A hammer is good only if you stop pounding after the nail is all the way in. Keep pounding and you break the wood.
As a general rule, it's always smarter to criticize people who aren't around.
As a rule, we can’t always tell the difference between the people who are far smarter than us and the people who are dumber. Both groups make choices we can’t understand.
Being absolutely right and being spectacularly wrong feel exactly the same.
Being right and being wrong feel exactly the same to all of us. We can’t tell the difference. If we could, everyone would agree on everything important.
Certainty isn't a good indication of rightness for any complicated situation.
Do what you can do, not what you can't. Then build on the momentum.
Don’t judge a group by its worst 5 percent. If you do, you’re probably in the worst 5 percent of your own group.
Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.
Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.
Favoring action over inaction, even in the face of uncertainty, is generally a good approach to life.
I recommend that you improve your psychological bravery but say no to anything that has a strong chance of killing you.
If a bigot says in public often enough that racism is evil, the bigot is self-influencing himself to be less racist. We are better off encouraging insincere but positive opinions, because they are self-fulfilling to a degree. Reward what works.
If we knew how often we were wrong about our understanding of just about everything, it would be deeply demotivating.
If you are genuinely trying to understand the world, please avoid judging entire groups by their worst members.
If you can’t tell whether a simple plan or a complicated one will be the best, choose the simple one. If it’s a coin toss, you might as well do whatever is easiest.
If you happen to be a human being--and many of my readers are—you are wrong about all sorts of things more often than you admit, and more often than you remember.
If you see news that is so absurd it is literally unbelievable, that’s usually because it isn’t true.
If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion.
Insanity is always a reasonable diagnosis when you’re dealing with writers and artists. Sometimes the only real difference between crazy people and artists is that artists write down what they imagine seeing.
It is childlike thinking to insist in all cases that the people who cause problems are the only people who should solve them.
It is loserthink to attack an opponent by acting as dumb as they act. It might feel good, but it isn't a winning strategy.
It is one thing to disagree with an opposing viewpoint, but it is a far bigger problem if you have never heard it.
It's easy to tell when another person is rationalizing (as opposed to being rational), but it is nearly impossible to know when you are doing it yourself.
Just because we prefer something, that doesn't make it good for us.
Let’s stop blaming each other for things that happened more than twenty years ago. Humans change a lot in two decades.
Mowing your lawn is not a slippery slope to shaving your dog.
My nomination for the most loserthinkish advice in history is: ‘Stay in your lane.’ That is the sort of advice that is better served to an enemy, not a friend.
Nature doesn't seem to care whether we are smart. In terms of our survival as a species, it only matters that some people, in some places, get things right some of the time.
None of us are good at mind reading, and we know it, even if we don’t admit it.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.
One of the strongest walls in our mental prisons is a thing called history. And history isn’t even real.
One thing I find helpful is growing old. It’s a slow process, but totally worth it compared to dying.
Other people are a mess. I think we can agree on that.
Our world rewards action over inaction, at least in the average sense...the person who doesn't try anything at all is unlikely to succeed.
People who seem to have good luck are often the people who have a system that allows luck to find them.
People who understand economics can more easily spot hoaxes because money drives human behavior in predictable ways.
Persistence is useful, but there’s no point in being an idiot about it.
So long as we have lots of warning, humans are astonishingly clever at solving problems, even enormous ones. So figure that into your predictions.
Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it.
Take it from me when I say a good sense of humor can compensate for a lot of other shortcomings in one’s looks and personality.
The frauds of this world always have an advantage, but if you are alert to the influence of money, you can spot them more easily.
There are three important things to know about human beings.… Humans use pattern recognition to understand their world. Humans are very bad at pattern recognition. And they don't know it.
We have to choose our targets wisely, which is a problem, because we do not have a wise public or a wise government.
We humans are judgmental people, and we can’t turn off that feature of our brains. Nor would we want to do so, since judging our environment is what keeps us alive.
We’re all putting on an act and hoping the audience buys it.
You can debate the morality of viewing profits as the top priority in business, but you can't argue that it doesn't work. At most, you can argue that some companies take it too far. But that is the risk of any tool.
You might think a topic is too complicated to master for your use, but you might learn otherwise in less than a minute if you bother to check.