Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don't know the odds. It's a big difference.

If you're going to be unreligious, it's likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.

It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.

Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.

you know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.

An executive might have a very strong intuition that a given product has promise, without considering the probability that a rival is already ahead in developing the same product.

We deeply want to be led by people who know what they're doing and who don't have to think about it too much.