From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
My resilience, I believe, is inherited from my parents. They, ordinary in every sense, achieved the extraordinary for us, their children, striving to offer opportunities they never had. They embodied perseverance, teaching me to distinguish a bad day from a bad life, to persist, and to adapt. My parents' immense influence, coupled with my stubbornness, shaped my journey.
Animals in this third group had learned from being exposed to inescapable shocks that nothing they did made a difference- they were essentially helpless when it came to controlling their fate. Most of our fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do.
Our psychology is open-ended: we can plug in variables, and are not just tied to constants. We can expand our circle of sympathy – we can employ the logic of impartiality, and the emotional prompts of human contact and vicarious experience, and expand our fellow-feeling from our family to our clan, our nation, tribe, and from there to all of humanity and even other sentient beings.
To me personally, movies are about escapism. Movies are about sitting in a theatre, watching something- watching a story unfold with people I don't know- watching that happen and emoting an emotion knowing that for those two hours, when I walk into that theatre, I don't have to worry about what is going on outside.
You have to make decisions throughout your life and be prepared to accept responsibility for those decisions. There is also confidence that comes from learning a set of skills – and that confidence allows you to challenge the status quo.
Uncertainty creates a strategic incentive for a rational man to go to war. That's not necessarily a mistake as, at the moment, people may wish they had better information, but they may also realise they've made the optimal choice.
Human beings have a real tendency to overreact on the upside and the downside. We are not rational investors. I do not believe that people make rational financial decisions! If you study financial decision-making you will find that human beings are irrational in a very predictable manner.
What motivates great entrepreneurs is fear of failure; and here's the thing – most entrepreneurs fail several times before they achieve success, and the more you fail, the more fear you have.
You should never place your value as a human being on results. You don't control the results of the game – people get lucky or go bankrupt. Also, what happens when you achieve your result? What long-term satisfaction does that bring you?
It might feel—if you haven't yet learned the rules of these hidden markets—that the outcomes are based on luck, chance, or things beyond your control, but you actually have a lot more agency in them than you think.
Education attenuates conspiracism such as those without a high school diploma are twice as likely to believe conspiracy theories than people with a graduate degree. But 1 in 5 people with a graduate degree believe in conspiracy theories, which is 20% – that is a high number. Education does not entirely eliminate it.
Without what Becker called 'cultural world views' we would be overwhelmed by existential terror. Beliefs about reality that we share foster psychological equanimity by giving us a sense of meaning and value.