Harvey Mackay Quotes

Wisdom consists in being able to distinguish among dangers and make a choice of the least harmful.

Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.

My errors will point to thinking men the various roads, and will teach them the great art of treading on the brink of the precipice without falling into it.

Chess helps you to concentrate, improve your logic. It teaches you to play by the rules and take responsibility for your actions, how to problem solve in an uncertain environment.

The choice is between which mistake is easier to correct: underdoing it or overdoing it.

Game management is accomplished by staying constantly alert and then reading and reacting to potential problem situations before they materialize. It all boils down to paying attention to details.

The rest is a mere matter of detail, to be settled with judgment, discretion, and caution.

At a very young age I was predicting outcomes, trying to take all the information and find the best route to wherever I was going. I avoided a lot of pitfalls because of that.

You want people with different life experiences as a backstop against bad decision.

Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing and to think just as objectively when you're in trouble.

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

We had the same doomsday people when we were building the MGM Grand, same people, same doomsday. You have to ask a lot of questions and listen to people, but eventually, you have to go by your own instincts.

What's the worst that could happen?

Suppose you had a small electrical fire and... a structural engineer [looked] at your home's wiring [and] reports that the wiring is "shot" and there is a 50% chance that your house would burn down in the next few years unless you replace all the wiring. The job will cost $20,000... so you get an independent assessment. The next engineer agrees with the first warning. You can either continue to shop for additional evaluations until you find the one engineer in 1,000 that is willing to give you the answer you want, "Your family is not in danger" or you can change the wiring.

We don't want to make a mistake. Would you rather make the mistake and err on the side of caution or wait until something happens and then answer to the American people, why you didn't vet these people properly?

Almost everything I do when I approach an operational problem comes from the time I've been in space. It's a way of organizing your thoughts. We use problem-solving; what we call "what-if-ing." What if this happened? What would we do? We go over plan B, C, D, E, F, and whatever else, depending on the criticality of what we're doing. This kind of thing can be applied almost everywhere, even at home.

you must be careful never to allow doubt to paralyze you. always take the decisions you need to take, even if you're not sure you're doing the right thing. You'll never go wrong if, when you make a decision, you keep in mind an old German proverb: 'The devil is in the detail.' Remember that proverb and you'll always be able to turn a wrong decision into a right one.

Rather than reacting to every risk we hear and see, we should make an effort to discern which ones we can do something about.

You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but you want to get rid of the bathwater so the baby can swim the next couple of days and be OK.

Nothing indicates the soundness of a man's judgment so much as knowing how to choose between two disadvantages.

Daddy always said that an option that you know to have a bad outcome is only a fool's option, i.e., not an option at all. And I liked to think that Daddy hadn't raised a fool.

There is some risk involved in action, there always is. But there is far more risk in failure to act.

Prudence therefore consists in knowing how to distinguish degrees of disadvantage.

The step between prudence and paranoia is short and steep. Prudence wears a seat belt. Paranoia avoids cars. Prudence washes with soap. Paranoia avoids human contact. Prudence saves for old age. Paranoia hoards even trash. Prudence prepares and plans, paranoia panics. Prudence calculates the risk and takes the plunge. Paranoia never enters the water.

Think very carefully about what you want in life. Reckon with the risks.