The brain of man conserves programming space by being reluctant to change, which is a form of inconsistency avoidance.

That’s such an obvious concept—that there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that’s still going to be lousy. The money still won’t come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers.

You must stop slop early. It’s very hard to stop slop and moral failure if you let it run for a while.

In piloting, as in other professions, one great hazard is a bad effect from man-with-a-hammer tendency. We don’t want a pilot, ever, to respond to a hazard as if it was hazard X just because his mind contains only a hazard X model. And so, for that and other reasons, we train a pilot in a strict six-element system: His formal education is wide

‘No man’s life should be accounted a happy one until it is over.’”

In fact, one trick in life is to get so you can handle mistakes. Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke. You’ve made an enormous commitment to something. You’ve poured effort and money in. And the more you put in, the more the whole consistency principle makes you think, “Now it has to work. If I put in just a

If my experience is any guide, the rustic’s approach is to be avoided at all cost by someone bent on misery.

The social proof phenomenon, which comes right out of psychology, gives huge advantages to scale—for example, with very wide distribution, which of course is hard to get. One advantage of Coca Cola is that it’s available almost everywhere in the world.

imitation harder to arrange for competing products. And, because we are going to attach so many expensive psychological effects to our flavor, that flavor should be different from any other standard flavor so that we maximize difficulties for competitors and give no accidental same-flavor benefit to any existing product.