Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.

People should be conscious of the large contribution made by anything that gets people together easily in the reduction of loneliness and emotional well-being.

Endlessly amused by people's minds.

However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.

Question: So investors shouldn't delude themselves about beating the market? Answer: "They're just not going to do it. It's just not going to happen."

You should not take your intuitions at face value.

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.