Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don’t get the rocket back for inspection.
The trick, when you’re flirting, is figuring how to keep a balance between being engaging enough to retain someone’s attention and not seeming overly available. So you tease a person a little.
Anger can be a problem, but it has tremendous potential, too. It’s just figuring out what to do with it.
When you’re a musician, one of the things that comes to you in the beginning that is quite unexpected is the reaction from your fans, and to the way your music plays an important part in their life in figuring things out.
I think you can go from being not very funny to working really hard for 10 years and figuring out how to make a living on the road, but I don’t think you can rise much above that.
Talking-head shows are just a camera, a sound guy, and then a PA writing down what you say and a producer asking you questions. And you’re just supposed to rephrase the question and add a joke to it. Figuring out how to do that was super hard.
As we get further into our career we’re figuring out how to become more efficient as artists, and doing so many different things is testament to our cohesiveness as the Roots.
I do have a lot of difficulty figuring out what I want to be working on, but what’s the alternative? To be one of those people who has a million things they want to do, and then never does any of them? And then where will you be?
It’s of course important to mention that when DJing, I’m building my own story through the music. I’m figuring out what song to play next, what song to play after that, and how the two will blend together. How the emotion is going to develop from one song to another. So I first build that storyline.
Math, it’s a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
Last year I was 16, it was my first round of releasing music. Since then I’ve been working more on having an identity as an artist and really figuring out what it is that I want to talk about and how I want to sound.
It’s writing songs within the structure of telling a story, so it becomes a platform for diverse songwriting, for a writing process that’s broader than just figuring out a song. You’re also dealing with always pushing the story forward, with casting the voices, with the orchestration, with the arrangements.
Of course, the opposite of white privilege is not blackness, as many of us seemed to think then; the opposite of white privilege is working to dismantle that privilege. But my particular hip-hop generation proved to be very serious about figuring it all out and staying engaged.
I knew I had a lot to offer, and it was just about finding my niche and figuring it out.
It wasn’t so much figuring out my voice comedically, because that was always pretty clear. It was more about performing and being a good, watchable performer.
I’m still figuring out why people would want to look at me. Maybe it’s generic beauty, but it’s weird to be valued for something I was born with.
It’s always nice to do the flashbacks. That’s what’s so great about ‘Scandal’ is that we get to do flashbacks and then keep figuring out and discovering more things about our characters that make them fuller.
The Internet is about giving the consumer exactly what they want, whether there’s an audience of one or 1,000 or 10,000, and then figuring out how to make money on it later.
Management is getting people together to figure out how to transform inputs into outputs. In the process of figuring out the process of how people work together, you’ve got to figure out who’s got what responsibilities, and how do they work together.
You travel with the hope that something unexpected will happen. It has to do with enjoying being lost and figuring it out and the satisfaction. I always get a little disappointed when I know too well where I’m going, or when I’ve lived in a place so long that there’s no chance I could possibly get lost.
To me that’s what Jobs was about. He said at the end of the movie, ‘When you realize that the world was created by people no smarter than you, your life will change.’ That, to me, is a message for right now and people figuring out what they’re going to do with themselves.
I’m 19. I’m in the process of growing up and figuring out where I’m supposed to be in my life. But it is kind of weird when I realize that other people look to me as inspiration.
I very much want to be in the business of creating content, of doing stories all over the world rather than figuring out what the business model is for ‘Newsweek’ on the iPad, although that’s very important work as well.
I’m always just grinding and figuring out what adjustment I need to make and how to tweak my swing to where I want it to be for that game and that pitcher.
It’s night by night, just figuring out watching film on different passes I can make, and the ball will find you and it comes back to you, but it opens up the floor for other guys too.
It’s very juicy to twirl your mustache and figure out why people do the horrible things that they do. It’s not just because they are evil, but because that’s how they somehow explain the world to themselves and justify themselves. It’s always interesting figuring out how that happens.
The best thing that I got was rehearsing with my father. It was always about the process of figuring things out, and trying something new, and having another take on something and keeping it alive.
My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.
The way I do things is I take it one day at a time. Don’t try to put too much pressure or stress on myself figuring out what somebody else is going to do. Just worry about what I got to do.
The first sort of big present I remember getting from Santa Claus was quite a small telescope that I remember going into our backyard with my parents and figuring out how to assemble, and staring at the night sky, just for hours, with both of my parents.
Every stage of filmmaking’s important while you’re doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it’s how to tell the story.
I think everyone goes through it in university, figuring out whether or not they’re doing the right course. I guess I’m the same, but in music.
My mom bought a computer in the ’80s to do accounting, and she was so smart at computers that we spent all our time with them. My childhood was sitting on the floor of her office and figuring out how to program with my mom.
I never believed I could write anything. No way – write a whole story? Figuring out all that plotting and symbolism? How do you foreshadow things?
Figuring out what to wear is much easier if you first think about what effect you want to create.
The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.
I think my faith as a Muslim is very important. One of the core values is that you are always trying to build consensus. So when it comes to figuring out if something is permissible or not in Islam, it’s usually a discussion, and people have to come to a consensus in order for something to be approved.
I think I’m still figuring out how to be a little less selfish.
That’s a part of success: figuring out what success means to you.
When it comes right down to it, developing a critical sensibility about parenting isn’t really about disapproval; it’s about honing your own sensibilities, figuring out how you want to parent.
As a dad I’m emotionally dedicated but I’m not ‘figuring out their life plans’. But of course as I’m telling them about the rights of wrongs I’m thinking back to what I was like at their age.
If you’re going to spend most of your time in your democracy figuring out how to get oil by intervening into other people’s countries and insuring that you follow it with military might, we think there’s an alternative. Which would be renewable energy.
I think intuition can be a form of answered prayer. You do the best you can – thinking, figuring, planning – and then you pray.
I did improv in junior high school. Figuring out my comedic timing helped my confidence in talking to the bullies and talking to people in class. If I could make them laugh, then I was in; I was OK.
Contest skating is about figuring out the hardest tricks you can do that you can also land every time. It doesn’t matter if it’s a kickflip back lip or a kickflip front board or a hardflip. Any trick you feel really confident in and you can land any time, those are the tricks you bring to the contest.
Putting labels on entire groups of people makes things much simpler. If all New Yorkers are pushy, or all politicians are dishonest, we don’t have to do the hard work of figuring out who’s who.
If you’ve experienced cheating in a new marriage, the real work is not obsessively combing through all the details of what happened, but rather figuring out if your relationship is worth saving.
I spend a lot of time in the gym working on moves, working on difficult shots, figuring out ways to create space, becoming a tough-shot taker and a tough shot maker, especially down the stretch.
