psychology

Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes—a feature of intuitive decision making—eventually leads to inferior outcomes.

Oxytocin produces trust, love, and friendship.12 It’s the “pro-social” neurochemical that underpins everything from loving, long-term marital bliss to cooperative, well-functioning companies. We feel its presence as joy and love. It promotes trust, underpins fidelity and empathy,

Nature is like a genie that answers exactly the question we pose, not necessarily the one we intend to ask.

At the biological or physical level, everyone has developed both away from and toward motivation;

Social support provides even more neurochemistry, which produces an even greater boost in intrinsic motivation. More crucially, other people provide actual help. Financial, physical, intellectual, creative, emotional—they all matter. Simply put, on the road to impossible, we’re going to need all the help we can get.

Deepak Malhotra tells his students is the most important part of a salary negotiation: they have to like you.

True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

Even in recorded history we find so many instances of goodness, even of nobility, that we can forgive, though not forget, the sins. The gifts of charity have almost equaled the cruelties of battlefields and jails.

When we are being inclusive, we never forget that all of our senses are constantly in play. We don’t let them drive our emotions and decisions. Instead, we actively enlist their help—as Holmes does with both boot and letter—and learn to control them instead.