Jeff Smith Quotes

We're right here on this very spot. Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it's a matter of not knowing where you aren't - and I don't care at all about where I'm not.

When the terrain differs from the map, you have to go with the terrain.

How many times have you heard a person in a workplace say, "I wasn't trained for this!" That's an impossible reaction from a physicist, who would say, instead, "Cool. A problem I've never seen before. Let's see how I can figure out how to solve it!"

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

I never panic when I get lost. I just change where it is I want to go.

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else.

But I love the idea - whether it's in my work or where I live - exploring new frontier, and I like putting myself in strange places and trying to survive and figure things out and gather up an infrastructure. I like knowing that I could figure out a way to live anywhere.

If you can't go one way, there's many ways to get where you're going. So you just take a step back and see beyond the wall.

You gotta be able to change worlds.

You have to be very fast-thinking, creative, and mobile. It is key to making a business move.

The appeal of the wild for me is its unpredictability. You have to develop an awareness, react fast, be resourceful and come up with a plan and act on it.

Mapping, both literal and metaphorical, has always been about our quest for knowing.

I always look at 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail.' They talked about how they wrote this movie with horses, and then they realized that horses are super-expensive and time-consuming. 'Why don't we just change it to coconuts?' That's part of my process.

If a door is shut, go up and wiggle it a little - don't assume it's locked.

Any time you're in a maze there's multiple ways to get to the end.

Never say never, always try to see if there is an opportunity to go around the problem if you can't go across it.

I want to mix, match, take something off, move the ball around.

Don't be too close-minded, and don't think there's only one way to get to where you want to be. There are a thousand ways to get there, and if one way doesn't work, try the other.

You know you can usually solve almost any problem, or you'll realize you can't, but usually you can solve almost any problem through some sort of trickery one way or another and get the shot to work, but you know when to give up.

The map isn't always the territory, and you have to kind of walk through it to get a feel for it.

I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.

We were just looking at maps.

It's not about your resources, it's about your resourcefulness .

Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it--turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself, so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.

I wisely started with a map.