Marcelo Barbosa

“A study led by the Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive, and then followed the patients. Sixty-three per cent of doctors overestimated survival time. Just seventeen per cent underestimated it. The average estimate was five hundred and thirty per cent too high. And, the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
― Sigmund Freud

“In fact, like other personality traits, personal happiness appears to be strongly influenced by our genes. Studies of identical and fraternal twins show that identical twins are significantly more likely to exhibit the same level of happiness than are fraternal twins or other siblings. Behavior geneticists have used these studies to estimate just how much genes matter, and their best guess is that long-term happiness depends 50 percent on a person’s genetic set point, 10 percent on their circumstances (e.g., where they live, how rich they are, how healthy they are), and 40 percent on what they choose to think and do.31”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

“If we are connected to everyone else by six degrees and we can influence them up to three degrees, then one way to think about ourselves is that each of us can reach about halfway to everyone else on the planet.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives