Book Review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Despite how this book is advertised, it's not a murder mystery. Well, there is a murder mystery within it but it's just a small part of the overall story. The primary theme running throughout the book is the main character's relationship with his parents and the strain that his autism spectrum disorder has had on his parents' relationship.

Regarding style, the book has some maths and logic sprinkled throughout it. You'll like that or not like it depending on whether you like maths and logic. The author also slips in – through the voice of the main character – arguments for the non-existence of God. Except – in both chapters where this occurs – it doesn't read like the voice of a 15 year old Christopher John Francis Boone but the voice of a 40 year old Mark Haddon. It came across as out of place and forcefully interjected.

Overall this was an okay read but not what I expected it to be. I expected a math-based murder mystery. I found a mildly emotional family drama.

Book Review: The Catcher in the Rye, by Jerome David Salinger

Three days and three nights in the life of a teenage boy – Holden Caulfied – who has escaped school and is wandering around 1940s New York. That's the backdrop of this book. The focus of the book is Holden's state of mind and volatile emotional state. Chief among his emotions is the belief that almost everybody – with the clear exception of his younger sister Phoebe and his younger brother Allie who passed away three years before the events of the book – is a phony.

I found this book very readable and I enjoyed Holden's sweeping statements littered throughout the book. You can't take this book too seriously but it is a serious book! It is quite dark at times so bear that mind before picking it up.

Below are my favourite passages from the book:

It's partly true, too, but it isn't *all* true. People always think something's *all* true. 

He was always asking you to do him a big favour. You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he's a real hot-shot, and they're always asking you to do them a big favour. Just because *they're* crazy about themself, they think *you're* crazy about them, too, and that you're just dying to do them a favour. It's sort of funny, in a way. 

I didn't answer him straight away. Suspense is good for some bastards…

He gave out a big yawn while did he said that. Which is something that gives me a royal pain in the ass. I mean if somebody *yawns* right while they're asking you to do them a goddamn favour. 

That's something else that gives me a royal pain. I mean if you're good at writing compositions and somebody starts talking about commas… He wanted you to think that the only reason *he* was lousy at writing compositions was because he stuck all the commas in the wrong place. 

That was one good thing about Stradlater. You didn't have to explain every goddamn little thing with him, the way you had to do with Ackley. Mostly, I guess, because he wasn't too interested. That's really why. Ackley, it was different. Ackley a very nosy bastard.

…he didn't answer me right away. He was the kind of a guy that hates to answer you right away.

He always had to know who was going. I swear, if that guy was shipwrecked somewhere, and you rescued him in a goddamn boat, he'd want to know who the guy was that was rowing it before he'd even get in.

When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go.

He was always stroking his stomach or his chest. He was mad about himself.

He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

That's just the trouble with all you morons. You never want to discuss anything. That's the way you can always tell a moron. They never want to discuss anything intellig–

I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead.

My mother gets very hysterical. She's not too bad after she gets something thoroughly digested, though.

…you should've seen her. I had her glued to her seat. You take somebody's mother, all they want to hear about is what a hot-shot their son is.

You take a guy like Morrow that's always snapping their towel at people's asses – really trying to *hurt* somebody with it – they don't just stay a rat while they're a kid. They stay a rat they're whole life.

…I tried to get them in a little intelligent conversation, but it was practically impossible.

I thought the two ugly ones, Marty and Laverne, were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn't blame them, but it was very amusing anyway.

The Navy guy and I told each other we were glad to've met each other. Which always kills me. I'm always saying 'Glad to've met you' to somebody I'm not at *all* glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.

One of my troubles is, I never care too much when I lose something – it used to drive my mother crazy when I was a kid. Some guys spend *days* looking for something they lost. I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much. Maybe that's why I'm partly yellow.

If you want to know the truth, I can't stand ministers. The ones they've had at every school I've gone to, they all have these Holy Joe voices when they start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. I don't see why the hell they can't talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk.

The goddamn movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding.

What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would've done it, too, if I'd been sure somebody'd cover me up as soon as I landed. I didn't want a bunch of stupid rubbernecks looking at me when I was all gory.

I used to think she was quite intelligent, in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theatre and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.

He was enjoying the conversation about tennis and all, but you could tell he would've enjoyed it *more* if I was a Catholic and all. That kind of stuff drives me crazy. I'm not saying it ruined our conversation or anything – it didn't – but it sure as hell didn't do it any good.

He was the kind of a phony that had to give themselves room when they answer somebody's question. He stepped back, and stepped right on the lady's foot behind him. He probably broke every toe in her body.

Girls. You never know what they're going to think.

She was about as kindhearted as a goddamn wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddamn eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. I'm not kidding.

These intellectual guys don't like to have an intellectual conversation with you unless they're running the whole thing.

The thing he was afraid of, he was afraid somebody'd say something smarter than *he* had. He really amused me.

People never give your message to anybody.

…they had this goddamn secret fraternity that I was too yellow not to join.

…you don't have to be a bad guy to depress somebody – you can be a *good* guy and do it. All you have to do to depress somebody is give them a lot of phony advice…

That's something that annoys hell out of me – I mean if somebody *says* the coffee's all already and it isn't.

You hate to tell *new* stuff to somebody around a hundred years old. They don't like to hear it. 

Book Review: Prisoners of Geography, by Tim Marshall

This book contains a nice succinct recent history of the modern world. Perhaps it is oversimplified in parts but that's what makes it so readable in my opinion. One of the recurring discussions in the book is the greater role that natural geographic features such as mountains, rivers and coastlines play in identifying and shaping ethnicities than lines on a map. We see a number of examples where an ethnic group identifies more with the people on the other side of the border than with those with whom it shares a country. The Pashtun people of north-west Pakistan and south-east Afghanistan are a good example of this but there are plenty others. Another recurring discussion in the book is the role that a nation's natural geographic makeup plays towards its successes or its struggles. To summarise: This is an insightful book. Get it. Read it.

Below are some quotes from the book.

"... political realities are shaped by the most basic physical realities."

"The colonial powers drew artificial borders on paper, completely ignoring the physical realities of the region."

"Although 75 per cent of its [i.e. Russia's] territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there."

"When the Soviet Union broke apart, it split into fifteen countries. Geography had its revenge on the ideology of the Soviets and a more logical picture reappeared on the map, one in which mountains, rivers, lakes and seas delineate where people live, are separated from each other and thus how they develop different languages and customs."

"For Russia this [i.e. the control of Crimea] was an existential matter: they could not cope with losing Crimea, the West could."

"It doesn't matter if the ideology of those in control is tsarist, Communist or crony capitalist – the ports [to the north and east of Russia] still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat."

"It remains a feature of China to this day that when China opens up, the coastland regions prosper but the inland areas are neglected."

"Demographics and geopolitics oppose Tibetan independence."

"If we take Europe as a whole we see the mountains, rivers and valleys that explain why there are so many nation states. Unlike the USA, in which one dominant language and culture pressed rapidly and violently ever westward, creating a giant country, Europe grew organically over millennia and remains divided between its geographical and linguistic regions."

"Geographically, the Brits are in a good place. Good farmland, close enough to the European Continent to trade and yet protected by dint of being an island race – there have been times when the UK gave thanks for its geography as wars and revolutions swept over its neighbours."

"What is undeniable is that the water around the island, the trees upon it which allowed a great navy to be built, and the economic conditions which sparked the Industrial Revolution all led to Great Britain controlling a global empire."

"... geography tells us that if humans do not constantly strive to overcome its 'rules', its 'rules' will overcome us."

"Almost the entire continent [of Africa] developed in isolation from the Eurasian land mass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south."

"Much of the land [in Africa] consists of jungle, swamp, desert or steep-sided plateau, none of which lend themselves to the growing of wheat or rice, or sustaining herds of sheep."

"Africa's rhinos, gazelles and giraffes stubbornly refused to be beasts of burden..."

"Most of the continent's [i.e. Africa's] rivers also pose a problem, as they begin in high land and descend in abrupt drops which thwart navigation."

"The continent's [i.e. Africa's] great rivers... don't connect and this disconnection has a human factor. Whereas huge areas of Russia, China and the USA speak a unifying language which helps trade, in Africa thousands of languages exist and no one culture emerged to dominate areas of similar size."

"... the Europeans... took maps of the contours of Africa's geography and drew lines on them – or, to take a more aggressive approach, lies... These lines were more about how far which power's explorers, military forces and businessmen had advanced on the map than what the people living between the lines felt themselves to be, or how they wanted to organise themselves."

"... the European idea of geography did not fit the reality of Africa's demographics."

"The notion that a man from a certain area [in the Middle East] could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn't know in a faraway town, made little sense. The idea that the document was issued because a foreigner had said the area was now two regions and had made up names for them made no sense at all and was contrary to the way in which life had been lived for centuries."

"To this day most people [in Latin America] still live close to the coastal areas..."

"Until recently the riches [in the Arctic] were theoretical, but the melting ice has made the theoretical probable, and in some cases certain. The melting of the ice changes the geography and the stakes... The hunger for energy suggests the race is inevitable..."

"There are going to be a lot more ships in the High North [i.e. the Arctic], a lot more oil rigs and gas platforms – in fact, a lot more of everything."

"... wars are started by fear of the other as well as by greed..."

"... we have neither conquered our own geography yet, nor our propensity to compete for it."

"... geography does not dictate the course of all events. Great ideas and great leaders are part of the push and pull of history. But they must all operate within the confines of geography."

"... although we have broken free from the shackles of gravity, we are still imprisoned in our own minds, confined by our suspicion of the 'other', and thus our primal competition for resources."

Book Review: Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck

This is a must-read. If you didn't have the pleasure of reading this book at school, do your self a favour and get it and read it. It's a short book (100 pages roughly) so it won't take you long to read at all. I found myself reading it twice over back-to-back. The standout themes in the book for me were companionship and loyalty. In particular, the companionship and loyalty that the two main characters – George and Lennie – display towards each other. We see how companionship and loyalty gives these two characters a sense of completeness. We see how other characters in the book who are missing this have a sense of incompleteness about them. To summarise: It's a top-drawer book. Get it. Read it.

Here are my favourite quotes from the book:

Slim: "Guys don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella."

Crooks: "You go on get outta my room. I ain't wanted in the bunk house, and you ain't wanted in my room... They play cards in there, but I can't play because I'm black. They say I stink. Well, I tell you, you all of you stink to me."

Crooks: "S'pose you didn't have nobody. S'pose you couldn't go into the bunk house and play rummy 'cause you was black. How'd you like that? S'pose you had to sit out here an' read books. Sure you could play horseshoes till it got dark, but then you got to read books. Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody—to be near him... A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. I tell ya... I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick."

Crooks: "A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin' books or thinkin' stuff like that. Sometimes he gets thinkin', an' he got nothing to tell him what's so an' what ain't so. Maybe if he sees something', he don't know whether it's right or not. He can't turn to some other guy and ast him if he sees it too. He can't tell. He got nothing to measure by."

Crooks: "I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand."

Book Review: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Jay Fowler

Warning: spoiler alert

This book had some good ideas about memory. Specifically, when we revisit or narrate an old memory again and again, does that memory start to take a life of its own which is distinct from the original event? Other than this, the book was pretty okay: Not too great, not too bad. It's the story of the protagonist (Rosemary) and her family struggling to come to terms with the "loss" of her sister. The final page – when Rosemary finally meets her sister after years apart – was strong:

"I didn't know what she was thinking or feeling. Her body had become unfamiliar to me. And yet, at the very same time, I recognized everything about her."

Book Review: Empire, by Niall Ferguson

I found this book to be an engaging and educational read. As someone with very limited knowledge of the British Empire, I found the pacing and level of detail in this book to be just right. I thought the author did a good job of telling the story of the British Empire without getting into too much discussion about whether the actions of the British were good or bad or justified. After reading this book, I definitely feel I have a decent surface-level understanding of the origins of the empire in the 1600s, the spread and growth of the empire through the 1700s and 1800s, and the eventual demise of the empire in the 1900s. Also, as the subtitle of the book promised, I definitely feel I have a better understanding of how the modern world has been shaped by the Empire.

Here's a brief timeline of the standout events which the author discussed in the book:  

• 1600s (first half)
• English Civil War.
• Increased migration of Brits to America.
• 1600s (second half)
• Pirating the ships and islands of more successful empires like the Spanish.
• 1700s (first half)
• The rise of sugar imports into Britain.
• Growth in the number of slave exports from Africa to America on British ships.
• 1700s (second half)
• The rise of re-exporting stimulants like sugar, caffeine and tobacco to continental Europe.
• Britain emerges the victor in the Seven Years War over France.
• American War of Independence.
• Increased transportation of British convicts to Australia.
• 1800s (first half)
• Slavery is made illegal in British territory.
• The rise of Christian missionary groups and missionaries operating in British colonies.
• 1800s (second half)
• The Indian Mutiny.
• The Industrial Revolution shrinks the world with the construction of bigger, faster ships and the invention of the telegraph.
• Construction of the HMS Warrior battleship is completed.
• The first meeting of the Indian National Congress is held. (Though initially intended to defuse Indian disaffection with the British Raj, Congress would become the crucible of Indian nationalism.)
• A third of Africa is annexed to the British Empire.
• 1900s (first half)
• The Boer War is fought (against the Boer states) for control of South Africa. (Survivors were herded into concentration camps.)
• World War I
• World War II
• 1990s (second half)
• End of the Empire.

Lastly, here are some quotes from the book:

Pirates: "... when an expedition went wrong – as when Sir Humphrey Gilbert's expedition to the West Indies foundered off Ireland in 1578 – the survivors resorted to piracy to cover their expenses."

Pirates: "The Empire had begun with the stealing of gold; it progressed with the cultivation of sugar."

Sugar Rush: "The rise of the British Empire, it might be said, had less to do with the Protestant work ethic or English individualism than with the British sweet tooth."

Sugar Rush: "Taken together, the new drugs gave English society an almighty hit; the Empire, it might be said, was built on a huge sugar, caffeine and nicotine rush – a rush nearly everyone could experience."

Sugar Rush: "Indian textiles – which even a servant like [Daniel] Defoe's 'plain country Joan' could afford – meant that the tea-swilling English not only felt better; they looked better too."

Men of War: "... they [the Indians] allowed themselves to be divided – and, ultimately, ruled."

Men of War: "... no matter how devoted they [the British] might be to Indian culture, their aim was always to transfer their profits back home to Britain. The notorious 'drain' of capital from India to Britain had begun."

The Taxman: "British power in India continued to be based on the sword. War after war extended British rule even further..."

The Taxman: "They had robbed the Spaniards, copied the Dutch, beaten the French and plundered the Indians. Now they ruled supreme."

Plantation: "Here was one of the key differences between British America and Latin America. Spanish settlers tended to be solo male encomanderos... the majority of male Iberian migrants therefore took their sexual partners from the (dwindling) indigenous or the (rapidly growing) slave population. The result within a few generations was a substantial mixed-race population of mestizos and mulattos (Hispanic and African). British settlers in North America were not only much more numerous; they were encouraged to bring their wives and children with them, thus preserving their culture more or less intact. In North America, as in Northern Ireland, therefore, British colonisation was a family affair. As a consequence, New England really was a new England, far more than New Spain would ever be a new Spain."

Plantation: "There were probably around 2 million indigenous people in the territory of the modern United States in 1500. By 1700 the number was 750,000. By 1820 there were just 325,000."

Black and White: "We tend to think of the British Empire as a phenomenon of white migration, yet between 1662 and 1807 nearly three and a half million Africans came to the New World as slaves transported in British ships. That was over three times the number of white migrants in the same period."

Black and White: "By 1770... Britain's Atlantic empire seemed to have found a natural equilibrium. The triangular trade between Britain, West Africa and the Caribbean kept the plantations supplied with labour. The mainland American colonies kept them supplied with victuals. Sugar and tobacco streamed back to Britain, a substantial proportion for re-export to the Continent. And the profits from these New World commodities oiled the wheels of the Empire's Asian commerce."

Civil War: "... it is the great paradox of the American Revolution... that the ones who revolted against British rule were the best-off of all Britain's colonial subjects."

Civil War: "It was the constitutional principle – the right of the British parliament to levy taxes on the American colonists without their consent – that was the true bone of contention."

Civil War: "... they [the American colonists] wanted their assemblies to be put on a par with the Westminster Parliament..."

Civil War: "It has sometimes been argued that in gaining Canada in the Seven Years War, Britain had undermined her position in America. Without the French threat, why should the thirteen colonies stay loyal?"

Civil War: "... the loss of America had the unforeseen effect of securing Canada for the Empire, thanks to the flood of English-speaking Loyalists who, together with new British settlers, would eventually reduce the French Quebecois to a beleaguered minority."

Civil War: "The irony is that having won their independence in the name of liberty, the American colonists went on to perpetuate slavery in the southern states... By contrast, within a few decades of having lost the American colonies, the British abolished first the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout their Empire."

Mars: "The great paradox of Australian history is that what started out as a colony populated by people whom Britain had thrown out proved to be so loyal to the British Empire for so long. America had begun as a combination of tobacco plantation and Puritan utopia, a creation of economic and religious liberty, and ended up as a rebel republic. Australia started out as a jail, the very negation of liberty. Yet the more reliable colonists turned out to be not the Pilgrims but the prisoners."

Mars: "... transportation there [New South Wales in Australia] was no longer a deterrent to crime, but rather a free passage to a new life, with the prospect of a golden handshake in the form of a land grant at the end of one's sentence."

Mars: "The colonists brought with them contamination in the form of infectious diseases to which the Aborigines had no resistance, and cultivation which implied the exclusion of the nomadic tribes from their ancestral hunting grounds."

Mars: "The case of the Aborigines was a striking example of the way attitudes diverged over distance. The British in London regarded the problem quite differently from the British in Sydney. Here was the very essence of the imperial dilemma. How could an empire that claimed to be founded on liberty justify overruling the wishes of colonists when they clashed with those of a very distant legislature?"

From Clapham to Freetown: "This was the birth of a new kind of politics, the politics of the pressure group. Thanks to the work of zealous activists armed only with pens, paper and moral indignation, Britain had turned against slavery."

From Clapham to Freetown: "Here was a measure of the strength of the campaign against the slave trade: that it could mobilise not only legislators to ban the trade, but also the Royal Navy to enforce the ban."

From Clapham to Freetown: "For two hundred years the Empire had engaged in trade, warfare and colonisation. It had exported British goods, capital and people. Now, however, it aspired to export British culture."

From Clapham to Freetown: "There could not be a greater contrast between the missionaries' motives and those of previous generations of empire-builders, the swashbucklers, the slavers and the settlers."

The Clash of Civilisations: "... by the 1830s and 1840s 40 percent of the total value of Indian exports took the form of opium..."

The Clash of Civilisations: "The rock on which British rule was founded was the Indian Army."

The Clash of Civilisations: "When Delhi fell to 'British' forces, those forces were mostly Indian."

The Clash of Civilisations: "In the time between [David] Livingstone's death in 1873 and [Henry Morton] Stanley's death in 1904 around a third of Africa would be annexed to the British Empire; virtually all the rest would be taken over by a handful of other European powers. And it is only against this background of political domination that the conversion of sub-Saharan Africa to Christianity can be understood."

The Annihilation of Distance: "It is indeed one of the richer ironies of the Victorian value-system that the same navy that was deployed to abolish slave trade was also active in expanding the narcotics trade."

The Annihilation of Distance: "From 1879, the date of the second British attempt to invade and control Afghanistan, until the third attempt in 1919, Britain and Russia conducted the world's first Cold War along the North-West Frontier. But the spies in this Cold War were surveyors, for whoever mapped the frontier first stood a good chance of controlling it."

Cape to Cairo: "Within twenty short years after 1880... ten thousand African tribal kingdoms were transformed into just forty states, of which thirty-six were under direct European control. Never in human history had there been such drastic redrawing of the map of a continent."

Cape to Cairo: "Across Africa the story repeated itself: chiefs hoodwinked, tribes dispossessed, inheritances signed away with a thumbprint or a shaky cross and any resistance mown down by the Maxim gun. One by one the nations of Africa were subjugated... By the beginning of the new century [i.e. the 20th century], the carve-up was complete."

Greater Britain; "Around two and a half million British nationals emigrated to the Empire between 1900 and 1914, three-quarters of them to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In most cases, emigration substantially increased their incomes and reduced their tax burdens."

Weltkrieg: "In the autumn of 1914, around a third of British forces in France were from India; by the end of the war more than a million Indians had served overseas, almost as many as came from the four white Dominions put together."

Weltkrieg: "... the Indians were not reluctant conscripts [to fight for the British in the first world war]; they were in fact all volunteers, and enthusiastic volunteers at that."

The Transfer of Power: "Once the British had made up their minds to get out [from their various colonies], they aimed to catch the first boat home, regardless of the consequences in their former colonies."

The Transfer of Power: "In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?"

Book Review: The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg

This was a decent read. The author does a fine job of intertwining stories and theory. The key takeaways for me were the definition of "habit" and the concept of a "habit loop". A habit is defined as "the choices that all of us deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about but continue doing, often every day." A habit loop, on the other hand, is defined as consisting of cues, cravings, routines and rewards: a cue creates a craving and triggers a routine which leads to a reward, which ties back to the cue.

The author argues that once a habit loop is formed, it's difficult to change the cues and rewards that drive our cravings and it's easier instead to focus on changing our routines within the habit loop. The author further argues that long-term change is only truly possible with belief and belief is a whole lot of easier to obtain with the help of a group or community. Alcoholics Anonymous was cited as an example of these points.

As well as the methods of Alcoholics Anonymous, the standout examples from the book for me were those of how marketers use this knowledge of cues and rewards to create cravings within us. There was the example of Pepsodent toothpaste advertisements which target the craving for that cool, tingling sensation in our mouths after brushing above and beyond the craving for clean teeth. There was the example of Febreze spray advertisements which target the craving to make everything smell as nice as it looks above and beyond the craving to hide bad smells. Lastly, there was the example of Cinnabon and how their stores are located away from other food stores so that the smell of cinnamon rolls reach us early and so that the craving for one is ignited well before we see the store.

Below are some quotes from the book.

"When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks." 

"... habits emerge without our permission... families don't usually intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week... until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries." 

"Every McDonald's... looks the same – the company deliberately tries to standardise stores' architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines." 

"Studies of people who have successfully started new exercise routines... show they are more likely to stick with a workout plan if they choose a specific cue, such as running as soon as they get home from work, and a clear reward, such as beer or an evening of guilt-free television." 

"... habits are so powerful [because they] create neurological cravings. Most of the time, these cravings emerge so gradually that we're not really aware they exist, so we're often blind to their influence. But as we associate cues with certain rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains that starts the habit loop spinning." 

"... to overpower the habit, we must recognise which craving is driving the behaviour." 

"... a cue and a reward, on their own, aren't enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts expecting the reward – craving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment – will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come." 

"Claude Hopkins [the main behind the Pepsodent toothpaste commercials in the early 1900s] wasn't selling beautiful teeth. He was selling a sensation. Once people craved that cool tingling [in their mouths] – once they equated it with cleanliness – brushing became a habit." 

"Shampoo doesn't have to foam, but we add foaming chemicals because people expect it each time they wash their hair. Same thing with laundry detergent. And toothpaste... There's no cleaning benefit, but people feel better when there's a bunch of suds around their mouth." 

"Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier." 

"... you can never truly extinguish bad habits. Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine. That's the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behaviour can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same." 

"In order to offer alcoholics the same rewards they get at a bar, Alcoholics Anonymous has built a system of meetings and companionship – the 'sponsor' each member works with – that strives to offer as much escape, distraction and catharsis as a Friday night bender. If someone needs relief, they can get it from talking to their sponsor or attending a group gathering, rather than toasting a drinking buddy." 

"Often, we don't really understand the cravings driving our behaviours until we look for them." 

"If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine. At least, most of the time. For some habits, however, there's one other ingredient that's necessary: belief." 

"... for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible." 

"Belief is easier when it occurs within a community." 

"... a habit cannot be eradicated – it must, instead, be replaced." 

"... habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of habit change is applied: If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted... For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group." 

"If you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a group." 

"When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It's not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change." 

"... willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success." 

"Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent... If you knew how to avoid the temptation of a marshmallow as a preschooler, it seemed, you also knew how to get yourself to class on time and finish your homework once you got older, as well as how to make friends and resist peer pressure." 

"... once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom – and the responsibility – to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp, and the only option left is to get to work."

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."

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 than 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."