Richard Diebenkorn Quotes

One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.

I'm not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type.

The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.

At 20, you're cocky and you think you can rule the world, and you get it all wrong.

When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

Only fools are positive.

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.

Enthusiasm and misplaced belief can take you a long way.

I don't want to sound like 'chirpy Evan' who's just bouncing around with his unrealistic views and doesn't understand what's going on.

The attributes for entrepreneurs cut both ways. You need the ability to ignore inconvenient facts and see the world as it should be and not as it is. This inspires people to take huge leaps of faith. But this blindness to facts can be a liability, too. The characteristics that help entrepreneurs succeed can also lead to their failure.

But when someone is on a winning horse, and everything looks wonderful, it's very hard as an outsider to persuade them something is wrong.

I'm sort of a delusional in the sense of, I was just gonna graduate from school and just, like, prance onto a film set and have a movie crew waiting for me to make my '8½' or something, which is completely insane.

If you're not riddled with doubt, you've probably done something wrong.

There is a tendency to overestimate the positive things in our lives and underestimate the possibility of negative things

For people at the bottom who are really doing badly — those in the bottom 10th or 15th percentile — they think their work falls in the 60th or 55th percentile, so, above average. People at the bottom still think they're outperforming other people.

There is really an issue in Silicon Valley with companies getting a bit ahead of themselves in terms of their own self-perception of their own success.

We always want to congratulate ourselves at having made more progress than we actually have.

If you think you're right 80% of the time, you're deluded.

Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it." "Are you saying we shouldn't hope?" "I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open!

optimism is a disease

When something looks too good to be true, it usually is.

I got on a high believing everything I would produce was going to sell at the rate I wanted.

Optimism and stupidity are nearly synonymous.

People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence.

Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.