86 Quotes by David McRaney

You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. If you win, you tell everyone.

Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up opportunities to hang out with people. The loss of control in any situation can lead to this state.

You will soon realize you are not so smart, and thanks to a plethora of cognitive biases, faulty heuristics, and common fallacies of thought, you are probably deluding yourself minute by minute just to cope with reality.

This sets you up to be more afraid of terrorists than home furniture, even though falling couches and televisions take more lives each year.

As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his book The Tipping Point, if a company grows beyond 150 people, productivity sharply declines until the company divides its outlying entities into smaller groups. You function better in a cluster – that way everyone in that cluster is connected to one another and only certain individuals connect your cluster to other clusters.

Research shows people believe others see their contributions to conversation as being memorable, but they aren’t. You think everyone noticed when you stumbled in your speech, but they didn’t. Well, unless you drew attention to it by over-apologizing.

When it comes to buying lottery tickets, fearing the West Nile virus, looking for child molesters, and so on, you use the availability heuristic first and the facts second.

To be less dumb is to see the danger in believing in forces that do not exist and trusting them when you would do better to trust yourself.

You sold out long ago in one way or another. The specifics of who you sell to and how much you make – those are only details.