There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier.

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

We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.

If people can construct a simple and coherent story, they will feel confident regardless of how well grounded it is in reality.

The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.