Brandon Gorrell

109 Quotes
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109 quotes curated by Brandon Gorrell:

“...one of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behavior that no one wants.”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Truths
“If a frog turns right and catches a fly, and then turns left and catches a fly, and then turns around backward and catches a fly, the purpose of the frog has to do not with turning left or right or backward but with catching flies. If a government proclaims its interest in protecting the environment by allocates little money or effort toward that goal, environmental protection is not, in fact, the government's purpose. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals. ”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Facts, Insights, Rhetoric, Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Truths
“Many interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. ”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Systems theory, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own?”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Good questions, Systems
“You think that because you understand 'one' that you must therefore understand 'two' because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand 'and.'”
— Sufi teaching story, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Insights, Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Wow
“A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“You can be doing something that has always worked and suddenly discover, to your great disappointment, that your action no longer works.”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“The system, to a large extent, causes it's own behavior. An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result. ”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Self-similarity, Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system's response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world. ”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“Depth over breadth, man. I believe in diving deeply into a small pool of information. ”
— Josh Waitzkin, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game
Tagged: Notes to self, The Fighter's Mind, Work