David McRaney Quotes

First impressions are difficult to change.

THE MISCONCEPTION: Venting your anger is an effective way to reduce stress and prevent lashing out at friends and family. THE TRUTH: Venting increases aggressive behavior over time.

If you neglect your personal space and allow chaos and clutter to creep in, it will affect you, and perhaps encourage further neglect. Positive feedback loops should improve your life, not detract fro...

The future is the result of actions, and actions are the result of behavior, and behavior is the result of prediction.

Subjective Validation THE MISCONCEPTION: You are skeptical of generalities. THE TRUTH: You are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address...

When you are making plans, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good.

Baumeister and his group wrote in the social-exclusion paper that being part of society means accepting a bargain between you and others. If you will self-regulate and not be selfish, then you get to...

While driving and talking on a cell phone, how much of your world do you miss? The research findings suggest you could have your eyes wide open, but fail to see the car, the bike, or the deer about to...

You are always under the influence of irrational reasoning. You persist in a state of deluded deliberation. You are terrible at explaining yourself to yourself, and you are unaware of the depth and br...

You are unaware of the constant nudging you receive from ideas formed in your unconscious mind.

For any plan to work, every team needs at least one asshole who doesn’t give a shit if he or she gets fired or exiled or excommunicated.

Calling someone a bigot, or an idiot, or an asshole feels good, but it does not prove you right or that person wrong.

Thanks to a plethora of cognitive biases, faulty heuristics, and common fallacies of thought, you are probably deluding yourself minute by minute just to cope with reality.

Psychologists call missing information in plain sight inattentional blindness. You believe with confidence your eyes capture everything before them and your memories are recorded versions of those cap...

You are as deluded as the rest of us, but that’s OK, it keeps you sane.

Indeed, later research backed up their claims, showing that people who are brutally honest with themselves are not as happy day to day as people with unrealistic assumptions about their abilities. Peo...

You, too, are unaware of how unaware you are

Whatever groups you don’t belong to become the groups who you think will be bowled over by messages you don’t agree with.

To match the complexity of your conscious experience and your unconscious processing, to deal with the constant confusion bombarding your senses and the noisy chatter of the agencies within your mind,...

Hundreds of experiments into the misinformation effect have been conducted, and people have been convinced of all sorts of things. Screwdrivers become wrenches, white men become black men, and experie...