Influential people are never satisfied with the status quo. They’re the ones who constantly ask, ‘What if?’ and ‘Why not?’ They’re not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom, and they don’t disrupt things for the sake of being disruptive; they do it to make things better.
There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young woman at a lecture I was giving – she came from Liberty University, which is a ludicrous religious institution. She said, ‘What if you are wrong?’ and I answered that rather briefly, and that’s gone viral.
If you look at the positives, if you test yourself and challenge yourself… I describe myself as a ‘yes’ person. If you say no to too many things, you think ‘what if’.
What if I could just focus on fighting? What would that be like? What would it be like to take advantage of all the resources this place has to offer? Because you’re not doing it when you’re cutting weight all the time.
Kids want you to take them to whatever kid movie is opening, and you just hope it’s good because you’re going to buy a ticket, no matter what. If it’s no good, you kind of drape your arm over your kid so they don’t get smashed, and you take a little nap.
Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.
My best generic tip, would be to be always thinking of an escape strategy. Always look around you and think ‘what if’? That and making sure you are correctly trained and experienced.
In a sprint you make 100 decisions a second. What if X goes now and Y goes then? Should I take this gap or that one? You have to be sharp. Over time it becomes instinct.
No matter what, if my son was gay, I’d treat him like a king.
The reason I’m fiendishly drawing end-of-game plays when I’m taking notes is what if I screwed up something down the stretch of a game?
When you are on the field as a captain, the mind is always working. You cannot relax at any point of time. You are always focussing on what is going to be the next move, what if it doesn’t work, what if the situation changes and you have to change your plan.
Fearless means trusting your instincts and clarity of thought. Once you have made up your mind, don’t be scared of what if.
You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‘Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.
I fell in love with this idea of an old school game character, like Donkey Kong, who looks like a very simple guy but is really wrestling with this very profound struggle: ‘What’s the meaning of life? What if I don’t like this job I’ve been programmed to do?’
A lot of amateurs are terrified of going up against a player who is clearly better than they are. They never play their best, because they aren’t comfortable. There’s one surefire way to get over that, and it’s to ask yourself, ‘What if I beat him?’ Imagine the possibility.
It’s like, what if you get a set of tires that aren’t balanced right or a driveshaft that’s vibrating. That could create a problem. You try to think of every possible scenario of what can make you uncomfortable and try to come up with a solution for it.
I think about work all the time. I was in my bathroom yesterday and thought, ‘I could never work again.’ I don’t have a job lined up right now – what if I never get another one?
Year 2008 wiped out $19.2 trillion in US income… What if the money was spent on the Midwest of the United States?
Someone who sees you on a certain night, maybe they’ve seen you on a bad night. I’ve seen Tom Brady throw interceptions. Is it time to retire, or is it a bad game? What if all week in practice he looked phenomenal?
What if God exists except it turns out he doesn’t really like people very much?
Londoners say, ‘We’re so proud of our diversity and tolerance,’ but what if that diversity ends up making us intolerant?
‘A Court of Thorns and Roses’ was actually inspired by three of my all-time-favorite fairy/folktales: ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’ and ‘Tam Lin.’ I got the kernel of inspiration by wondering: ‘What if ‘Beauty’ was a huntress?’
It’s easy to dislike the few senior women out there. What if women were half the positions in power? It would be harder to dislike all of them.
The word dream match is thrown around quite a bit, and I mean if you think about it. There’s all these possibilities, like what if Edge could face Roman Reigns or Seth Rollins? Or, a guy like AJ Styles.
My husband was just OK looking. I was in labor and I said to him, ‘What if she’s ugly? You’re ugly.’
What if every relationship you’ve ever been in, is someone slowly figuring out they didn’t like you as much as they hoped they would?
I characterize myself a little bit as a reluctant filmmaker. I learned from watching my friend in college stay up late at night, at 2 A.M., just to get the lighting right, and I thought, ‘You know what, if that’s what it’s going to be like, I think I’m just going to write,’ and I did that.
I don’t think we should speak so much. What if we were singing a song? We split, whilst singing.
If I went to a major, you never know – what if they don’t like the stuff I do? I could just get shelved. And then I’m stuck in a contract, and I can’t leave. And if that happens, you’re gonna realize, you’re going to start hating it, so the power with being indie is you could do whatever you want.
What if the Internet breaks tomorrow? Then you’d realize that you’re a human being, and you’re not validated by what other people think of you – it’s how you think of yourself.
Instead of picking your career and backfilling your life behind that, what if you pick your life and backfill your career with whatever is left over?
Really, some of the best ‘X-Files’ stories come right out of science. And you just apply that ‘what-if’ idea. Oh, what if this were true? And that’s why so many times the show is scarier because it was not necessarily improbable.
So I had an operation. So what? If I die, I die. I’m more interested in my music.
Humans, being the only race to pay for living on this planet, have over the centuries become dependent on money. But what if money becomes a curse? Just like too little money can become a problem, so can too much money.
I didn’t set out to be a Trump impressionist at all. It wasn’t that I wanted to be Trump. It’s that I was asking, ‘What if Trump was me?’
If Clinton is elected or if Trump is going to get elected, I think the polarization in Congress will be greater than ever. Nothing is going to get done. It is going to be so ugly, so partisan, so back-biting. Well what if you elect a couple of Libertarians?
There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, ‘But why?’ The question that takes the book forward is, ‘What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?’
I want to be a Bond girl. Think about it – I have metal components in my legs, so when I go through airport security, I set off the alarms. But when they realize why I’m beeping, they let me through. What if I had weapons in my legs? I could take one off and pull out an Uzi! Legs Galore – that would be me!
What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
The thing I think about all the time is, what if I’d taken a job at Deloitte instead? They offered me one. I just think if I’d taken literally any other job, Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t exist. You have no idea how much I brood on this.
What if lawmakers never spoke to their constituents? Oddly enough, that’s exactly how corporate America operates. Shareholders vote for directors, but the directors rarely, if ever, communicate with them.
Had I been older, I would’ve never been able to pull it off because I would’ve analyzed it to death. When I was 16, there was no such thing as ‘what if.’
What if everything you were told about the female was wrong?
When I wake up in night sweats, that’s what I’m thinking about: what if someone grabs me from my past and says, ‘I heard you drag me to filth on your podcast.’
You know what, if I had to do it all again, I would do the same things as before. I would meet the same people, make a lot of friends, bring a lot of happiness to my country. I get to travel all over the world, doing seminars. I have thousands of students in the Nogueira gyms.
Your parents and people close to you, whenever you want to do something or you want to follow a dream, they’ll try and stop you. It’s not out of their hating, it’s just protection. They want to try and preserve you. Like ‘oh what If he fails?’ From the culture we’re from, they want to protect you.
What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?
I remember looking to McDonald’s, and, my God, they have 13,000 restaurants in the United States. Well, we have almost a couple thousand Chipotles. What if Pizzeria Locale is a few thousand, and Shod. All of a sudden, we’re bigger than McDonald’s in the U.S. I mean, that’s not an unreasonable way to think about this.
One day I heard Ray Charles on the radio and I found out he was blind. I thought, ‘You know what, if there’s room for Ray, there might be room for Jose.’
