Blink

by Malcolm Gladwell

Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think.

decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

Believe it or not, the risk of being sued for malpractice has very little to do with how many mistakes a doctor makes.

I think that approach is a mistake, and if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that — sometimes — we’re better off that way.

They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act — and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment — are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

We need to accept our ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.”

He assumes that everyone who walks in the door has the exact same chance of buying a car.

“The first thing I told our staff is that we would be in command and out of control,”

that extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues. What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks is that they take too much information into account.

But the truth is that for the most important decisions, there can be no certainty.

Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

“All cops want two-man cars,” says de Becker. “You have a buddy, someone to talk to. But one-man cars get into less trouble because you reduce bravado.