I know plenty of entrepreneurs who are numbers first. They tend to be highly analytical people, and before they pull the trigger, all the numbers have to line up just right.
It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.
We live in a digital world where all is available at the touch of a screen. Money has been simplified, changed subtly over time from tangible bills to numbers in cyberspace. Cash is no longer in a cloth bag; it's numbers on a screen. Numbers that can be manipulated and modified. If you run out of numbers, you can just buy some more, right?
People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them.
Americans are analytical in their sports, which are very stop-start, so the numbers tend to add up. That's why Moneyball works for baseball. It doesn't work so well for football because it's a fluid game.
I put up O.K. numbers - not Bugs Bunny-style numbers like some other guys - but O.K. numbers.
I dream in numbers, and I like to look up the meaning of numbers, and numbers stick out to me.
Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series
I don't want to make vast generalizations about people who go into legal professions, but there are similarities in the barristers that I met and interacted with, in the sense that they tend to be highly eloquent, highly analytical, thinking people who have a very rapid-fire think-before-they-speak button, as it were.
Okay, look at it this way: if the evening news has a very high probability of being accurate, then it's highly improbable that they would inaccurately report the numbers chosen in the lottery. That counterbalances any improbability in the choosing of those numbers, so you're quite rational to believe in this highly improbable event.
It's a very, very tough market.
So unless you do a really good job, you buy the right products from the manufacturers, you service the customer, they keep coming back, they bring their friends in, it's all about numbers, numbers, numbers.
That's all baseball is, is numbers; it's run by numbers, averages, percentage and odds. Managers make their decisions based on the numbers.
There are large numbers of people in India below the poverty line; there are large numbers of people who lead a meager existence. They want to find a little escape from the hardships of life and come and watch something colorful and exciting and musical. Indian cinema provides that.
How can you be on top of the things you do? I think when you are involved in a business, first of all you need to know the business. After that you know the business, you can - the numbers tell you what is happening. You can read with the numbers.
Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.
If you're going to kill someone there isn't much reason to get all worked up about it and angry - you just pull the trigger. Angry discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.
Cardinal Arithmetics is much older than Number Theory. People used to exchange things way before there were numbers. Expressing numbers like 762 is already a sign of a very advanced civilization.