Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

I PREFER ORDINARY explanations to extraordinary ones, but that doesn’t always make me right. Sometimes the less ordinary explanation is the correct one. It just doesn’t happen often.

Once you can embrace the educational value that comes with being wrong, you will find it easier to think, “But I might be wrong this time,” in any given situation. There will be occasions in which you want to dial down your ego to avoid looking like a jerk. For example, sometimes you might need to pretend in front of others that you have some doubt

A more useful way to think of the political news is that nearly every major story is exaggerated to the point of falsehood, with the intention of scaring the public.

If your opinion is that another person’s idea is terrible, you can only be sure that at least one of you is stupid. You can’t really know which one of you it is except in rare cases in which things can be objectively measured.

People who have good arguments use them. People who do not have good arguments try to win by labeling.

So if you are playing the odds, your confidence that you can see some evil in another person’s soul is probably closer to being batshit crazy than to being the first known human with psychic powers.

Your best defense against the negativity served up by your own filters on the world is to intentionally seek out positive thoughts and stories, which I sometimes call managing your mental shelf space.

I’ve seen lots of wannabe cartoonists with sufficient talent to succeed. But rarely do you find one who understands how to get out of ego jail.

Once you embrace the reality that we all present the “enhanced” versions of our real selves, all the time, you can relax a bit and get into character.