You should not take your intuitions at face value.

Some achieve a reputation for great successes when in fact all they have done is take chances that reasonable people wouldn't take.

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

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

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments.

Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person - you already feel fortunate.