Ready to dive into some quotes about options in life?
Every choice we make in life creates more options. Sometimes the options are clear, and sometimes they’re not.
The thing that makes the most successful lifestyle designers is their mindset around optionality. They know that no matter what choice they make, there’s always another one around the corner.
Entrepreneurs also know the importance of optionality. They’re always on the lookout for new opportunities that will help them grow their businesses.
But what is optionality, and why is it so important? In today’s blog post, we’ll explore the concept of optionality and share some quotes from famous thinkers that will inspire you to take action. Stay tuned!
Quotes About Options and Optionality
Options, any options, by allowing you more upside than downside, are vectors of antifragility.
If you “have optionality,” you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells. For you don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur. (The key is that your assessment doesn’t need to be made beforehand, only after the outcome.)
Option = asymmetry + rationality.
Nassim Taleb
I always say don’t make plans, make options.
Jennifer Aniston
Freedom is not the capacity to do whatever we please; freedom is the capacity to make intelligent choices.
Frances Moore Lappé
In life, we should explore options outside our comfort zone.
Dani Alves
I like having options, alternate lives unlived but always possible.
Abigail Padgett
If working remotely is such a great idea, why isn’t everyone doing it? I think it’s because we’ve been bred on the idea that work happens from 9 to 5, in offices and cubicles. It’s no wonder that most who are employed inside that model haven’t considered other options, or resist the idea that it could be any different. But it can.
Jason Fried
When you hold an option and the world moves with you, you enjoy the benefits; when the world moves against you, you are shielded from the bad outcome since you are not obligated to do anything. Optionality is the state of enjoying possibilities without being on the hook to do anything.
Mihir A. Desai
Wealth is not about having a lot of money; it’s about having a lot of options.
Chris Rock
Money is only a vehicle that provides you with options, and I say there’s only one thing that money can’t buy – poverty.
Jerry Doyle
An option is what makes you antifragile and allows you to benefit from the positive side of uncertainty, without a corresponding serious harm from the negative side.
Nassim Taleb
If you want to be a powerful woman, you need money. It gives you options and freedom so you don’t have to think about money all the time.
Jen Sincero
You have as many options as you give yourself.
Kasie West
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
Nassim Taleb
We must dare to think ‘unthinkable’ thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world.
James William Fulbright
When you get angry, your options narrow.
Robert Greene
Show people a positive path that enables them to make progress on their own terms. Give them options and alternatives that empower them.
Mark Goulston
I believed our touching to be more intense because it’s very holding back. Belief is always a choice.
Jane Green
Certainly, by providing individuals coming out of institutions with ways to become productive citizens, we reduce recidivism. What that means is we reduce crime. There are fewer victims when individuals have options – when they have job skills, when they have life skills, we break the cycle of children following their parents into institutions.
Loretta Lynch
Nothing happens until you decide.
Oprah Winfrey
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
Nassim Taleb
Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant.
Anthony Robbins
Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free.
Paul Tillich
The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
David Russell
People will always have opinions about your decision because they’re not courageous enough to take action on their opinion.
Steve Maraboli
We must dare to think ‘unthinkable’ thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world.
James William Fulbright
I don’t think that strategically it is smart to begin cutting your options when the other side does not move at all.
Hillary Clinton
Success means your options multiply. Size increases complexity, and complexity can confuse vision.
Andy Stanley
Life has a habit of making the easy, desperately difficult, and the hardest choices so easy as to be no choice at all.
Catherine Sanderson
We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.
Stephen Covey
It’s easy to make good decisions when there are no bad options.
Robert Half
May your choices reflect your hopes not your fears.
Nelson Mandela
Healthy choices thread through every aspect of life.
Mary Anne Radmacher
Very few people understand their own choices, and end up being manipulated by those who want to sell them something. In that sense, impoverishment might even be desirable. […] To put it another way: if wealth is giving you fewer options instead of more (and more varied) options, you’re doing it wrong.
Nassim Taleb
Our destiny becomes the accumulation of the choices that we make; the choices of which paths we took in life.
Steven Redhead
Decision making is the specific executive task.
Peter Drucker
Know the best and highest choices for health and more often choose those things.
Mary Anne Radmacher
People forget they have options. And they forget that those things don’t really matter. They should concentrate on what they have and not what they don’t have. And by the way, wishing and dreaming doesn’t mean concentrating on what you don’t have, it’s positive thinking that encourages hoping and believing, not whinging and moaning.
Cecelia Ahern
I choose to make the rest of my life the best of my life.
Louise Hay
Every day brings new choices.
Martha Beck
Life is the sum of your choices.
Albert Camus
The choices we make determine our destiny.
Brandon October
You express the truth of your character with the choice of your actions.
Steve Maraboli
Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.
Eckhart Tolle
My goal is to just have options.
Amanda Seales
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.
Sigmund Freud
When you get angry, your options narrow.
Robert Greene
One thing my parents always taught me was to maximize my options.
Monica Raymund
The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether – when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement.
The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of the pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism.
Trial and error is freedom.
Nassim Taleb
The choices you make now, the people you surround yourself with, they all have the potential to affect your life, even who you are, forever.
Sarah Dessen
It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
Stephen King
All is context. Choose yours carefully, where you have a choice.
Mike Young
Why are you going to choose failure when success is an option?
Jillian Michaels
Empowerment is being aware that there is no one to blame for my choices and actions; that I have a personal choice and responsibility for my life.
Steve Maraboli
When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take, choose the bolder.
William Joseph Slim
Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.
Aeschylus
If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
Jim Rohn
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
Maya Angelou
Life is a choice – as is how you handle the pitfalls along its bumpy road.
Julie Donner Andersen
Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.
Neil Gaiman
Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.
Malcolm Gladwell
Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.
Jean-Paul Sartre
You are what you choose to be today. Not what you’ve chosen to be before.
Wayne Dyer
We may think that our decisions are guided purely by logic and rationality, but our emotions always play a role in our good decision making process.
Salma Stockdale
We all need to decide whether to “play it safe” in life and worry about the downside, or instead take a chance, by being who we really are and living the life our heart desires. Which choice are you making?
Charlie Badenhop
If wealth is giving you fewer options instead of more (and more varied) options, you’re doing it wrong.
Nassim Taleb
Every choice you make has an end result.
Zig Ziglar
The quality of your life is built on the quality of your decisions.
Wesam Fawzi
Life is about choices. Some we regret, some we’re proud of. Some will haunt us forever. The message: we are what we chose to be.
Graham Brown
Your life changes the moment you make a new, congruent, and committed decision.
Anthony Robbins
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
William James
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
Thomas Merton
You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.
William Clement Stone
Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.
Patricia Briggs
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide. Napoleon Bonaparte
Robert Half
It is a bit of a cliché to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time–by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still?
In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions–we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made shape our lives for decades to come.
Amor Towles
How a Flaneur Approaches Options in Life
A flaneur approaches options in life with a relaxed, open-minded perspective. Instead of constantly chasing after goals or getting stuck in a routine, they take time to explore different paths and appreciate the small, unexpected joys life has to offer.
They value the journey over the destination, allowing them to fully immerse themselves in the present and remain receptive to new opportunities that come their way.
This casual, observational approach to life means that they’re not pressured to always make the “right” choice, but instead can choose paths that genuinely interest and engage them at any given moment.
It’s about a mindful approach to the options life presents, giving oneself the freedom to wander, explore, and discover new avenues without the stress of rigid expectations.
Contemplate and Create
Thought-Provoking Queries and Actionable Challenges
Contemplate
- Nassim Taleb mentioned that having optionality means you don’t need to rely heavily on intelligence, knowledge, or other skills, but rather on the wisdom to avoid unintelligent actions and to recognize favorable outcomes when they occur. How does this perspective resonate with you, and in what ways might embracing optionality influence your decision-making process?
- Eckhart Tolle speaks about three options in the face of an intolerable and unhappy situation: removal, change, or complete acceptance. Can you identify a moment in your life where you exercised one of these options? How did your choice affect the trajectory of your life, and what might have happened if you chose a different option?
Create
- Explore Your Options: This week, dedicate time to exploring options outside your usual scope of action, as encouraged by Dani Alves. This could mean researching a topic you know little about, trying a new hobby, or simply changing your routine to include something new. Write down the options you explore and note any that you might want to integrate into your life on a more regular basis.
- Optionality Mind Map: Inspired by the various perspectives on options and optionality presented in the article, create a mind map that illustrates the different paths your life could take based on the options currently available to you. You might include career paths, personal development opportunities, or lifestyle choices. Once your map is created, identify one or two paths you find most appealing and brainstorm the initial steps you would need to take to start down those paths.
Parting Words
We’ve seen that optionality is a powerful tool when it comes to both our personal and professional lives. It allows us to maintain our flexibility and keep our options open while also giving us the power to make choices that will affect our future. With so many quotes about optionality out there, we wanted to know what your favorite one was.
Let us know in the comments below which quote about optionality you like and why?
You might also like these related quote collections:
This Post Has One Comment
Pingback: Flâneur Quotes: A Collection of Words Related to Flâneurs and Flânerie