...There’s a baseline IQ level needed to work at my firm, but I don’t need rocket scientists. After that, what best predicts your success in my world is drive, energy, attitude, judgment, conviction, and passion. And an ability to cut to the center of an issue...
...some memories might strike us as convincing not because they are necessarily accurate but because of how often we call them to mind (i.e., reassemble them) and how easy it is do so...
...superforecasting demands thinking that is open-minded, careful, curious, and—above all—self-critical. It also demands focus. The kind of thinking that produces superior judgment does not come effortlessly. Only the determined can deliver it reasonably consistently, which is why our analyses have consistently found commitment to self-improvement to be the strongest predictor of performance...
...to be a world-beater, “you absolutely must choose your parents correctly.”...
...The economy isn’t like an individual family that earns a certain amount and spends some other amount, with no relationship between the two. My spending is your income and your spending is my income...
...We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy...
...Behavior happens when Motivation AND Ability AND Prompt converge at the same moment...
...women are, on average, better at expressing emotions and remembering the details of emotional events...
...What you’re doing when you invest is deferring consumption and laying money out now to get more money back at a later time. And there are really only two questions. One is how much you’re going to get back, and the other is when...
...When we know what to say no to, we can say yes to the things that matter...
...the volume and complexity of knowledge today has exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people—consistently, correctly, safely...
...When [you] are juggling time, you borrow from tomorrow, and tomorrow you have less time than you have today...It’s a very costly loan...
...The slope of the trajectory for your career is (unfairly) set in the first five years post-graduation. If you want the trajectory to be steep, you’ll need to burn a lot of fuel. The world is not yours for the taking, but for the trying. Try hard, really hard...
...We tend to assume that all items on a list are equally important, but usually just a few of them are more important than all the others put together...Fear plus urgency make for stupid, drastic decisions with unpredictable side effects...
...10Xers exercise productive paranoia, combined with empirical creativity and fanatic discipline, to create huge margins of safety. If you stay in the game long enough, good luck tends to return, but if you get knocked out, you’ll never have the chance to be lucky again. Luck favors the persistent, but you can persist only if you survive...
