Top Quotes: “The Art of the Good Life” — Rolf Dobelli

Background: There were a few useful paradigms in this book, but damn did this author piss me off along the way! He comes across as incredibly privileged and completely unaware of his privilege, plus genuinely conceited enough to believe that he is living life perfectly and everyone should be exactly like him. Such a blowhard lol.

Mental Accounting: How to Turn a Loss into a Win

“Parking tickets used to infuriate me. These days I pay them with a smile. I just debit the sum from the account I’ve earmarked for donations. Each year I have a very set budget for good causes, and I pay all my fines out of that. This simple trick is known as mental accounting, a classic logical fallacy.”

“People treat money differently depending on where it’s coming from, so if you find money on the street, you treat it more casually and spend it more quickly and more frivolously than money you’ve actually earned.”

“If a beer’s two dollars more expensive than usual or two dollars cheaper, it elicits no emotional response in me whatsoever. I save my energy rather than my money. After all, the value of my stock portfolio fluctuates every minute by significantly more than two dollars. Try it for yourself. Come up with a similar number, a modest sum to which you’re completely indifferent — money you consider not so much money as white noise.”

The Fine Art of Correction: Why We Overestimate Set-Up

“How much of the time does a plane stick to its flight path? Never! Thousands of times per second, the autopilot recalculates the gap between where the plane is and where it should be and issues corrective instructions.”

“Our lives work like a plane or a car. We’d rather they didn’t — that they ran according to plan, foreseeable and undisturbed. Then we’d only have to focus on the set-up, the optimal starting point. We’d arrange things perfectly at the beginning — our education, career, love life, and family — and reach our goals as planned. Of course, our lives are exposed to constant turbulence, and we spend much of our time battling crosswinds and the unforeseen caprices of the weather. Yet we still behave like naive fair-weather pilots: we overestimate the rule of the set-up and systematically underestimate the role of correction.”

“As cells divide, copying errors are perpetually being made in the genetic material, so in every cell there are molecules retroactively correcting these errors. Without this process of DNA repair, we’d die of cancer hours after conception. Our immune system follows the same principle. Hostile viruses and bacteria are constantly mutating, and our defenses can only function through perpetual correction.”

“A good life is not a stable state or condition. It is only achieved through constant readjustment.”

“Why are we so reluctant to correct and revise? Because we interpret every little piece of repair work as a flaw in the plan.”

“People who self-correct early on have an advantage over those who spend ages fiddling with the perfect set-up and crossing their fingers that their plans will work out. So don’t invest all your resources into the perfect set-up — at work or in your personal life. Instead, practice the art of correction by revising the things that aren’t quite working — swiftly and without feeling guilty.”

The Pledge: Inflexibility as Strategy

“Constantly having to make new decisions situation by situation saps your willpower. A brain exhausted by decision-making will plump for the most convenient option, which more often than not is also the worst one. This is why pledges make so much sense. Once you’ve pledged something, you don’t then have to weigh up the pros and cons each and every time you’re faced with a decision. It’s already been made for you, saving you mental energy.”

“The second reason inflexibility is so valuable has to do with reputation. By being consistent on certain topics, you signal where you stand and establish the areas where there’s no room for negotiation. You communicate self-mastery, making yourself less vulnerable to attack.”

Black Box Thinking: Why Every False Step Improves Your Life

“Whenever you make a big decision, write down what’s going through your mind — assumptions, trains of thought, conclusions. If the decision turns out to be a dud, take a look at your ‘black box’ and analyse precisely what it was that led to your mistake. With each explicable fuck-up, your life will get better. If you can’t identify your mistake, you either don’t understand the world or you don’t understand yourself. Persistence in your analysis will pay off.”

The Circle of Competence: Why It’s Important to Know Your Limits

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it. The more narrowly we focus on a particular aspect of our lives, the greater its apparent influence.”

“Overcoming this focusing illusion is key achieving a good life. When you compare things (cars, careers, holiday destination), you tend to focus on one aspect particularly closely, neglecting the hundred other factors. You assign this one aspect inordinate significance and believe it’s more critical than it really is.”

“Stop beating yourself up on your deficiencies. If you’ve got two left feet, forget the salsa lessons. It’s completely irrelevant how many areas you’re average or below average in. What matters is that you’re far above average in at least one area. A single outstanding skill trumps a thousand mediocre ones. Every hour invested in your circle of competence is worth a thousand spent elsewhere.”

The Smaller Meaning of Life: Which Goals You Can Achieve — and Which You Can’t

“It’s not money that makes you happy or unhappy, it’s whether or not you realize your ambitions. The equivalent holds true for other life goals, too.”

“Why do goals work? Because goal-oriented people put more effort into accomplishing them. And because goals make decisions easier. You can either make each choice in life on a whim — or refer to your goal.”

“Leave your goals deliberately a little vague (‘well-off’ instead of ‘billionaire). If you achieve them, wonderful. If you don’t, you can still interpret your situation as if you had (at least in part). It doesn’t even have to be a conscious process. Your brain will do it automatically.”

The Memory Bank: Experience Trumps Memory

“While the experiencing self is profligate (it throws almost everything away), the remembering self is remarkably error-prone — -and it leads us to make the wrong decisions. Because of our remembering self’s miscalculations, we tend to prize brief, intense pleasures, too highly and quiet, lasting, tranquil joys too little: bungee jumping instead of long hikes, thrilling one-night stands instead of regular sex with your partner, attention-grabbing YouTube videos instead of a good book.”

“The longer we live with a memory, the greater value it accrues. Without memory, an experience is entirely valueless. This is surprising, and it makes no sense. Surely it’s better to experience something wonderful than not — -regardless of whether you remember it. After all, in the moment you’ll be having a fabulous time! And once we’re dead, you and I will forget everything anyway.”

“It would be interesting to explore the emotional world of dementia patients, because that’s precisely what they experience: a series of transitory events, moment by moment, without any subsequent memory of them. You sometimes find carers in old folks’ homes treating their dementia patients harshly and arguing that ‘they won’t remember it anyway.’ This may be true, but the patients will certainly experience it in the moment. Their experiencing self is operating just fine — -and the same goes for you.”

“Once long-term plans are in place, focus wholly on the now. Make the most of your present experiences instead of worrying about future memories. A life full of wondrous but forgotten moments is still a wondrous life, so stop thinking of experiences as deposits for your memory bank.”

Life Stories Are Lies: Why We Go Through the World with a False Self-Image

“How does the brain weave facts into memories? By binding them into a compact (simplified and devoid of holes), consistent (contradiction-free), and causal story. Our brains do this automatically. If someone asks who you are, you’ll have a brief, succinct answer ready. It’s consistent: things that don’t fit comfortably are forgotten, and you plug gaps in your memory with astonishing inventive skill. Your actions make sense — -there’s a reason for everything that happened in your life.”

“But we change more rapidly than we think. Plus, our fabricated life story makes it difficult to judge individual facts plainly — without interpretation, without context, without excuse. Excuses stop us from learning from our mistakes. Finally, we see ourselves as better — more good-looking, more successful, and more intelligent — than we really are. This self-serving bias leads us to run more risks than we otherwise do and to think too highly of ourselves.”

“We’re walking around with a false self-image, believing we’re less multi-layered, conflicted, and paradoxical than we really are. So don’t be surprised when someone judges you ‘incorrectly.’ You do the same yourself. A realistic self-image can only be gleaned from someone who’s known you well for years and who’s not afraid to be honest. Even better, keep a diary and dip back into it every now and again. You’ll be amazed at the things you used to write. Part of the good life is seeing yourself as realistically as possible.”

Defending Yourself

“If someone starts going for you, getting really vitriolic, ask them to repeat what they’ve said, word for word. You’ll soon see that, most of the time, your attacker will fold.”

The Book of Worries: How to Switch Off the Loudspeaker in Your Head

“Set aside a fixed time to dedicate to your anxieties — reserving ten minutes a day to jot down everything that’s worrying you — no matter how justified, idiotic, or vague. Once you’ve done so, the rest of the day will be relatively worry-free. Your brain knows its concerns have been recorded and not simply ignored. You’ll realize that it’s always the same dozen or so worries tormenting you. Once a week, look at the week’s notes and imagine the worst possible consequences, forcing yourself to think beyond them. You’ll discover most concerns are overblown. The rest are genuine dangers, and those must be confronted.”

Your Mental Fortress: The Wheel of Fortune

“Accept the existence of fate. Don’t be too concerned about whether you’re ascending or descending. It could all be turned on its head.”

“Everything you own, value, and love is ephemeral — your health, partner, friends, house, money, homeland, reputation. Don’t set your heart on those things. Relax, be glad if fate grants them to you, but always be aware that they’re fleeting, fragile, and temporary. The best attitude to have is that all of them are on loan to you, and may be taken away at any time.”

“If you have lost many things or even everything, remember that the positive has outweighed the negative in your life (or you wouldn’t be complaining).”

“What can’t be taken from you are your thoughts, your mental tools, the way you interpret bad luck, loss, and setbacks. You can call this space your mental fortress.”

Envy

“Choose a place to live, a city, a neighborhood where you’re in the ‘local elite.’ The same goes for your peer group. Don’t join a rotary club full of millionaires unless you’re also wealthy.”

“Be aware of the focusing illusion. If you’re envious of someone, it’s usually purely because you’re focusing on the wrong thing. In comparing your neighbor’s life with your own, you focus automatically on the aspects that are different. In doing so you’re overestimating their importance on your life satisfaction. You believe your neighbor is significantly happier than you, but viewed objectively something like a nice car contributes very little (if anything) to overall well-being. If you’re aware of the focusing illusion, you can lessen jealousy’s seething.”

“If you’re still seething with jealousy: deliberately identify the worst aspects of the person’s life and imagine them struggling with those problems. It’ll make you feel instantly better. Not very noble, but something to fall back on in an emergency.”

“If your own life happens to be especially enviable, stay modest to protect others from the worst pangs of jealous.”

Prevention: Avoid Problems Before You Have to Solve Them

“Wisdom is a practical ability. It’s a measure of the skill with which we navigate life. Virtually all difficulties are easier to avoid than to solve, hence ‘Wisdom is prevention.’”

“If you know where danger lurks, you can ward it off. ‘A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids a problem.’”

“Successes achieved through prevention (failures successfully dodged) are invisible to the outside world. As a result, we systematically overemphasize the role of successful politicians, surgeons, and therapists while underestimating the role of people who help society and individuals from veering into catastrophe. They’re the true heroes, the truly wise: good teachers, sensible legislators, skillful diplomats.”

“Spend 15 minutes a week focusing intently on the potential catastrophic risks in your life. Then forget all about it and spend the rest of the week happy and carefree. What you’re doing is a pre-mortem. Imagine, for example, that your marriage is on the rocks or you’ve suddenly gone bankrupt. Now track back, analyzing what led to this (imagined) catastrophe — right down to the underlying causes. Try to address these issues so the worst never happens.”

The Focus Trap: How to Manage Your Most Important Resource

“Our brains are evolutionarily predisposed to respond straight away to the minutest of challenges: a spider here, a snake there. This sensitivity was once crucial to survival, but today it makes withstanding the crossfire of modern stimuli a formidable task.”

“You’ve got to deliberately practice dealing correctly with managing information, the internet, and the news. Focus must be learned.”

“What does focus have to do with happiness? Everything. ‘Your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention.’ The same life events (positive or negative) can influence your happiness strongly, weakly, or not at all — depending on how much attention you give them.”

“You always live where your focus is directed. If you deliberately focus your attention, you’ll get more out of life. Be critical, strict, and careful when it comes to your intake of information — no less critical, strict, and careful than you are with food or medication.”

Mental Subtraction: How to Realize That You’re Happy

“Imagine you’ve lost your right arm. How does it feel? How much more difficult is your life? Imagine you’ve also lost your sight. Now, open your eyes. You’ll be happier than before you did this mental subtraction exercise.”

“Think about how you would feel if you’d never met your partner, if you’d lost your kids in an accident, if you were lying on your deathbed.”

“Mental subtraction is such an unexpected move that your brain never sees it coming. In several studies, researchers have shown that mental subtraction increases happiness significantly more markedly then simply focusing on the positives.”

Managing Expectations: The Less You Expect, The Happier You’ll Be

“Before every meeting, date, project, party, holiday, and undertaking, draw a sharp distinction between necessities, desires, and expectations. Rate your expectations on a scale from one to ten. Are you expecting a disaster (0) or the fulfillment of your life’s dream (10)? Deduct two points from your rating, then mentally readjust to that number.”

Sturgeon’s Law: How to Tune your BS Detector

“Sturgeon’s law is that 90% of everything is crap. This is true whether you’re talking about chemistry, sociology, or rock music.”

“Realizing this is easier said than done. The reason lies in our past. Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Most of what they encountered was highly relevant: plants that were either edible or poisonous; animals you hunted or were hunted by; members of your tribe who saved your life or endangered it. In those days, 90% of everything was relevant!”

“It’s also true for us: 90% of your ideas are unusable, 90% of your emotions are unfounded, 90% of your desires are twaddle. Being aware of that, you can be much more careful about which of your ‘inner products’ you take seriously and which you pass over with a smile.”

“So don’t just take any old crap that’s offered to you. Don’t give in to every urge simply because you happen to feel like doing it. Don’t try every gadget merely because it exists. Precious few things are valuable or essential, and applying Sturgeon’s law will save you plenty of time and frustration. Recognize the difference between ideas and good ideas, between products and good products, between investments and good investments. Recognize BS for what it is. If you’re not sure whether something is BS, it is.”

Inner Success: Why Your Input is More Important than Your Output

“Once you’ve achieved tranquility of the soul, you’ll be able to maintain your equanimity despite the slings and arrows of fate. To be successful is to be imperturbable, regardless of whether you’re flying high or crash landing.”

“Focus exclusively on the things you can influence and block out everything else. Our input we can control; our output we can’t, because chance keeps sticking its oar in. Money, power, and popularity are things over which we only have limited control. Losing them will send you into a tailspin if they’re the focus of your attention. If, however, you’ve trained yourself to be serene, imperturbable, and ataraxic, you’ll mostly be happy.”

“Edge closer to this ideal through daily practice. Every evening, take stock: When did you fail today? When did you let the day be poisoned by toxic emotions? What things beyond your control did you let upset you?”