Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking.

What people present to the world is a tiny fraction of what’s going on inside their head.

Prediction is about probability and putting the odds of success in your favor. But observers mostly judge you in binary terms, right or wrong.

We are extrapolating machines in a world where nothing too good or too bad lasts indefinitely.

There are limits to our sanity. Optimism and pessimism always overshoot because the only way to know the boundaries of either is to go a little bit past them.

Ignoring that people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.

We are pushed toward maximizing efficiency in a way that leaves no room for error, despite room for error being the most important factor of long-term success.

The best story wins.

We are swayed by complexity when simplicity is the real mark of intelligence and understanding.

Your willingness to believe a prediction is influenced by how much you want or need that prediction to be true.

It’s hard to empathize with other people’s beliefs if they’ve experienced parts of the world you have not.

An innocent denial of your own flaws, caused by the ability to justify your mistakes in your own head in a way you can’t do for others.

An underappreciation for how small things compound into extraordinary things.

The gap between knowing what to do and actually getting people to do it can be enormous.

We’re bad at imagining how change will feel because there’s no context in dreams.

We are blind to how fragile the world is due to a poor understanding of rare events.

The inability to accept hassle, nonsense, and inefficiency frustrates people who can’t accept how the world works.