Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic > Quotes

“high confidence causes low competence, which in turn causes denial, until one faces the facts and confidence is lowered—then, progress may start.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Confidence: How Much You Really Need and How to Get It

“Competence is an ability; confidence is the belief in that ability.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“Competence is how good you are at something. Confidence is how good you think you are at something.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“How odd, then, that so much of the recent debate over getting more women into leadership positions has focused on encouraging them to mimic the maladaptive behaviours of ambitious men. Do you really want to ask women to replicate a broken model?”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“If you have ever worked in an office, then you have probably experienced a particular form of bad management displayed by bosses who seem unaware of their limitations and are clearly and unjustifiably pleased with themselves. They are overconfident, abrasive, and very much in awe of themselves, particularly in light of their actual talents. They are their own biggest fans by some distance.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“Abraham Lincoln famously noted, it is possible to fool some individuals all the time and all individuals some of the time, but it’s not feasible to fool all individuals all the time.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Confidence: The surprising truth about how much you need and how to get it

“Don’t go chasing happiness. Instead, pursue the factors and conditions that create it.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

“How can rational people who have their own best interests at heart fall for charismatic con artists who promise them the impossible while pursuing harmful agendas and corrupt selfish interests?”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“While this aspect of self-awareness is no doubt useful, a more consequential side concerns understanding how you affect others and, in turn, what others think of you. As the poet Maya Angelou noted, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” In that sense, self-awareness is really about other-awareness, and people with higher EQs are better able to understand how their actions affect and are perceived by others.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“Growing up in stable, happy, and secure households may end up killing ambition, which leads to downward social mobility. The most extreme examples of this are found in aristocratic families, in which the amount of inherited wealth tends to decline with every generation.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Confidence: How Much You Really Need and How to Get It

“differences in behavior arise not because of differences in how men and women are, but in how men and women are treated. This is what the evidence shows: women are less likely to get useful feedback, their mistakes are judged more harshly and remembered longer, their behavior is scrutinized more carefully, and their colleagues are less likely to share vital information with them. When women speak, they’re more likely to be interrupted or ignored.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“As Bertrand Russell, the famous British mathematical philosopher and Nobel laureate, famously lamented in an essay condemning the rise of Nazi Germany, “the fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“People will passionately defend the qualities of leaders they deem charismatic, just as they would blindly defend a person they are in love with: with no concern for facts or objective evidence in support of their views.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“Specifically, women elicit more respect and pride from their followers, communicate their vision more effectively, better empower and mentor their subordinates, approach problem solving in a more flexible and creative way; and are fairer and more objective in their evaluation of direct reports.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“Another linguistic feature associated with psychopathy is the proclivity to talk about power, money, sex, and physical needs, whereas lower-psychopathy individuals tend to talk more about family, friends, and spirituality.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“There is a world of difference between the personality traits and behaviours it takes to be chosen as a leader and the traits and skills you need to be able to lead.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“Since we all want better leaders, we should not lower our standards when we select women, but we should raise them when we select men.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“This book explores a central question: what if these two observations - that most leaders are bad and that most leaders are male - are casually linked?”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“and”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“if organizations want leaders to drive change, they would be well advised to hire moderate misfits rather than candidates who are a perfect fit for the current culture. A carbon copy of the rest of the team could perpetuate rather than disrupt the status quo. At the same time, hiring people who are radically different will rarely generate the desired change. More likely, these leaders would end up disrupting only themselves.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain, if you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees, if you want a hundred years of prosperity, grow people. Chinese proverb”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, The Talent Delusion: Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential

“Freud argued that a leader emerges when a group of people - the followers - have replaced their own narcissism with that of the leader, so that their love for the leader is a subliminal form of self love.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“When men are considered for leadership positions, the same traits that predict their downfall are commonly mistaken - even celebrated - as a sign of leadership or talent.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“How can smart and educated people make self-destructive leadership choices, political term after term, without learning the lessons from previous failures.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“The result is a pathologic system that rewards men for their incompetence while punishing women for their competence.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“...the under-representation of women in leadership was not due to their lack of ability or motivation, but due to our inability to detect incompetence in men.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“In most part of the world, the notion of leadership is so masculine that most people will struggle to name one famous female business leader.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“If we want better and more effective organizations and societies, we first and foremost need to improve the quality of our leaders. Compelling evidence suggests that leadership is more likely to improve if we start drawing more heavily from the female talent pool, especially if we understand that the women most likely to drive positive change look quite different from the typical leaders we have today, irrespective of gender. But even more critically, we must put in place much bigger obstacles for the disproportionate glut of incompetent men who are so adept at becoming leaders, to everyone’s peril.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?:

“So far, the most consequential aspect of AI is not its ability to replicate or surpass but rather impact human intelligence.”
― Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique