With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors.

People are irrational - and predictably so.

Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected.

But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?

There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.

None of us always make the best financial decisions.

We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.