Adapt Quotes

“Pluralism matters because life is not worth living without new experiences - new people, new places, new challenges. But discipline matters too; we cannot simply treat life as a psychedelic trip through a series of novel sensations.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgment. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy. What matters is how quickly the leader is able to adapt.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“The Most successful industry of the last forty years has been built on failure after failure after failure.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“The evolutionary algorithm--of variation and selection, repeated--searches for solutions in a world where the problems keep changing, trying all sorts of variants and doing more of what works.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“And the fundamental point of all these massively parallel experiments is the same: when a problem reaches a certain level of complexity, formal theory won’t get you nearly as far as an incredibly rapid, systematic process of trial and error.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Given the likely shape of these ever-shifting landscapes, the evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wold gambles is the best possible way to search for solutions.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Few human inventions are more complex and tightly coupled than the banking system; Charles”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“In Iraq, the Army discovered that if the official hierarchy was on a disastrous course, it was vital to bypass it in order to adapt. Petraeus”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Here’s the thing about failure in innovation: it’s a price worth paying. We”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“It may be satisfying to castigate the likes of Geithner and the heads of Lehman Brothers and AIG, but safety experts like Perrow know it is far more productive to design better systems than to hope for better people.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition,’ he”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“The complexity of the society we have created for ourselves envelops us so completely that, instead of being dizzied, we take it for granted.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Palchinsky principles’: first, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along. The”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“whatever some Prius fans may believe, it turns out that Priuses do have a corporeal form, and a Prius in congested traffic will cause more emissions indirectly by slowing other cars down than it will emit directly.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“That is why ‘learn from your mistakes’ is wise advice that is painfully hard to take.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Doing foolish things in an attempt ‘to correct the past’, like marrying the man whose baby you just aborted, isn’t unusual at all. It’s part of being human. What”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“the scale of the trouble, the economist John Kay was pointing out the similarities between the crunch”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Although the rig’s crew had, in principle, shut down the flow of oil and gas to the platform, so much”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“did start paying attention to the unglamorous insights”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“and tightly coupled than the banking system; Charles”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“enough pieces of cheese and you can be fairly sure that the”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Swiss cheese model’ of accidents. Imagine a series of safety”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“isn’t the initial loss that does for him, but the stupid plays he makes in an effort to deny that the loss has happened. The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk:”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“wanted to build a toaster from scratch. He started by taking apart a”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“It was a dismal mismatch: Hitler had been single-mindedly building up his forces in the 1930s, while British defence spending was at historical lows. The Luftwaffe entered the Battle of Britain with”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“gamble in a wartime prison camp should serve as an example to the staff of the World Bank today. We’ll discover what the disasters at Three Mile Island and Deepwater Horizon have to tell us about preventing another Lehman Brothers crisis. We’ll learn from a watchmaker,”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Esther Duflo, a leading randomista. ‘Sometimes”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“other tendency emerges because we rarely like the idea of standards that are inconsistent and uneven from place to place. It seems neater and fairer to provide a consistent standard for everything, whether it’s education, the road network or the coffee at”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“even have our own catchphrase, the ‘postcode lottery’, to describe the scandal that standards vary from place to place. It is something of a national obsession. We want all of our public services to be like Coca-Cola: all identical, all good. And they can’t be. If we are to take the ‘variation”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure