The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

by Maria Konnikova

There’s a false sense of security in passivity. You think that you can’t get into too much trouble—but really, every passive decision leads to a slow but steady loss of chips.

Perceived aggression in women is not only not valued; it’s seen in a negative light. In men, on the other hand, it’s viewed as evidence of great potential.

When women act in a more feminine, less confrontational way, we aren’t being shy or stupid. We are being smart. We are reacting to the realities of the world, knowing that to fail to do so is to incur potentially life-changing penalties. We are socialized into our passivity.

Not only do memories change over time, but the more emotional the landscape, the less we’re able to engage them with any specificity.

Fresh air, sky, water, trees: these are the elements of clearheadedness. Our minds reset in the presence of greenery. We feel more relaxed after nature walks. We’re less angry, more alive, more thoughtful. Even urban greenery—that is, environments like parks as opposed to actual woodland—can have a similar effect, lowering the stress hormone cortisol, heightening our sense of pleasure, improving our ability to solve difficult problems.

How we frame something affects not just our thinking but our emotional state. It may seem a small deal, but the words we select—the ones we filter out and the ones we eventually choose to put forward—are a mirror to our thinking. Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook.

The language we use becomes our mental habits—and our mental habits determine how we learn, how we grow, what we become.

There is no such thing as objective reality. Every time we experience something, we interpret it for ourselves.

the most we can do is make the best decision possible with the information we have; the outcome doesn’t matter. If you choose wisely, you should make that same choice over and over.

You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.

We can’t control the variance. We can’t control what happens. But we can control our attention and how we choose to deploy it.

Someone can always be confidently wrong, even about their own mind.

It turns out that we’re able to make all sorts of accurate predictions about behaviors—not judgments about people, mind you, but predictions about how they might act irrespective of how we might feel about them—if we ignore the cues we normally love to look at (faces) and instead look at bodies.