3 Quotes from Daniel Kahneman That Changed My Life

So last week, one of my favorite authors of all time passed away. This is a really tough year to be one of my, you know, mentors, be one of my favorite thinkers. Earlier this year, Charlie Munger passed away at the ripe old age of, like, 99. Now, Daniel Kahneman, the famed economist, the author of one of my favorite books of all time called thinking fast and slow, he passed away, and I believe he was, like, 90 as well. So. So, you know, both. I only pick people to be my heroes who will live in both physical perpetuity and also intellectual perpetuity. And both of these guys, Charlie and Daniel, they said things over the course of their career that have had a really positive impact on my life and the way that I think about my business, think about how I move through my day to day.
And I wanted to share with you three of the quotes from Daniel Kahneman in particular that have had maybe the most transformative effect on my life. Now, the thing that you need to know about Daniel, if you’re not familiar with his work, thinking fast and slow, is this was written a long time ago, and in it, he breaks down what he refers to as cognitive biases. These are the biases that are inherent in all humans. They’re universals. They’re not cultural. They’re not societal. They are just ingrained to all of us. And he shared these universal cognitive biases in the hope that by becoming aware of them, we can help to eliminate the effects of them, or at least minimize the effects of them, because a lot of times, our poor judgment, our bad decision making, is the result of poor information or because of these biases, which are emotional triggers that are influencing our logical state.
And so from a high level, that is what he became most famous for, was writing that book and his work on these cognitive biases. So that’s an important starting off point as we dive into these three quotes. Number one is that nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it. Our brains, they tend to amplify whatever thought is dominating our mind at any given moment. We take these thoughts then, and we put them up on a pedestal, and we trick ourselves into believing, because it’s on this pedestal, it is more important than it really is. After all, you wouldn’t be thinking about the thing if it weren’t important, right? You can see, like, when you really start to take a step back and you look at it like, this is. This is pretty recursive reasoning, and it leads to this cycle of what I call spastic perseveration where, because you have a thought, you assume it’s more important than it is, and therefore you perseverate on it. You think about it more, which only amplifies it and makes it more and more important inside of your mind.
But the reality is this spastic perseveration, or what my girlfriend Jamie refers to as whirly brain. It’s not the result necessarily of the thing truly being important. It’s just the function of your brain, which is the thing that you’re thinking about in the moment. You wouldn’t be thinking about it if it wasn’t important, right. It’s a way for your brain to justify what it’s doing. And the reality is not everything is so life and death, and this is really helpful to realize, is that we are really good at imagining worst case scenarios. That is one of the traits that kept our ancestors alive, being able to imagine what could go wrong here and then be able to plan accordingly so that we have some strategies in place when things do go wrong. But the truth is that we’re better at imagining worst case scenario than we are at accurately calculating the probabilities of that reality, etcetera.
And so we tend to spend most of our time fixated on worst case scenarios that are unlikely to ever actually occur. And this is good to know, because you will spend a lot of time spastically perseverating on these worst case scenarios that aren’t probably going to play out in reality. And so one of the things that’s helped me get out of this kind of recursive loop is to think to myself, okay, things are almost never as good or bad as you think think they’re going to be. So is this really any different? And that question’s an interesting one, because often we. We lie to ourselves. We convince ourselves, this time is different. This time it is life and death. Right? We have this all the time.
Like, when you get your heart broken as a 16 year old, like, this is life and death. It’s never going to be the same. And then you have your heart broken again at 22, and you think you’ve learned a lesson from when you were 16, but then you realize, oh, my God, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened. And people are like, is this really any different? You’re like, yes, this time it is different. We really good at justifying to ourselves that this time is different, when the reality is it’s not. It’s not different. It is the same as it’s always been, which is to say that it’s never as good or bad as you think it’s going to be. Okay.
So, number two, the second quote from Daniel that’s been really impactful in my life is that the world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way the mind works your brain. To me, the way I think about the brain is that it’s a dot connecting machine. Its job is to see patterns, to make connections, to create cohesive narratives that explain why the world is the way that it is. And the goal of these stories is to create order from chaos and hopefully, in the process, increase our likelihood of not dying. Right? Yes, all things happen for a reason, but the truth is, we generally have no clue why they occur. And often we just create a narrative that makes sense in hindsight as we’re connecting dots that in reality don’t actually connect. But we’re really good at this.
The brain, that’s the default pattern for it to move through the world. It creates narratives and stories about everything, and it draws correlations. It draws lines of causation. It’s very hard to break out of this loop, because, again, your brain is a pattern recognizing machine, even when there is no pattern to be recognized. A lot of what happens in life is just pure chaotic randomness. A great book on this topic is from Nassim Taleb, which is called fooled by randomness. And it’s just talking about how randomness really guides so much of our lives. But we’re really good about creating these justifications, these explanations for why the thing occurred when in reality, we don’t really know.
And I find this to be really, really helpful to understand when I’m moving through life. Like, not to get overly confident in any belief that I might have about why something is the way it is. Having strong beliefs loosely held so that you can. You can quickly let go of the things once you have new information and realize, okay, I created a pattern. I drew connecting dots that didn’t really connect, and I did this wrong, realizing that you’re probably wrong about everything you choose to believe. Right now, I find to be a very empowering position, because it puts you on the path of always seeing, seeking more answers and more perspectives, which, at the end of the day, is critical, because you are just a universe of one. You have one unique perspective from which to look at this universe, when the reality is that there’s seven and a half billion universes all around us. Each one of them has a name.
Each one of them thinks they are the hero of their own story. And if you could see the world through their eyes, you would agree with them, but you can’t. You’re stuck in your own locus of control. And so just getting outside of that whenever you possibly can and realizing you don’t have all the answers, you don’t have the ability to control, connect all the dots, I find to be very, very empowering. The third quote, and this is the one that has saved me very recently from having a little bit of a little anxiety attack, is this quote which says, I have no sunk costs. This is perhaps the most popular or most famous of all the cognitive biases that Daniel Kahneman talked about, which is the sunk cost fallacy, which is we, you know, the idea of throwing good money after bad, you’ve already put so much money in, you’ve already put so much time and energy into pursuing this thing. I spent six years getting this degree to become a doctor or a lawyer. It would be a waste to walk away from this career right now.
Right? That is the sun cost fallacy. And this, this played out in a really interesting way. Jason Zweig, who is wag zweig. Zweig, Zwig. I don’t know how to pronounce his name. He was the co author of some books with Daniel, and he shared a really interesting anecdote that’s been very, very powerful for me. He said, I was thunderstruck. How did he do it? How could anybody do that? When I asked Danny, how could you start again as if we had never written, written an earlier draft, he said simply, I have no sunk costs.
I have no sunk costs. That’s an amazing concept. You have nothing in your life that you have put so much time and energy into that you can’t just walk away and start anew. That’s a very freeing thought. And it helped me a lot with a problem that I had a couple of months ago, which was that about a month out from a speech that I was going to give, I had this realization one morning that there was a structure, a way to put the speech together that was far better than I previously done. And there was at this point, I had put 100 hours into rehearsing the speech, and it would require me to go back to square one, rewrite the thing, come up with a whole new structure, and then try to master that in the limited time that I had available before delivering it. And I went back and forth for a couple of days on this, really struggling, because on the one hand, it wasn’t everything that it could be. And I knew that but on the other hand, I’d already put so much time and energy into the first version, I wasn’t sure if I just needed to stick with it.
And reading this quote from Daniel Kahneman, I have no sunk costs. It reminded me that the reason good is the enemy of great is because we have so much invested in the good, we can’t walk away from it. And sometimes that’s what’s required to achieve greatness. Sometimes great is not just higher up the same mountain you’re currently on, it’s not currently higher up the good mountain. Sometimes great requires you to go back down, down the mountain you’ve already established yourself on, and go and walk over to another. And that can be very, very hard. But just seeing this quote gave me a lot of confidence to, at that moment, throw away everything that I had worked on in that speech up to that point and start over. And as a result, I think the end of result of that speech was far, far stronger than it would have been otherwise.

So those are three quotes from my homeboy, Daniel Kahneman. Rest in peace. You did the world some favors. We appreciate you. We appreciate your service. If you haven’t read his book thinking fast and slow, I highly recommend you go check that out. And as always, I appreciate you so much for putting your time and energy into this podcast. Thank you for being here.

We’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.