Think Like A Freak

by Steven D. Levitt

negative events—vicious crimes, horrible accidents, and sundry dramatic evils—make an outsize impression on our memories.

This may explain why we are so bad at assessing risk, and so quick to overrate rare dangers (like an airplane crash

One factor emerged as the best predictor of poor mental health: whether a teacher had been verbally insulted by his or her students.

But even if you are certifiably right on every point, you should not think for a minute that you will ever be able to persuade them.

you should tell stories.

we don’t mean “anecdote.”

Anecdotes often represent the lowest form of persuasion.

without data, we have no idea how a story fits into the larger scheme of things.

story lays out a daisy chain of events, to show the causes that lead up to a particular situation and the consequences that result from it.

it is always worth questioning what a story is based on, and what it really means.

Nathan didn’t berate David with rules—Hey, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife! Hey, don’t kill! Hey, don’t commit adultery!—even though David had broken all of them. He just told a story about a lamb.

There is in fact a huge upside to quitting when done right, and we suggest you give it a try.

opportunity cost. This is the notion that for every dollar or hour or brain cell you spend on one thing, you surrender the opportunity to spend it elsewhere.

Might you do something that makes your life, or others’ lives, more fulfilling, more productive, more exciting?

Resources are not infinite: you cannot solve tomorrow’s problem if you aren’t willing to abandon today’s dud.

failure can provide valuable feedback.

They go so far as to celebrate their failures with a party and cake.

“It’s just a fact of invention that most ideas won’t work out,”

“Knowing when the time is right to walk away is a perpetual challenge.”

The key is failing fast and failing cheap.

If we try to spend ten thousand dollars on our failures instead of ten million dollars, we’ll get the opportunity to do a lot more things.”

the premortem can help flush out the flaws or doubts in a project that no one had been willing to speak aloud.

people who quit their unattainable goals saw physical and psychological benefits.

status-quo bias,

quitting is at the very core of thinking like a Freak.

Winston Churchill, despite his famous advice to those Harrow schoolboys, was in fact one of history’s greatest quitters.

By now, he knew what was worth letting go, and what was not.