Book Review: Leading, by Alex Ferguson

I thought this book complimented Alex Ferguson's autobiography nicely. Whereas his autobiography offers his thoughts on the players who he managed over the years (what made some players good and others great), this book offers insights into how he got the best out of his players. What really made this book excel in my opinion is its structure: it's nicely broken down into small 5-10 page chapters and the chapters are nicely grouped into themes. After reading the two books, I can't say I fully understand what made Alex Ferguson stand out singularly from other managers but I can definitely say I've learnt a lot from both books.

Below are some quotes from the book:

"... I gradually began to realise that teaching bears some similarities to football management. Perhaps the most important element of each activity is to inspire a group of people to perform at their very best."

Listening: "There's a reason that God gave us two ears, two eyes and one mouth. It's so you can listen and watch twice as much as you talk. Best of all, listening costs you nothing."

Watching: "... there are two forms of observation: the first is on the detail and the second is on the big picture."

Watching: "... you can see a lot more when you are not in the thick of things... If you are in the middle of a training session with a whistle in your mouth, your entire focus is on the ball. When I stepped back and watched from the sidelines, my field of view was widened and I could absorb the whole session, as well as pick up on players' moods, energy and habits."

"It takes courage to say, 'Let me think about it'."

Discipline: "If you can assemble a team of eleven talented players who concentrate intently during training sessions, take care of their diet and bodies, get enough sleep and show up on time, then you are almost halfway to winning a trophy. It is always astonishing how many clubs are incapable of doing this."

Work rate: "It was no accident that players like Ronaldo, Beckham, the Neville brothers, Cantona, Scholes, Giggs and Rooney would all have to be dragged off the training ground. They all just had a built-in desire to excel and improve."

Drive: "For me drive means a combination of a willingness to work hard, emotional fortitude, enormous powers of concentration and a refusal to admit defeat."

Drive: "... a winning drive is like a magical potion that can spread from one person to another."

Conviction: "I cannot imagine how anyone, without firm convictions and deep inner beliefs, can be an effective leader."

Conviction: "It's one thing to have confidence in your own abilities. It's a completely different challenge to instil confidence in others."

Conviction: "As we reassembled for the following season, I kept reiterating that United expected to win absolutely every game we played. It didn't matter whether our opponent was the reigning Premier League, or Champions League champions, or a fourth division team we'd drawn in the FA Cup. I was just able to keep reinforcing the ideology that no club was bigger than United – no matter whether their owner controlled all the oil in the Persian Gulf, or every coal-mine in Russia."

Preparation: "Part of the pursuit of excellence involves eliminating as many surprises as possible because life is full of the unexpected. That's what our scouts, our youth system and the innumerable training sessions were all about."

Preparation: "... ultimately no battles are won by mounting a sterling defence. The way to win battles, wars and games is by attacking and overrunning the opposing side. So I would always dwell on our opponents' weaknesses – partly to exploit them and partly to impart in my players a sense of what was possible."

Pipeline: "When I joined Aberdeen in 1978 we had two scouts; by the time I left we had 17 scouts, who were responsible for identifying promising youngsters who lived in Scotland. The result was fabulous."

Pipeline: "Youngsters can inject a fantastic spirit in an organisation and a youngster never forgets the person or organisation that gave him his first big chance. He will repay it with a loyalty that lasts a lifetime."

Pipeline: "For young players, nothing is impossible, and they will try and run through a barbed-wire fence, while older players will try to find the gate."

Pipeline: "Every generation also raises the level of the game, because they stand atop more shoulders than the previous one."

Teamwork: "Balance is the key to every team. It is impossible to win a football game with eleven goalkeepers or with a group of people with identical talents."

Teamwork: "In football eight players, not eleven, win games, because everybody has off-days and it's almost impossible to make eleven people play to perfection simultaneously."

Teamwork: "I was always on the lookout for new players for the first-team squad... Whenever we came across a player of unusual ability, the unspoken question was whether he would serve us better than the current incumbent... Another exercise that I used to employ to keep myself honest was to ask myself which member of our first-team squad would be able to command a starting place with Real Madrid or AC Milan or whatever team happened to be Champions of Europe that year. That little mental exercise always illuminated our weaker spots."

Excellence: "Whenever we bought a player I would make a point of sitting down with him and explaining exactly what was expected of him at a club like Manchester United."

Inspiring: "You don't get the best out of people by hitting them with an iron rod. You do so by gaining their respect, getting them accustomed to triumphs and convincing them that they are capable of improving their performance."

Inspiring: "It turns out that the two most powerful words in the English language are, 'Well done'."

Inspiring: "Anyone who is in charge of a group of people has got to have a strong personality. That doesn't mean dominating every conversation or speaking at the top of your voice. Some quiet people have very strong personalities and rooms fall silent when they have something to say. A strong personality is an expression of inner strength and fortitude."

Inspiring: "... I always tried to couch [criticisms] in a positive way. For example, I would tell a young player that he would be far more effective if he passed the ball more. That message is more likely to be absorbed than barking, 'You're never going to be any good if you keep hogging he ball'."

Inspiring: "There is no benefit in engaging in public hangings. It just doesn't buy you anything. It humiliates the victim and does not do much to encourage those around him."

Inspiring: "While not always succeeding in the heat of the moment, I would try to reserve my severest comments for a private session with a player."

Inspiring: "I would always try to meld criticism with support by saying, 'You know you are capable of better. What were you thinking?'"

Speaking: "I made a habit of never going around issuing reminders to individual players. It just plants the seeds of doubt in their minds and they are left wondering whether the manager trusts them. Similarly, I never felt it made any sense to be perpetually barking instructions at players during games. If you have to resort to that, it means that you have not prepared or communicated your plan correctly, or you do not trust the players to do what they are supposed to do."

Speaking: "There are some managers who will enter a dressing room at half-time with a pack of notes. When they talk to the players they will use their notes as prompts. I cannot imagine how that is an effective way to communicate. If you have command and control of your subject, you don't need notes. No player is going to believe that someone is in control of his material, or is an authority on a subject, if he has to keep resorting to notes. I relied on my memory and my own assessment and, that way, when I was talking to the players, I was able to maintain eye contact. I'm sure I got some stuff wrong. I'd miss a deflection or a foul but, in the grand scheme of things, those tiny details don't count. It's the message, the command of that message and its delivery that pack the punch. Everyone has their own style, but using notes when trying to motivate people is not mine."

Answering: "The journalists didn't own the press conferences. I did."

Control: "... a display of temper is more effective if used sparingly."

Control: "If you look at all my teams it was evident that they enjoyed playing and they tended to express themselves in an uninhibited fashion. People do not do that if they are quaking in their boots or if their boss has made them afraid of their own shadows."

Control: "Harsh outbursts and temper tantrums can, when used sparingly, have an effect, but it's a negative and corrosive way to run anything. It's far better to give people a belief in themselves, and faith in the direction of their organisation..."

Control: "I was the puppet master, not the control freak."

Delegation: "... working with, and through, others is by far the most effective way to do things – assuming, of course, that they understand what you want and are keen to follow."

Delegation: "... my job was different. It was to set very high standards. It was to help everyone else believe they could do things that they didn't think they were capable of. It was to chart a course that had not been pursued before. It was to make everyone understand that the impossible was possible. That's the difference between leadership and management."

Delegation: "When you're a manager, it's vital to care about the details but it's equally important to understand that there isn't enough time in the day to check on everything."

Delegation: "On the whole it is better to explain to the people around you that you care about little details, but that it's their job to attend to them."

Delegation: "When I hired someone to do something I trusted them to do it. I depended on them to get on with their job and come to me with any problems."

Decision-making: "During my time at United I got rid of several people who could not make decisions. I could never deal with people who were wishy-washy or whose judgement rested on the opinion of the last person they had talked to. They just made my life harder."

Buying: "Any leader is a salesman – and he has to sell to the inside of his organisation and to the outside. Anyone who aspires to be a great leader needs to excel at selling his ideas and aspirations to others. Sometimes you have to persuade people to do things they don't want to do, or to sell them on the idea that they can achieve something they had not dreamed about."

Frugality: "... my upbringing always inclined me towards building rather than buying. I suppose I was more of what my son Mark, in his line of work, would call a 'value investor'."

Brokers: "I was struck when I read The Snowball, the biography of Warren Buffet by Alice Schroeder, to learn of his distrust of investment bankers. I feel about football agents the way Mr Buffet feels about bankers – they are what he calls 'money shufflers'."

Data overload: "I'm sometimes amazed by how people get fixated on information. It's like standing in a hospital room staring at the numbers on the bedside monitors while the patient chokes to death on a chicken sandwich. You have to consider the human element of life and the way that circumstances and chance can upset everything – even the most accurate and clearly reported data. Knowing the heart-rate of a player and doing all the video analysis in the world of his opposite number isn't going to help you if he loses control and gets sent off in the first minute."

Confidentiality: "As my father always said, you only need six people to carry your coffin and, as I have got older, I have become ever more appreciative of that remark."

Book Review: Alex Ferguson – My Autobiography

I found this book to be an enjoyable read. There were glimpses of Alex Ferguson's leadership qualities and style throughout the book but the biggest takeaway for me were his comments on the players that he managed over the years: what made some players great and others truly outstanding. Some players were summarised in a sentence or two (e.g. Dennis Irwin, Gary Pallister, Edwin van der Sar), others explained in a paragraph or two (e.g. Juan Sebastian Veron, Alan Smith, Owen Hargreaves) and a small few explored over an entire chapter (e.g. David Beckham, Christiano Ronaldo, Roy Keane). I'm going out on a whim here but Alex Ferguson's reading and understanding of the people around him – his players especially – could well be the single greatest character trait that propelled him to football management greatness and kept him at the top for so long.

Below are some quotes from the book:

"Sometimes defeats are the best outcomes. To react to adversity is a quality…  fighting back was part of our existence. If you are lackadaisical about defeats you can be sure there will be more to come. Often we would drop two points in a game by the opposition equalising with the last kick of the ball and then go on a six- or seven-game winning run. It was no coincidence."

"It's precisely because I started out in the shipbuilding district of Glasgow that I achieved what I did in football. Origins should never be a barrier to success. A modest start in life can be a help more than a hindrance."

"I always took risks. My plan was: don't panic until the last 15 minutes, keep patient until the last quarter of an hour, then go gung-ho."

"In a crisis you're better just calming people down."

"As long as you don't criticise individual players in public, admonishing the team is fine, not a problem. We can all share in the blame: the manager, his staff, the players. Expressed properly, criticism can be an acceptance of collective responsibility."

"The minute a Manchester United player thought he was bigger than the manager, he had to go… The moment the manager loses his authority, you don't have a club. The players will be running it, and then you're in trouble."

"The name of the manager is irrelevant. The authority is what counts. You cannot have a player taking over the dressing room."

"… I'm a football man, and I don't think you give up football for anything. You can have hobbies… What you don't do is surrender the nuts and bolts of football."

"Because they [England] don't have enough technical and coaching ability, the years from 9 to 16 are thrown away. So how do they compensate? The boys compete, physically. Great attitude, they have. Sleeves up. But they don't produce a player. They are never going to win a World Cup with that system, that mentality."

"… 'Give me a break, Rio [Ferdinand],' I said when I heard he was going to meet that star of the American rap scene. 'Is he going to make you a better centre-half?'…"

"I don't like easy signings. I like having to fight for a player on the grounds that a battle to extricate him means you're acquiring something valuable. I liked it when the selling club were desperate to hang on to their man."

"There is more to the art than the goalkeeping. It's a question of the personality you bring to the job. Not only do keepers have to deal with the business of making saves, they must cope with the process of making errors. You need a big character at Manchester United to handle the aftermath of a high-profile mistake."

"… he [Paolo Di Canio] was the sort of player Manchester United should have: one who can put bums on seats and get people off them, too."

"My advice [to David Gill when he stepped in as chief executive of Manchester United] was, '… don't take on too much. Delegate.'"

"Sometimes you lost one player but gained another of similar merit. We missed out on Paul Gascoigne, for example, but landed Paul Ince. We didn't persuade Alan Shearer to join us but we did sign Eric Cantona… The unifying aim was to develop whichever player we ended up with."

"One sign of a great player is that the opposing fans sing songs against him."

"That's what Alan [Smith] was: a supremely brave lad. He was a good, honest professional, too. What he lacked was the real top quality you need to excel at the biggest clubs."

"A constant in our discussions about young players – in terms of whether they could handle the demands of the Old Trafford crowd and the short patience span of the media – was temperament. Would they grow or shrink in a United shirt?"

"You can't leave your character in the dressing room. It has to come out of that room, down the tunnel and onto the pitch."

"We helped Ronaldo to be the player he was and he helped us recapture the excitement and self-expression of Manchester Untied teams."

"What I always thought about Ronaldo was that, even if he was having a dire game, he would always create three chances. Every game. Look at all the matches. In the mountain of video evidence, you could not find one instance where he failed to create at least three chances. He possessed an unbelievable talent. I can place everything on that list: training performances, strength, courage, skill with either foot, heading ability."

"No matter how many tackles or fouls he absorbed, his whole being expressed defiance: 'You're not going to kick me out of this game. I'm Ronaldo.' He had that wonderful courage and confidence in his ability."

"In all my time, the strong personalities have helped shape the team's actions. Bryan Robson Steve Bruce, Eric Cantona: those players enforced the will of the manager and the club."

"When we were embroiled in an argument once, Roy [Keane] said to me, 'You've changed.' I replied, 'Roy, I will have changed, because today is not yesterday. It's a different world we're in now. We have players from twenty different countries in here. You say I've changed? I hope I have. I would never have survived if I hadn't changed.'"

"I always felt that my best moments as a manager were when I made quick decisions based on irrefutable fact, on conviction."

"… I couldn't take sides against my players. I had to find solutions other than castigating them in public. Sometimes I had to fine or punish them, of course, but I could never let it out of the dressing room. I would have felt I had betrayed the one constant principle of my time as a manager: to defend. No, not to defend, but to protect them from outside judgements."

"The one thing I could never allow was a loss of control, because control was my only saviour."

"The player will be thinking: '1. Can he [the manager] make us winners? 2. Can he make me a better footballer? 3. Is he loyal to us?' These are vital considerations, from the player's side. If the answer to all three is yes, they will tolerate murders."

"I've always found that you have to take the hard road all the time, whether it's popular or not. If you have a worry about one of your staff, that tells you straight away there is a problem. It never made sense to me to go to bed every night worrying when you could do something to cut the problem away."

"… control was my aim… The big decisions you make in those jobs are usually seen by outsiders as exercises in power, when control is really what it's about."

"There's no secret to success in this world.  The key is graft. Malcolm Gladwell's book, 'Outliers: The Story of Success', could just have been called Graft. Hard Graft."

"I admire people who show you their emotions. It shows you they care."

"In those moments of defeat and acceptance, there would be a dawning, for me, of where we needed to go. My feeling was always: 'I don't like this, but we'll have to meet the challenge. We'll have to step up a mark.' It wouldn't have been me, or the club, to submit to apocalyptic thoughts about that being the end, the finish of all our work. We could never allow that."

"We didn't need to win the ball against Arsenal, we needed to intercept it."

"… your character must be strong. To deal with a club like Manchester United, your personality has to be bigger than those of the players. Or, you have to believe it is, to control the whole picture… There is only one boss of Manchester United, and that's the manager."

"Despite the image of me as someone who wanted obedience at all times, I loved people with a bit of devil in them. It was refreshing. You need self-confidence, a bit of nerve. If you're surrounded by people who are scared to express themselves in life, they will be equally frightened when it really matters, on the pitch, in games."

"There was no resting on the status quo, even in the best times. The longer I stayed, the further I looked ahead. Regeneration was an everyday duty."

"… you must tell them the truth. There is nothing wrong with presenting hard facts to a player who has lost his form."

"Faced with the need to confront a player who had performed below our expectation, I might have said: 'That was rubbish that.' But then I would follow it up with, 'For a player of your ability.' That was for picking them back up from the initial blow. Criticise but balance it out with encouragement. 'Why are you doing that? You're better than that.'"

"Saying we always finished the campaign at a higher gallop and with heightened resolve could be classified as a mind game… I did it every year. 'Wait till the second half of the season,' I would say. And it always worked. It crept into the minds of our players and became a nagging fear for the opposition. Second half of the season, United would come like an invasion force, hellfire in their eyes. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"It makes no sense to offer players an easy chance to tell themselves, 'The manager's lost it.' If they lose faith in your knowledge, they lose faith in you. That grasp of the facts must be kept at a high level, for all time. You have to be accurate in what you say to the players."

"I loved it when a journalist asked a big long question because it allowed me time to prepare my answer. The hard ones were the short questions: 'Why were you so bad?' That kind of pithy inquiry can cause you to elongate your response. You stretch it out while you're trying to think, and end up justifying your whole world to them. There's an art to not exposing the weaknesses of your team, which is always your first priority. Always."

"Never give in: that's a great religion, a great philosophy to have. I never gave in. I always thought I could rescue something from any situation."

Walk: Great Monk Wood in Epping Forest

Summary

If you're looking for a super casual walk just a short drive from East London, this one's for you.

Route

The steps for this walk couldn't be simpler:

1. Drive northwards up Epping New Road (also called the A104) and pull into Wake Valley Pond car park.
2. After you park up, walk out of the car park where you just entered from and cross over Epping New Road into the forest on the other side.
3. Walk in an east-south-easterly direction until you're right besides the road named Golding's Hill (also called the A121).
4. Turn and walk in a south-westerly direction along the path named Green Ride (as named in the Maps.me app).
5. Whip around Court Hill and then start to walk northwards back towards your car.

See here for a graphical representation of the route in the Ordnance Survey website and see here for some pictures of the area uploaded to my Flickr account.

Recommended app

For this walk I definitely recommend the Maps.me app over the OS Maps app since none of the paths are marked out for this one in the OS Maps app. Whichever app you decide to use, remember to download an offline map of the area beforehand since there's pretty much zero phone or data reception in the entire area.

What to pack

• Small mat to place over any fallen trees you decide to sit on... to prevent yourself getting a wet bottom.
• Waterproof walking boots so you can splash around at will anywhere in the forest.
• Extra footwear to keep in the car and change into when you finish your walk.

Book Review: The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick

I found this book to be a really good account of the early years of Facebook, from its inception in 2004 up to the point when it had grown to 500 million users worldwide in 2010. It's been ten years now since this book was published so, for sure, it is old, but it was nice to get a feel for Facebook's origin story before it started to consume other apps and really become a conglomerate.

The standout point for me from the book was the evolution of the product throughout those early years. The Facebook team seemed to introduce features into the site again and again which, call it skill or luck or both, just seemed to work. Some of these big increments were the following:

• Identity: In the early days, users had to sign up with their university email address and they had to use their real name. This ensured users were who they said they were. "Validating people's identity in this way made Facebook fundamentally different from just about everything else that had come before on the Internet."
• Photos: The ability to tag people in photos suddenly meant ordinary photos became more articulate and began to express and elaborate friend relationships. "In Facebook, photos were no longer little amateur works of art, but rather a basic form of communication."
• News Feed: It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when there was no centralised news feed in the Facebook app; users had to tediously click around into their friends' profiles to figure out what was new. The News Feed changed that and brought the information that mattered most to a user to the user. "The conceptual model for the News Feed was a newspaper that was custom-crafted and delivered to each user." The News Feed also reversed the process of communication: "Instead of sending someone an alert about yourself, now you simply had to indicate something about yourself on Facebook and Facebook would push the information out to your friends... This new form of automated communications made it possible to stay in touch with many people simultaneously with a minimum of effort. It was making a big world smaller."
• Applications Platform: By opening up its social graph and allowing third party developers to build applications on top of Facebook, there was a new expansiveness to the site and it became the centre of an ecosystem of partners. "Turning it into a platform for applications began to make it feel a bit like being on the Web itself. Facebook was becoming its own self-contained universe."
• Translation Tool: Rather than asking its employees and contractors to translate the site's words and phrases into other languages, Facebook turned the task over to the crowd. Facebook's software presented volunteers with a list of words and phrases to be translated, and used a voting mechanism to decide on the best translations. This tool had a huge impact on Facebook's global growth and meant that it could translate its site into a new language in a matter of days – rather than weeks or months – and at almost zero cost.
• Facebook Connect: In making it possible for websites to log users in with their Facebook account, websites were enabled to tap into users' information but, crucially for Facebook, to also project information back into Facebook.

The author, in the closing chapter, put these continual product changes and innovations – and Facebook's disregard for whether users were comfortable with the changes – down as the single most important reason why he thought Facebook's growth was so rapid and why it was able to beat its competitors.

Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

I found this book to be deceptively dense. It's not a huge book in terms of size and it's not a difficult book in terms of language; on the contrary, it's a good size and the words within it don't require a constant delve into the dictionary. But boy does it pack a punch. I often found myself having to go back to re-read a sentence or paragraph to make sense of it. Not because it's badly written; purely because of the depth of the content. I was stop and start with it for a number of years but I'm pleased that I made it to the end and pleased that I went through my highlights and underlines a second time to consolidate it all.

In terms of content, it covers a number of topics in the field of psychology and behavioural economics. A running theme throughout the book, however, are two modes of thinking: an impulsive, intuitive, gullible mode of thinking (System 1), and a cautious, effortful, doubtful but lazy mode of thinking (System 2). And it's these two modes of thinking from which the book gets its name: Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 is the fast mode of thinking that we defer to more often than not (whether we realise it or not), and System 2 is the slow mode of thinking that we engage in only when we're really paying attention.

Overall, I found this book to be a really rich piece of work and definitely one of the best psychology books that I've ever read. What Susan Cain's book Quiet did to make us appreciate quietness and introversion, I think this book has done to make us appreciating slow, methodical thinking.

I've pulled out my notes from the book and typed them up below into two parts: the first part contains definitions of concepts mentioned in the book, and the second part consists of my favourite quotes from the book.

Concepts defined and discussed in the book

• What You See Is All There Is: Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence. We cannot help dealing with the limited information we have as if it were all there is to know.
• Framing effect: Different ways of presenting the same information often evoke different emotions.
• Substitution: Answering a related but easier question in place of a harder one.
• Heuristic: A simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.
• Affect heuristic: Letting your likes and dislikes (i.e. emotions) determine your beliefs about the world.
• Availability heuristic: You assign a probability to an outcome according to the ease with which instances of it come to mind. So when instances of an event come to mind with ease (e.g. because you have heard about cases of it in the news a number of times), then you assign it a higher probability.
• Availability bias: We remember our own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other.
• Availability cascade: The mechanism through which biases flow into policy and priorities are reset. A media story frightens the public, and those fears encourage more media courage. The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone's mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment.
• Probability neglect (also named denominator  neglect): When we are thinking about the numerator – the story on the news – without thinking about the denominator.
• Conjunction fallacy: When we judge a conjunction of two events (e.g. Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement) to be more probable than one of the events (e.g. Linda is a bank teller) in a direct comparison.
• Narrative fallacy: When flimsy accounts of the past shape our views of the world and our expectation for the future. The elements of luck and randomness are often overlooked, and the elements of skill and talent are often highlighted. This arises inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.
• Halo effect: When we incline to match our view of all the qualities of a person to our judgement of one attribute that is particularly significant. For example, if we think a baseball pitcher is handsome and athletic, we are likely to rate him better at throwing a ball too. Or, if we think a player is ugly, we will probably underrate his athletic ability.
• Planning fallacy: Plans and forecasts that (1) are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios and (2) could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases.
• Optimistic bias: When we view the world as more benign that it really is, our own attributes as more favourable that they are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable that they are likely to be.
• Loss aversion: When the response to losses is stronger than the response to corresponding gains.
• Sunk-cost fallacy: The decision to invest additional resources in a losing account, when better investments are available. An example of this is driving into a blizzard because one has paid for tickets to attend an event.
• The focusing illusion: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

Quotes from the book

The Lazy Controller: "... both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work... people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation... self-control requires attention and effort..."

The Associative Machine: "... being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused... You can see why the common admonition 'to act calm and smile regardless of how you feel' is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind..."

Cognitive Ease: "A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth."

Cognitive Ease: "If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do... couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility."

Cognitive Ease: "... when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors... A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one's guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required."

Norms, Surprises, and Causes: "How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark? The number of people who detect what is wrong with this question is so small that it has been dubbed the 'Moses illusion'. Moses took no animals into the ark; Noah did."

Norms, Surprises, and Causes: "When something cement does not fit into the current context of activated ideas, the system detects an abnormality, as you just experienced. You had no particular idea of what was coming after 'something', but you knew when the word 'cement' came that it was abnormal in that sentence. Studies of brain responses have shown that violations of normality are detected with astonishing speed and subtlety."

A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions: "... people (and scientists, quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold."

A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions: "If you like the president's politics, you probably like his voice and his appearance as well. The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person – including things you have not observed – is known as the halo effect."

A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions: "The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted."

A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions: "It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern."

Anchors: "My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous offer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear – to yourself as well as to the other side – that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table."

Availability, Emotion, and Risk: "Unusual events attract disproportionate attention [by the media] and are consequently perceived as less unusual than they really are. The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed."

Availability, Emotion, and Risk: "The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?)."

Availability, Emotion, and Risk: "... small risks: we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight – nothing in between."

Availability, Emotion, and Risk: "... the number of casualties from terror attacks is very small relative to other causes of deaths. Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns... the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths. The difference is in the availability of the two risks, the ease and the frequency with which they come to mind. Gruesome images, endlessly repeated in the media, cause everyone to be on edge."

Availability, Emotion, and Risk: "Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavour to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers."

The Illusion of Understanding: "The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen."

The Illusion of Understanding: "You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance."

The Illusion of Validity: "... declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true."

The Illusion of Validity: "The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained... our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability... we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday..."

The Engine of Capitalism: "If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chance of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer."

Prospect Theory: "The reason you like the idea of gaining $100 and dislike the idea of losing $100 is not that these amounts change your wealth. You just like winning and dislike losing – and you almost certainly dislike losing more than you like winning."

Prospect Theory: "For most people, the fear of losing $100 is more intense than the hope of gaining $150. We concluded from many such observations that 'losses loom larger than gains' and that people are loss averse."

Prospect Theory: "The pain of losing $900 is more than 90% of the pain of losing $1,000."

Bad Events: "... a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches... the negative trumps the positive in many ways..."

Bad Events: "... the long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive... a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1..."

Bad Events: "... we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains... not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain... The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it."

Bad Events: "Loss aversion creates an asymmetry that makes agreements difficult to reach. The concessions you make to me are my gains, but they are your losses; they cause you much more pain than they give me pleasure."

Bad Events: "Animals, including people, fight harder to prevent losses than to achieve gains... A biologist observed that 'when a territory holder is challenged by a rival, the owner almost always wins the contest – usually within a matter of seconds'."

Rare Events: "... low-probability events are much more heavily weighted when described in terms of relative frequencies (how many) than when stated in more abstract terms of 'chances', 'risk', or 'probability' (how likely)."

Keeping Score: "Boards of directors... often replace a CEO who is encumbered by prior decisions and reluctant to cut losses. The members of the board do not necessarily believe that the new CEO is more competent than the one she replaces. They do know that she does not carry the same mental accounts and is therefore able to ignore the sunk costs of past investments in evaluating current opportunities."

Keeping Score: "... be explicit about the anticipation of regret. If you can remember when things go badly that you considered the possibility of regret carefully before deciding, you are likely to experience less of it."

Frames and Reality: "A bad outcome is much more acceptable if it is framed as the cost of a lottery ticket that did not win than if it is simply described as losing a gamble... losses evoke stronger negative feelings than costs."

Two Selves: "Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self."

Two Selves: "A comment I heard from a member of the audience after a lecture illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing memories from experiences. He told of listening raptly to a long symphony on a disc that was scratched near the end, producing a shocking sound, and he reported that the bad ending 'ruined the whole experience.' But the experience was not actually ruined, only the memory of it. The experiencing self had had an experience that was almost entirely good, and the bad end could not undo it, because it had already happened. My questioner had assigned the entire episode a failing grade because it had ended very badly, but that grade effectively ignored 40 minutes of musical bliss. Does the actual experience count for nothing?"

Two Selves: "The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximise the qualities of future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self."

Two Selves: "Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and the memories can be wrong."

Life is a Story: "A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing... This is how the remembering self works: it composes stories and keeps them for future reference."

Life is a Story: "The photographer does not view the scene as a moment to be savoured but as a future memory to be designed."

Life is a Story: "The word *memorable* is often used to describe vacation highlights, explicitly revealing the goal of the experience."

Life is a Story: "Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me."

Thinking About Life: "The focusing illusion creates a bias in favour of goods and experiences that are initially exciting, even if they will eventually lose their appeal. Time is neglected, causing experiences that will retain their attention value in the long term to be appreciated less than they deserve to be."