Quotes from Leonard Mlodinow

Research suggests that your happiness set point as well as circumstances and recent events accounts for much but not all of your happiness level. What about the rest? That's due to our behavior, and the good news is, in contrast to the others, this factor is very much under our control.

As philosopher Francis Bacon put it in 1620, "the human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirm it, and though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty, it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that this opinion will remain unshaken."46

Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data.

As a result, determinism is a poor model for the human experience. Or as the Nobel laureate Max Born wrote, "Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality.

survival in Nazi concentration camps "depended on one's ability to arrange to preserve some areas of independent action, to keep control of some important aspects of one's life despite an environment that seemed overwhelming.

What I've learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.

That's why doctors instinctively "package" themselves in nice shirts and ties and it's not advisable for attorneys to greet clients in Budweiser T-shirts. In

Or as the IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.

According to the laws of chance, if you look around enough, you are bound to find something interesting.

We fill in blanks and make guesses, but the truth about us is far more complex and subtle than that which can be understood as the straightforward calculation of conscious and rational minds.

complex systems (among which I count our lives) we should expect that minor factors we can usually ignore will by chance sometimes cause major incidents.8

in the recent past, as the pace of change has quickened, the calculus governing the benefits of embracing novelty has been dramatically altered. Today's society bestows rewards as never before upon those who are comfortable with change, and it may punish those who are not, for what used to be the safe terrain of stability is now often a dangerous minefield of stagnation.

HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the conscious and the unconscious levels.

Little is known about Boyle's mother, other than that she was married at seventeen and proceeded to bear fifteen children in the next twenty-three years, then dropped dead of consumption, which by then must have come as a relief.

And when people interpret the behavior of someone who is a member of a minority, they interpret it in the context of preconceived stereotypes.51

at a time when mystical incantation was more valued than mathematical calculation.

that in a random series of 101,000,007 zeroes and ones, you should expect at least 10 nonoverlapping subsequences of 1 million consecutive zeros.11

A FEW YEARS AGO a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his "accomplishment," he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. "I dreamed of the number 7 for seven straight nights," he said, "and 7 times 7 is 48.

if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events.

for the sake of their own sanity," people overestimate the degree to which ability can be inferred from success.

Evolution has provided us with an unconscious mind because our unconscious is what allows us to survive in a world requiring such massive information intake and processing.

wherever they looked, the chaos of life seemed to produce quantifiable and predictable patterns.

When we perform an assessment or measurement, our brains do not rely solely on direct perceptional input. They also integrate other sources of information—such as our expectation.

We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation.