I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want.
Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.

Think about it: It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value—its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything.

It’s smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them.

Money will be one of the things you need, but it’s not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want.

As we get older, we begin to make our own choices.

We choose what we are going after (our goals), and that influences our paths.
If you want to be a doctor, you go to medical school; if you want to have a family, you
find a mate; and so on.

It pays to think about how we make them because they are what ultimately determine the quality of our lives.

很多作家都指出:
“人们似乎生活在有时和或许的世界里,但他们希望继续生活在永远的确定中”( Bronowski 978a,p.94)

大部分公众都能意识到,医学的许多结论都采用的是概率趋势而非绝对确定性的表述。吸烟会导致肺癌并诱发其他健康问题,但每个吸烟者都会得肺癌吗?所有戒烟者都解除了患肺癌的风险吗?大多数人都不会认为这些推论能够成立。
吸烟很大程度上增加了患肺癌的概率,但并非绝对。医学能够以很大的把握告诉我们,吸烟群体中的人比与之相似的非吸烟群体中的人更容易死于肺癌,但不能告诉我们是哪一些人会死,这种关系就是概率,它并不适用于所有个案。

每当个别个案被用来证明概率趋势是无效的时候,很多人都常常点头表示赞同,这反映岀他们没有正确理解统计规律的本质。如果人们认为一个特例就可以让一个规律失效,他们一定认为这个规律应该在任何情况下都适用。

心理学家把类似“老乔”的故事称作“某某人”统计学的运用:由于某些人知道与某个成熟的统计学趋势相左的“某某人”的例子,就会质疑这个趋势。
例如,我们经常听到类似的话—“你是说服务业的就业机会正在扩大而重工业中则在缩小?这不对,我就知道‘某某人’上周四在一个钢铁厂找到了一份工作”。

实际上人们知道的不少,他们只不过顺手把“某某人”当成一种工具,把与他们观念相悖的事实否决掉而已。
然而,研究人类决策和推理的心理学家们的研究结果表明,人们之所以使用“某某人”,不只是由于它是一个有用的辩论手段。
相反,这一错误的争论模式之所以被应用得如此频繁,主要在于人们不知道如何处理概率信息。

决策心理学的最新研究发现,概率推理可能正是人
类认知的阿喀琉斯之踵。

I am still writing them, along with others at Bridgewater, and expect to continue to write them until people don’t care to read them or I die.