Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well. It’s why disentangling chance from skill is so difficult in everyday decisions: it’s a statistical undertaking, and one we are not normally equipped to deal with.
Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Some of us imbue probability with emotion. It becomes luck: chance that has suddenly acquired a valence, positive or negative, fortuitous or unfortunate. Good or bad luck. A lucky or unlucky break. Some of us invest luck with meaning, direction, and intent. It becomes fate, karma, kismet — chance with an agenda. It was meant to be. Some even go a step further: predestination. It … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Math & Science, Psychology | Behavior
A basic shortcoming of our neural wiring is that we can’t quite grasp probabilities. Statistics are completely counterintuitive: our brains are simply not cut out, evolutionarily, to understand that inherent uncertainty. There were no numbers or calculations in our early environment — just personal experience and anecdote. We didn’t learn to deal with information presented in an abstract fashion, such as tigers are incredibly rare … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Math & Science, Psychology | Behavior
Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… 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 illusion of control is what prevented … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Although we cannot deliberately evoke that will-o’-the-wisp, chance, we can be on the alert for it, prepare ourselves to recognize it and profit by it when it comes.
Author: W. I. B. Beveridge | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
Such is our proclivity for error and our vulnerability to reversals of fortune, we are all on the verge of needing someone to come to our imaginative aid. And therefore, if for no other reason, we have a duty to remain constant providers of generous interpretations of the lives of others. We must be kind in the sense not only of being touched by the … [ Read more ]
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Relationships
Even when they do not know any of the details, generous onlookers must make a stab at picturing the overall structure of what might have happened to the wretched being before them. They must guess that there will be sorrow and regret beneath the furious rantings, or a sense of intolerable vulnerability behind the pomposity and snobbishness. They must intimate that early trauma and let-down … [ Read more ]
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
One of the most damning paradoxes of our condition is that, again and again, we withhold from others the loving sympathy and empathic understanding we demand for ourselves. When we lose the reins of our own character, when we lash out or sulk or act from a small dark place, we hasten to rationalize our actions as situational — we were too tired, too triggered, … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: History
Love may be sanctified and ennobled by its commitment to the unconditional horizon of perfection, but what makes love real in the human world seems to be our moving, struggling conversation with that wanted horizon rather than any possibility of arrival. The hope for, or the declaration of a purely spiritual, unconditional love is more often a coded desire for immunity and safety, an attempt … [ Read more ]
Author: David Whyte | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
Heartbreak is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control. Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot. […] Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream. […] But heartbreak may be the very … [ Read more ]
Author: David Whyte | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Pain & Suffering, Personal Improvement
Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to … [ Read more ]
Author: David Whyte | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Relationships
What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Good & Evil, Love
A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess at least two things besides: gratitude and purity.
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
It is not the strength, but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men.
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: History, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.
Author: James Baldwin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Good & Evil, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
To want what you want so fiercely, to love it so absolutely, is not a personal indulgence in hubris or delusion — it is the mightiest antidote to the terrors of being alive and, in consequence, the fuel for your most generous contribution to the world.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
It is by wanting that we orient ourselves in the world, by finding and following our private North Star that we walk the path of becoming. To become, of course, is no easy task — to become, that is, what you yourself desire to be, without mistaking your culture’s or your idols’ or your lover’s desires for your own.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
The lives we live are bridges across the immense river of possibility, suspended by two pylons: what we want and what we make. In an ideal life — a life of purpose and deep fulfillment — the gulf of being closes and the pylons converge: We make what we want to see exist.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
All great works suffer from and are saved by a gladsome blindness to what they ultimately demand of their creators.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Insight, Literature | Arts