8 Quotes Tagged: competence

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.

Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it.

Under a good administration, the Nile gains on the desert. Under a bad one, the desert gains on the Nile.

They all have excellent resumes... So what I’m trying to find out is how they will behave under pressure.

it is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didnt

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long since discharged them from external direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless remains under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay - others will easily undertake the irksome work for me.

That the step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind...

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.