Problem Anticipation Quotes

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

Some people seem to think there's no trouble just because it hasn't happened yet. If you jump out the window at the 42nd floor and you're still doing fine as you pass the 27th floor, that doesn't mean you don't have a serious problem. I would want to address the problem right now.

You need a group of people who will continually realize that you will run into problems, and for each you will have hundreds or thousands of ways you can approach it.

Back to Microsoft days, I'm always looking for, 'OK, that's great, but what can go wrong?'

As a lawyer, I can assure you that a lot of document drafting is repetitive, involving cutting and pasting from templates. But the best lawyers bring a unique perspective to the process and anticipate clients' problems.

When seen up close, dangers are controllable: when you begin to climb the mountain of your dreams, pay attention to the surroundings. There are cliffs, of course. There are almost imperceptible cracks in the mountain rock. There are stones so polished by storms that they have become as slippery as ice. But if you know where you are placing each footstep, you will notice the traps and how to get around them.

There are guys you give the benefit of the doubt if they hold you up a little bit longer than normal, and you have that list of guys you kind of know are going to be a problem when you get there. The window of being patient with them is a lot shorter.

He who regards many things easy will find many difficulties. Therefore the sage regards things difficult, and consequently never has difficulties.

Cicero smiled at us. 'The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destory one's spirit by worrying about them too far in advance. Especially tonight.

And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.

I always anticipated difficulties in order to avoid scenes.

In the year 2000 you're going to have a problem...Leisure time will be a problem in the year 2000. I just want you to realize, I just want to make sure that you know of it now.

There's no doubt that I'm a better president now than when I first took office. This is not a job where there's a manual, and over time you get a better sense of what's important, what's not, how to see around corners and anticipate problems, as opposed to just managing problems once they've arrived.

If I'd known how many problems I was going to run into before I finished, I can't remember a single project I would have started.

Anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them is actually the opposite of worrying: it's productive.

It's like, what if you get a set of tires that aren't balanced right or a driveshaft that's vibrating. That could create a problem. You try to think of every possible scenario of what can make you uncomfortable and try to come up with a solution for it.

Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong.