...As Columbia Business School professor Eric Johnson explained to us, the more meaningful a potential loss is, the more loss averse we become. In other words, the more there is on the line, the easier it is to get swept into an irrational decision...
...“There’s a big difference between probability and outcome. Probable things fail to happen—and improbable things happen—all the time.” That’s one of the most important things you can know about investment risk...
...Greed leads many investors to seek shortcuts to investment success. Rather than allowing returns to compound over time, they attempt to turn quick profits by acting on hot tips...
...To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing...
...Motivation is what gets you into this game; learning is what helps you continue to play; creativity is how you steer; and flow is how you turbo-boost the results beyond all rational standards and reasonable expectations...
...When we lack the knowledge and skills to achieve excellence, we sometimes lack the knowledge and skills to judge excellence...
...Nobody is good at the beginning of doing something new. Get over it. If you want to live a life that matters, don’t start when you get good; start now so you become good...
...According to the theory of relativity, an object can in fact never reach the speed of light, because by then its mass would have become infinite, and by the equivalence of mass and energy, it would have taken an infinite amount of energy to get it there. This is the reason that any normal object is forever confined by relativity to move at speeds slower than the speed of light. Only light, or other waves that have no intrinsic mass, can move at the speed of light...
...early mornings are the time when they have the most control of their schedules...
...your job as a decision-maker is to figure out two things: (1) What do I already know that will make my guess more educated? (2) What can I find out that will make my guess more educated?...
...Downstream actions react to problems once they’ve occurred. Upstream efforts aim to prevent those problems from happening...
...putting self first, wanting to be liked rather than to lead, making decisions reluctantly, elevating harmony above productive argument, and not trusting subordinates...
...Taking initiative pays off. It is hard to visualize someone as a leader if she is always waiting to be told what to do...
...Play defense. Remember the long game. Control what you can control. Prepare for the worst and hope for anything remotely better. Always stick to principles over patterns...
...Ending with a digression, or with an unimportant detail, is particularly to be avoided...
...But because people tend to follow those who came before them, small, random initial differences snowballed...
...When things can’t get any worse, they always do, and when they can’t get any better, they always do...
...An eye-opening, original collection of gorgeous, never-before-seen photographic representations of the 118 elements in the periodic table...
...The periodic table is, finally, an anthropological marvel, a human artifact that reflects all of the wonderful and artful and ugly aspects of human beings and how we interact with the physical world—the history of our species written in a compact and elegant script...
...The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter...
