Maria Konnikova > Quotes

“the most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn’t often multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose.”
― Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.”
― Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“A change in perspective, in physical location, quite simply forces mindfulness. It forces us to reconsider the world, to look at things from a different angle. And sometimes that change in perspective can be the spark that makes a difficult decision manageable, or that engenders creativity where none existed before.”
― Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

“Less certainty, more inquiry”:”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

“Whatever I may think about God, I believe in randomness. In the noise of the universe that chugs along caring nothing about us, our plans, our desires, our motivations, our actions. The noise that will be there regardless of what we choose or don’t choose to do. Variance. Chance. That thing we can’t control no matter how we may try. But can you really blame us for trying?”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Take Control and Win

“The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became: the participants grew increasingly less likely to switch to winning stocks, instead doubling down on losers or gravitating entirely toward bonds.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

“The benefit of failure is an objectivity that success simply can’t offer.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

“Do we see ourselves as victims or victors? A victim: The cards went against me. Things are being done to me, things are happening around me, and I am neither to blame nor in control. A victor: I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

“You become a big winner when you lose,” Dan says. “Everyone plays well when they’re winning. But can you control yourself and play well when you’re losing? And not by being too conservative, but trying to still be objective as to what your chances are in the hand. If you can do that, then you’ve conquered the game.” And it resonates. After all, losing is what brought me to the table in the first place. It makes sense that learning to lose in a game—to lose constructively and productively—would help me lose in life, lose and come back, lose and not see it as a personal failure. It resonates—but it’s a tough ask. Dan nods. “It’s still tough to do. Even for me, and I have a lifetime of experience, that’s not an easy thing.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

“The confidence game—the con—is an exercise in soft skills. Trust, sympathy, persuasion. The true con artist doesn’t force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn’t steal. We give. He doesn’t have to threaten us. We supply the story ourselves. We believe because we want to, not because anyone made us. And so we offer up whatever they want—money, reputation, trust, fame, legitimacy, support—and we don’t realize what is happening until it is too late.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time

“Our education might stop, if we so choose. Our brains’ never does. The brain will keep reacting to how we decide to use it. The difference is not whether or not we learn, but what and how we learn.”
― Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“Gullibility may be deeply engrained in the human behavioral repertoire.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time

“To do nothing is within the power of all men.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time

“every time you find yourself making a judgment immediately upon observing—in fact, even if you don’t think you are, and even if everything seems to make perfect sense—train yourself to stop and repeat: It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong. Then go back and restate it from the beginning and in a different fashion than you did the first time around. Out loud instead of silently. In writing instead of in your head. It will save you from many errors in perception.”
― Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“Mastery is always a struggle for balance. How much time do you devote to the craft, and how much to yourself? And can you really do one without the other?”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Take Control and Win

“When it comes to you, I see clearly. When it comes to myself, I see what I want.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time

“Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don’t exist, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. It is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening—even”
― Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“The more you learn, that harder it gets; the better you get, the worse you are.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

“Attention is a limited resource.”
― Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“A helpful exercise is to describe the situation from the beginning, either out loud or in writing, as if to a stranger who isn’t aware of any of the specifics—much like Holmes talks his theories through out loud to Watson. When Holmes states his observations in this way, gaps and inconsistencies that weren’t apparent before come to the surface.”
― Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“for every standard deviation increase in cloud cover on the day of the college visit, a student is 9 percent more likely to actually enroll in that college.”
― Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“We want to learn to pay attention better, to become superior observers, but we can’t hope to achieve this if we thoughtlessly pay attention to everything. That’s self-defeating. What we need to do is allocate our attention mindfully”
― Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“I haven’t quite thought of it that way, but as always, the man has a point. How we frame something affects not just our thinking but our emotional state. It may seem a small deal, but the words we select—the ones we filter out and the ones we eventually choose to put forward—are a mirror to our thinking. Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

“The simple truth is that most people aren’t out to get you. We are so bad at spotting deception because it’s better for us to be more trusting. Trust, and not adeptness at spotting deception, is the more evolutionarily beneficial path.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time

“We can’t control the variance. We can’t control what happens. But we can control our attention and how we choose to deploy it.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

“Human beings don't like to exist in a state of uncertainty or ambiguity. When something doesn't make sense, we want to supply the missing link. When we don't understand what or why or how something happened, we want to find the explanation.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time

“Edward Gibbon warned about as far back as 1794, that “the laws of probability, so true in general, [are] so fallacious in particular”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

“One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate.

The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal.

It’s for this reason, Bonanno told me, that “stressful” or “traumatic” events in and of themselves don’t have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. “The prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” he said. “It’s only predictive if there’s a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.”
― Maria Konnikova

“If you want to be a good player, you just acknowledge that you're not 'due' -- for good cards, good karma, good health, money, love, or whatever else it is.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win