Quotes About Perspective

Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it.

learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past.

Their recommendation is that you should not put too much weight on regret; even if you have some, it will hurt less than you now think.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?")

We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.

They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.

It is often the case that when you broaden the frame, you reach more reasonable decisions.

When experts and the public disagree on their priorities, he says, "Each side must respect the insights and intelligence of the other.

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

Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.

For the billionaire looking for the extra billion, and indeed for the participant in an experimental economics project looking for the extra dollar, money is a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achievement. These rewards and punishments, promises and threats, are all in our heads.

The photographer does not view the scene as a moment to be savored but as a future memory to be designed. Pictures

The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality;

a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches. As he points out, the negative trumps the positive in many ways, and loss aversion is one of many manifestations of a broad negativity dominance.

The remembering self is the one that answers the question: "How was it, on the whole?" Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.

We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others.

In the competition with the inside view, the outside view doesn't stand a chance.

Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit from the informed opinions of others.

Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?

We hold a single interpretation of the world around us at any one time, and we normally invest little effort in generating plausible alternatives to it. One interpretation is enough, and we experience it as true. We do not go through life imagining alternative ways of seeing what we see.

recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation.

Most of us, most of the time, live with the unquestioned belief that the world looks as it does because that's the way it is.

We can live comfortably with colleagues without ever noticing that they actually do not see the world as we do.