Don't Trust Your Gut Quotes

“Happy couples are more likely to be happy in the future. Unhappy couples are more likely to be unhappy in the future.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“One of the best ways to improve one’s happiness is to avoid that instinct to avoid doing things that seem like a lot of energy. When the thought of doing an activity makes you go “ughhh,” that is likely a sign you should do it, not that you shouldn’t.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Reading the groundbreaking modern studies on happiness, I came to the conclusion that happiness is less complicated than we sometimes think. The things that tend to make people happy—say, hanging out with friends or walking near a lake—aren’t exactly mind-blowing. Yet modern society tries to fool us into doing things that data (or even a little common sense) says are unlikely to make us happy. Many of us devote years working far too hard at jobs we don’t like with people we don’t like. Many of us spend hours poring over the latest updates on social media. Many of us go months without spending real time in nature.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Collins and Hansen concluded that successful companies didn’t have more luck; they were better able to capitalize on the luck that they got, the luck that any company can expect.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“A sixty-year-old start-up founder has a roughly three times higher chance of creating a valuable business than a thirty-year-old start-up founder.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“MacKerron and Dolton sliced the data further. They found that the sports fan’s brain adjusts to how good their team is, limiting how much pleasure they can get from the wins of a great team. In particular, the researchers found that a sports fan, when his team is expected to win the game, will get only 3.1 points of pleasure from a win and will lose 10 points of happiness from a loss. In other words, the better the team you support is, the more the team has to win to give you any pleasure.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“If a fan’s team wins, the fan gets an additional boost of about 3.9 points of happiness. Not bad! So far, so good for being a sports fan. If your sports team wins, being a sports fan is fun. But what happens when your sports team loses? If a fan’s sports team loses, they can expect to lose 7.8 points of happiness. (A draw gives the average fan 3.2 points of pain.) In other words, losses hurt the average sports fan far more than wins please them.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“They found that 46.9 percent of the time, a person is thinking about something other than what they are currently doing. The researchers also found that, when a person is thinking about something else, they are significantly less happy.* Shockingly, even when a person’s mind is wandering in a pleasant direction, they report being slightly less happy than if they are focused on the task at hand. And, if the wandering thought is neutral or unpleasant, people are miserable. As the authors summed up their research, “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” The dangers of a wandering mind may be part of the reason meditation can prove so helpful for happiness. Scientists have consistently found that meditation does boost happiness.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“A recent analysis tried to figure out how much some of these services are worth to people by asking them how much they’d have to be paid to give them up. They estimated that search engines are worth $17,530 every year to the average American; email is worth $8,414; digital maps $3,648; and social media $322. We pay $0 for these services. Pretty amazing!”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Furthermore, of course it isn’t literally true that “nobody is happy.” In fact, according to the General Social Survey (GSS), 31 percent of Americans rate themselves as “very happy” these days.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“So how many people in America have severe problems? Alexander looked through data. He found that, at any given time, something like 20 percent of Americans are in chronic pain; 10 percent are dealing with trauma of sexual abuse; 7 percent have depression; 7 percent are alcoholic; 2 percent are cognitively disabled; and 1 percent are in prison. Alexander did some analyses that suggest something like half of Americans, at a given time, may have a severe problem. Alexander concludes, “The world is almost certainly a much worse place than any of us want to admit.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“The Mappiness data makes clear that many passive activities, such as watching TV, don’t yield much happiness—and lead to less happiness than people expect. One of the best ways to improve one’s happiness is to avoid that instinct to avoid doing things that seem like a lot of energy. When the thought of doing an activity makes you go “ughhh,” that is likely a sign you should do it, not that you shouldn’t. When someone used to cancel a plan to go to a show together or have a dinner party together or go for a run together, I used to say, “What would Larry do?,” thank my blessings for the cancellation, and surf the internet by myself. Now instead I say, “What would the Mappiness data say?” And I look at my iPhone case and try to overrule my instinct to sit on my couch and passively consume media. Mappiness data tells us there is great value (and more value than most suspect) in leaving your couch—unless, of course, you are having sex on that couch.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“There were two parts to the study. In the first part, the researchers asked a group of people questions like those that I posed to you in the first paragraph. For example, in one experiment the researchers recruited a group of assistant professors who were all hustling to get their dream job: a tenured professorship. The researchers asked how much their future happiness depended on the tenure decision. In particular, they were asked to imagine changes in their happiness under the two possible life paths. Life Path 1: they got tenure. Life Path 2: they were denied. As someone who has spent much of my adult life around assistant professors who do little else but eat, sleep, and try to get tenure, I found the results here not at all surprising. The assistant profs estimated that they would be substantially happier under Life Path 1 than Life Path 2. Getting tenure would lead to many happy years, assistant profs said. In the second part of the study, the researchers cleverly recruited a different group of subjects: people from the exact same university who earlier had been up for a tenure vote. These were people who had gone down the different life paths that the first group of assistant profs was approaching. Some of these people had gotten the big prize (tenure). Some of them had not. The researchers asked all these people to report how happy they were now. The results? There was no significant difference in the reported happiness of those who received tenure and those who had been denied.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“The biggest predictor of cadets’ career success was how dominant their faces appeared. Having a face that people judged as looking dominant increased the odds of a colonel becoming a brigadier general, a brigadier general becoming a major general, and a major general becoming a lieutenant general.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“In fact, across all the races that Todorov and colleagues studied, they found that the person whose face was judged as more competent by the majority of subjects won 71.6 percent of the Senate races and 66.8 percent of the House races. And the importance of looking competent for winning elections held even taking into account other factors, such as ethnicity, age, and gender.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Second, when quality is hard to judge, there is a Da Vinci Effect, which was first coined in a blog post by Jeff Alworth in 2017. The Da Vinci Effect says that the success of an artist begets more success for that artist. People are willing to pay more for the work of an artist who is already famous. Indeed, there are many examples of pieces of art that dramatically changed in value when experts changed their mind regarding who created it. Consider, for example, the Salvator Mundi, a depiction of Jesus Christ. In 2005, it was sold for less than $10,000. In 2017, a mere twelve years later, it was sold for $450.3 million, the highest price ever for a piece of art. What caused the price to rise so much in such a short time? In the in-between years, art experts became convinced that the painting had been created by Leonardo da Vinci. In other words, the same painting is worth 45,000 times more just because Da Vinci drew it.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Venture capitalists and investors have bought into the media-driven narrative that younger people are more likely to build great companies. Vinod Khosla, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems and venture capitalist, said, “People under 35 are the people who make change happen . . . people over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.” Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, the famous start-up accelerator, said that, when a founder is over the age of thirty-two, investors “start to be a little skeptical.” Zuckerberg himself famously said, with his characteristic absence of tact, “Young people are just smarter.” But, it turns out, when it comes to age, the entrepreneurs we learn about in the media are not representative. In a pathbreaking study, a team of economists—Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda (henceforth referred to as AJKM)—analyzed the age of the founder of every business created in the United States between the years 2007 and 2014. Their study included some 2.7 million entrepreneurs, a far broader and more representative sample than the dozens featured in business magazines. The researchers found that the average age of a business founder in the United States is 41.9 years old—in other words, more than a decade older than the average age of founders featured in the media. And older people don’t just start businesses more than many of us realize; they also succeed at creating highly profitable businesses more often than their younger peers do. AJKM used various metrics of success for a business, including staying in business for longer and ranking among the top firms in revenue and employees. They discovered that older founders consistently had higher probabilities of success, at least until the age of sixty.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Nothing could limit the fun of thousands of twins hanging out. Nothing, that is, except for scientists. Scientists got word that thousands of fraternal and identical twins would be in the same location on the same weekend. And they took off their lab coats, removed their goggles, got out their pencils and clipboards, and headed first thing to Twinsburg. The scientists transformed the annual Twins Days Festival from a weekend of fun and humor into a weekend of fun and humor—plus forms and tests.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Parents, as surprising as it seems, and as the best evidence on the topic suggests, have only small effects on: Life expectancy Overall health Education Religiosity Adult income They do have moderate effects on: Religious affiliation Drug and alcohol use and sexual behavior, particularly during the teens How kids feel about their parents”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Remember, earlier I said there were three possible worlds, each representing a different degree to which parents might influence their kids. Sacerdote’s study suggests that we live in World 1, the one in which parents don’t have an enormous impact. A one standard deviation increase in the environment in which a child is raised, Sacerdote found, might raise a child’s adult income by about 26 percent—not nothing but not too many rungs up the socioeconomic latter. Further, Sacerdote found the effects of nature on a child’s income were some 2.5 times larger than the effects of nurture.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“One important, relevant, fascinating, and data-driven finding was uncovered by researchers at the University of Texas. In the beginning of a course, the professors asked all the heterosexual students in that course to rate the attractiveness of each of their opposite-sex classmates. Not surprisingly, there was a good deal of consensus. Most people picked the same classmates as the most attractive; these people were, by definition, conventionally attractive. Think Brad Pitt or Natalie Portman or the closest equivalents in the class. At the end of the course, professors again asked the students to rate the attractiveness of each of their opposite-sex classmates. This is where the study got interesting. Now there was more disagreement in the attractiveness ratings. At the end of the class, people were far more likely to rate a person that other people didn’t find so attractive as the most attractive. What happened between the beginning and the end of the course that led so many people to change the rankings of their classmates’ attractiveness? The students spent time with each other.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Among more than 11,000 long-term couples, machine learning models found that the traits listed below, in a mate, were among the least predictive of happiness with that mate. Let’s call these traits the Irrelevant Eight, as partners appear about as likely to end up happy in their relationship when they pair off with people with any combo of these traits: Race/ethnicity Religious affiliation Height Occupation Physical attractiveness Previous marital status Sexual tastes Similarity to oneself What should we make of this list, the Irrelevant Eight? I was immediately struck by an overlap between the list of irrelevant traits and another data-driven list discussed in this chapter. Recall that I had previously discussed the qualities that make people most desirable as romantic partners, according to Big Data from online dating sites. It turns out that that list—the qualities that are most valued in the dating market, according to Big Data from online dating sites—almost perfectly overlaps with the list of traits in a partner that don’t correlate with long-term relationship happiness, according to the large dataset Joel and her coauthors analyzed. Consider, say, conventional attractiveness. Beauty, you will recall, is the single most valued trait in the dating market; Hitsch, Hortaçsu, and Ariely found in their study of tens of thousands of single people on an online dating site that who receives messages and who has their messages responded to can, to a large degree, be explained by how conventionally attractive they are. But Joel and her coauthors found, in their study of more than 11,000 long-term couples, that the conventional attractiveness of one’s partner does not predict romantic happiness. Similarly, tall men, men with sexy occupations, people of certain races, and people who remind others of themselves are valued tremendously in the dating market. (See: the evidence from earlier in this chapter.) But ask thousands of long-term couples and there is no evidence that people who succeeded in pairing off with mates with these desired traits are any happier in their relationship.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Hinge users are 11.3 percent more likely to match with someone who shares their initials. And this effect isn’t driven by people from the same religions both sharing initials and matching more frequently—say, Adam Cohen matching with Ariel Cohen. The elevated match propensity of people who share the same initials holds taking into account religious affiliation.*”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“It turns out, sometimes a switch to a different, more attractive occupation can make a male more desirable than a large salary increase. For example, the data from online dating sites suggests that a man who earned $60K in the hospitality industry would become more desirable, on average, if he earned the same amount as a firefighter than if he stayed in the same industry but upped his salary to $200K. In other words, a male firefighter who earns $60K tends to be more attractive to the average heterosexual woman than a hospitality worker who earns $200K. While many men believe they need to earn a substantial salary to “buy” a woman’s love, the data suggests that having a cool job is frequently more attractive than having a boring, but lucrative, job.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“The researchers determined that an Asian man would have to earn a staggering $247,000 more in annual income to be as attractive to the average white woman as he would if he were white.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Data has uncovered that the media gives us a distorted view of the age of typical entrepreneurs. A recent study found that the median age of entrepreneurs featured in business magazines is twenty-seven years old. The media loves telling us the sexy stories of the wunderkinds who created major companies. But how old is the typical entrepreneur, really? A recent study of the entire universe of entrepreneurs found that the average successful entrepreneur is forty-two years old. And the odds of starting a successful business increase up until the age of sixty. Further, the advantage of age in entrepreneurship is true even in tech, a field that most people believe requires youth to master the new tools.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“Researchers found, over a large sample of books, that the word “you” was twelve times more likely to appear in the most underlined sentences than other sentences. People, in other words, really like sentences that include the word “you.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“A nerdy way to say this: the Get-Happy Checklist is much easier than the Get-Rich Checklist.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“A recent study calculated that, in the first year of a baby’s life, parents face 1,750 difficult decisions.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“What do couples that get better over time tend to have in common? What about those that get worse?”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life