We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.
Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.
So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you’re thinking about and what you’re paying attention to.
Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.
We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
The ‘Instagram Generation’ now experiences the present as an anticipated memory.
Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don’t decide to do it. We don’t control it.
The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.
We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.
The effort invested in ‘getting it right’ should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.
It doesn’t take many observations to think you’ve spotted a trend, and it’s probably not a trend at all.
Spend some effort in figuring out why each decision did or did not pan out. Doing that systematically is key: really try to question the way you make decisions, and improve it.
The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.
Often, the most enjoyable part of an activity is the anticipation.
Researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period...
The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.
It’s a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.
This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
Nobody would say, ‘I’m voting for this guy because he’s got the stronger chin,’ but that, in fact, is partly what happens.
Managers think of themselves as captains of a ship on a stormy sea. Risk for them is danger, but they are fighting it, very controlled.