Upside Downside Quotes & Sayings

I find as long as I acknowledge the truth of something, then that's it. I know what it is and then I can operate. But if I overestimate the downside of something or the challenge of something and I get too obsessed about the difficulty of it, then I don't leave enough room to be open to the upside, the possibility. — Michael J. Fox

Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

That is, many times we're not risking our own money, we're risking somebody else's money, or maybe that someone is going to back stop or downside, but we still get the upside. — Robert F. Engle

The upside of fall was the tourists had gone home. The downside was the county stopped spraying for mosquitos and no-see-ums, so the little fuckers got to gorge themselves in a type of 'eat local' frenzy. — Natasha Boyd

On the upside, yesterday I taped a Ziploc bag to the inside of my skirt so I'd have someplace to store my everything-that-didn't-fit-in-my-bra and it worked really well, so now I'm working on a cape made solely from stapled-together Ziploc bags. It'll be awesome because I'll be able to see all the stuff in my Ziploc pockets (unlike my purse, which just eats everything, like a tiny black hole). And it'll also double as a rain poncho. And I can put a stiletto knife and a "How to Stab People" pamphlet in it so assholes know not to fuck with me and I don't even have to pull it out and threaten them. There is no downside to this. — Jenny Lawson

It's a bit startling to achieve global recognition before the age of 30 on account of your sister, your brother-in-law and your bottom. One day I might be able to make sense of this. In the meantime I think it's fair to say that it has its upside and its downside. — Pippa Middleton

Embrace opportunities with limited downside, unlimited upside. The best deals are those where your risk of loss is predictable and fixed if things go wrong, while your potential gains are enormous if things go right. Take such deals whenever you can get them if the odds of success are halfway decent. — Steve Pavlina

The upside of web-based journalism is that everybody gets a chance. The downside is that everybody gets a chance. — Aaron Sorkin

I think there are lots of opportunities to improve the product. When you read the press, people say, "Oh, the product needs improvement." I look at that and say, "Hey, that's an exciting thing to get behind!" Because they can improve that product. That leaves more upside from an innovation and revenue potential than you're gonna find in [a] lot of places. So you could say that's a downside, I see that as an opportunity. — Steve Ballmer

The big upside to being captain is it's a huge honour, but the downside is that there is definitely extra pressure. — Brian O'Driscoll

As I have found out, recognition has its upside, its downside and - you may say - its backside. — Pippa Middleton

Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Shareholders share in the downside and not necessarily in the upside; that's the whole story. — John Gutfreund

That is why, with optimism instead of fear, all those who want to see Puerto Rico's status resolved should seek the truth about each option, including the upside and the downside of each. — Dick Thornburgh

Currently, it was leading him through a neighborhood that was on the downside of whatever curve you hoped you'd bought your property on the upside of. Graffiti and garbage were everywhere here. They were everywhere in the city, if it came to that, but elsewhere the garbage was better quality, and the graffiti was close to being correctly spelled. The whole area was waiting for something to happen, like a really bad fire. — Terry Pratchett

Manage the downside; the upside will take care of itself — Donald Trump

The problem with being ravished by books at an early age is that later rereadings are often likely to disappoint. "The sharp luscious flavor, the fine aroma is fled," Hazlitt wrote, "and nothing but the stalk, the bran, the husk of literature is left." Terrible words, but it can happen. You become harder to move, frighten, arouse, provoke, jangle. Your education becomes an interrogation lamp under which the hapless book, its every wart and scar exposed, confesses its guilty secrets: "My characters are wooden! My plot creaks! I am pre-feminist, pre-deconstructivist, and pre-postcolonialist!" (The upside of English classes is that they give you critical tools, some of which are useful, but the downside is that those tools make you less able to shower your books with unconditional love. Conditions are the very thing you're asked to learn.) You read too many other books, and the currency of each one becomes debased. — Anne Fadiman

Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE! we forget the downside. FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is. Why? I think it's because humans are intrinsically afraid of loss. — Dan Ariely

Upside of being an attractive woman; if you're remotely intelligent, people will treat you like you're brilliant. Downside: same thing. — Dov Davidoff

Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I don't act because I love doing it, I act because it's my job. At the end of the year, I gotta pay my taxes, bills, doctors, insurance, car insurance, the occasional vacation. It's a wonderful job. The upside is that it is exciting and different ... the downside is that it is an extremely insecure job. — Clint Howard

To see how transfer of antifragility works, consider two scenarios, in which the market does the same thing on average but following different paths. Path 1: market goes up 50 percent, then goes back down to erase all gains. Path 2: market does not move at all. Visibly Path 1, the more volatile, is more profitable to the managers, who can cash in their stock options. So the more jagged the route, the better it is for them. And of course society - here the retirees - has the exact opposite payoff since they finance bankers and chief executives. Retirees get less upside than downside. Society pays for the losses of the bankers, but gets no bonuses from them. If you don't see this transfer of antifragility as theft, you certainly have a problem. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The downside of aging is a slower metabolism and achy joints.The upside is a knowledge of self that prevents one from behaving like a baboon. — Dov Davidoff

You know, we always tried to rationalize by saying you take the good, you take the upside, you got to deal with the downside, you've to take the downside. — Julius Erving

Going with it was Tenley's superpower. Only child of a single dad, she'd learned to roll with almost any situation. The upside was very little ruffled her. The downside was very little ruffled her. — Rachel Hauck

Now, when anything 'bad' happens, I remember that everything that ever happens to me has within it the seeds of something better. I look for the upside rather than the downside. I ask myself, 'Where's the greater benefit in this event?' — Jack Canfield

And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Aside from the movies, examples of positive-Black Swan businesses are: some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital. In these businesses, you lose small to make big. You have little to lose per book and, for completely unexpected reasons, any given book might take off. The downside is small and easily controlled. The problem with publishers, of course, is that they regularly pay up for books, thus making their upside rather limited and their downside monstrous. (If you pay $10 million for a book, your Black Swan is it not being a bestseller.) Likewise, while technology can carry a great payoff, paying for the hyped-up story, as people did with the dot-com bubble, can make any upside limited and any downside huge. It is the venture capitalist who invested in a speculative company and sold his stake to unimaginative investors who is the beneficiary of the Black Swan, not the "me, too" investors. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren't emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode - — David Quammen

Targeting investment returns leads investors to focus on potential upside rather on downside risk ... rather than targeting a desired rate of return, even an eminently reasonable one, investors should target risk. — Seth Klarman

Hedge funds have made massive leveraged credit bets, knowing that their upside is billions in fees and their downside is millions in fees. — Janet M. Tavakoli

Obviously it's easier when I' m doing the adapting myself. But my feeling is, your potential upside far outweighs the downside. Ultimately, they [moviemakers] can't change your book. Your book remains on the shelf the way you wrote it. If they make a great movie of your book, then you have the equivalent of millions and millions of dollars of advertising for your book. If the movie's not that good, that doesn't mean the book's not good. It doesn't change what you've already written. It has the potential to reach more people. — Jonathan Tropper

I think that most technology is positive in the short term, and negative in the long term. I wonder, if somebody looked back at the 20th and 21st centuries a thousand years from now, what their perception of the car would be. Or of television. I wonder if over time, they'll be seen as this thing that drove the culture, but ultimately had more downside than upside. — Chuck Klosterman

One has to weigh all of one's values always in relative terms. On the upside, you get people who are not acting on their homosexual attraction, who are avoiding the sin of practicing homosexuality. On the downside, you have destroyed marriages, traumatized children, and dead people who have taken their own lives. — Andrew Solomon

If you're expecting an upside in everything you do you might get extremely disappointed unless you also think about the consequences of a downside first. — Lou Silluzio

Successful or not, acts of physical courage always bring honor. It is the smaller forms of valor - standing up for principle at the risk of social disapproval, economic loss or injury to career - that require the greatest moral will power. Since there is usually little upside to winning and a significant and often lasting downside to losing, moral courage often requires as much character as physical bravery. — Michael Josephson

Now I tell you the downside of this is you feel awful, but the upside is you feel terrific. — Peter Cook

One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills - maybe even the cough - precede the major discharge of virus toward other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS cases to be recognized, hospitalized, and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren't emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode - not just lucky but salvational. — David Quammen

When I stand on my special-issue "Intelligent Investor" ladder and peer out over the frenzied crowd, I see very few others doing the same. Many stocks remain overvalued, and speculative excess - both on the upside and on the downside - is embedded in the frenzy around stocks of all stripes. And yes, I am talking about March 2001, not March 2000. — Michael Burry

But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance. — Sheryl Sandberg