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“We think we control our environment but in fact it controls us. We think our external environment is conspiring in our favor—that is, helping us—when actually it is taxing and draining us. It is not interested in what it can give us. It’s only interested in what it can take from us.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“When we take highly vocal umbrage at disappointing food in a restaurant by abusing a friendly waiter and making nasty comments to the maître d’—neither of whom cooked the food—it’s not because we regularly display the noblesse oblige of Louis XIV. Our behavior is an aberration, triggered by a restaurant environment where we believe that paying handsomely for a meal entitles us to royal treatment. In an environment of entitlement, we behave accordingly. Outside the restaurant we resume our lives as model citizens—patient, polite, not entitled.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“A recent study commissioned by Google’s nemesis – Facebook – has indicated that already today the Facebook algorithm is a better judge of human personalities and dispositions than even people’s friends, parents and spouses. The study was conducted on 86,220 volunteers who have a Facebook account and who completed a hundred-item personality questionnaire. The Facebook algorithm predicted the volunteers’ answers based on monitoring their Facebook Likes – which webpages, images and clips they tagged with the Like button. The more Likes, the more accurate the predictions. The algorithm’s predictions were compared with those of work colleagues, friends, family members and spouses. Amazingly, the algorithm needed a set of only ten Likes in order to outperform the predictions of work colleagues. It needed seventy Likes to outperform friends, 150 Likes to outperform family members and 300 Likes to outperform spouses. In other words, if you happen to have clicked 300 Likes on your Facebook account, the Facebook algorithm can predict your opinions and desires better than your husband or wife!”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“We treat effort as a second-class citizen. It’s the condolence message we send ourselves when we fail. We say, “I gave it my best shot,” or “I get an A for effort.” But after a few days, quantifying effort rather than outcome reveals patterns that we’d otherwise miss.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be