- Highlights
- An irony of studying history is that we often know exactly how a story ends, but we have no idea where it began.
- As financial advisor Carl Richards says, “Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”
- The biggest news, the biggest risks, the most consequential events are always what you don’t see coming.
- • Bad news gets more attention than good news because pessimism is seductive and feels more urgent than optimism.
- A big takeaway from his research is how awful so many experts are at predicting politics and the economy. Given that track record, will people ever choose to ignore the experts? “No way,” Tetlock once said. “We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”
- In a perfect world, the importance of information wouldn’t rely on its author’s eloquence. But we live in a world where people are bored, impatient, emotional, and need complicated things distilled into easy-to-grasp scenes.
- Schultz wrote in his 2011 book Onward: “Growth, we now know all too well, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. And when undisciplined growth became a strategy, we lost our way.”
- If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. That is so counterintuitive. But I think it perfectly highlights the danger of shortcuts.
- Take a good, honest, loving person and strip them of basic necessities and you’ll soon get an unrecognizable monster who’ll do anything to survive. Under high stress, “a man becomes a beast in three weeks,”
- The sore truth is that complexity sells better.