bit of everything. This makes sure that nothing is being accomplished. It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

I think one key part of doing more with less is to be more strategic, to realize what the objectives you're truly trying to accomplish are and then to drive with greater focus towards those objectives.

One of the things Mr. Kennedy taught me was that in laying out a new project, you shouldn't try to cope with every little problem.

The essence of strategy is that you must set limits on what you're trying to accomplish.

In business, staying focused requires that you turn most opportunities down.

You can only bite off so much, so you gotta know what you want to do.

It's a pretty intuitive process, picking the projects that I want to get involved with.

Prioritization sounds like such a simple thing, but true prioritization starts with a very difficult question to answer, especially at a company with a portfolio approach: If you could only do one thing, what would it be? And you can't rationalize the answer, and you can't attach the one thing to some other things. It's just the one thing.

One of the challenges of a good policy is trying to figure out what your priorities are.

Like most entrepreneurs, getting motivated to work has never been a problem for me; focus comes through delegating tasks to the best people you can find.

In certain situations, players should protect themselves by not losing track of the most important things in their job.

As in all things, it is terribly important to have a sense of priorities in what you do. And to make certain that priorities do not clash.

You must distinguish between what is urgent and what is important. You could accomplish all of the urgent things that you desire without accomplishing anything that is important.

Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.

There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.

A dozen times a day we come to a fork in the road and must decide which way we will go. It is important to get our ultimate objectives clearly in mind so that we do not become distracted at each fork in the road by the irrelevant questions: Which is the easier or more pleasant way? Or, Which way are others going?

One of the things I really learned from my first term is the importance of focusing. In that sense, it is a deliberate effort. What I look at with each vote is that priority of whether it's good for the middle class or not.

You have to be damn certain you're putting something better in its place.

What we spend our time on is probably the most important decision we make.

You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.