Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don't decide to do it. We don't control it.

We were required to predict a soldier's performance in officer training and in combat, but we did so by evaluating his behavior over one hour in an artificial situation. This was a perfect instance of a general rule that I call WYSIATI, "What you see is all there is." We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual's future, which was almost everything that would actually matter. When you know as little as we did, you should not make extreme predictions like "He will be a star."

When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

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

Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.