Matthew C Koonts

“which choice gets you the best odds? Fortune-telling isn’t real. No one can predict tomorrow with absolute confidence. But the mistake some people make is trying to avoid making any predictions because their thirst for certainty is so strong and their fear of doubt too overwhelming. If Annie had stayed in academics, would any of this have mattered? “Absolutely,” she said. “If you’re trying to decide what job to take, or whether you can afford a vacation, or how much you need to save for retirement, those are all predictions.” The same basic rules apply. The people who make the best choices are the ones who work hardest to envision various futures, to write them down and think them through, and then ask themselves, which ones do I think are most likely and why? Anyone can learn to make better decisions. We can all train ourselves to see the small predictions we make every day. No one is right every time. But with practice, we can learn how to influence the probability that our fortune-telling comes true.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“We hardly notice the empty restaurants we pass on the way to our favorite, crowded pizza place. We become trained, in other words, to notice success and then, as a result, we predict successful outcomes too often because we’re relying on experiences and assumptions that are biased toward all the successes we’ve seen—rather than the failures we’ve overlooked. Many successful people, in contrast, spend an enormous amount of time seeking out information on failures. They read inside the newspaper’s business pages for articles on companies that have gone broke.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.” Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers. In one study published in 2004, a sociologist named Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronics company and found that ideas that were most consistently ranked as “creative” came from people who were particularly talented at”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“the comparison for a moment, though, because it offers a valuable lesson: When strong ideas take root, they can sometimes crowd out competitors so thoroughly that alternatives can’t prosper. So sometimes the best way to spark creativity is by disturbing things just enough to let some light through.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business