Often, the most enjoyable part of an activity is the anticipation.

One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.

Researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period.

If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That's the 'halo effect.' Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.

We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.

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

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."