The evidence is unequivocal, there's a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.

There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.

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.

The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the [investment management] industry.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.