Richard Thaler Quotes

Experts are human, and humans respond to incentives. How any given expert treats you, therefore, will depend on how that expert's incentives are set up.

In total, by giving people $30 bonus, Intel lost almost 5 percent of productivity. That's a lot. Now, think about it. You give money because you think this would increase motivation. It actually decreases motivation.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

As you get older, you should be better at coaching. You learn your lessons. You keep thinking and learning about it, you should be better than you.

I think about willpower almost never. I realize for myself, trying to be more disciplined is pretty nebulous and it's often a slippery target. For me, I've just thought about incentives.

Is always the motivation to play better and better. But I think we are in a very good way to keep winning matches. That's most important thing for me.

A goal without real consequences is wishful thinking. Good follow-through doesn't depend on the right intentions. It depends on the right incentives.

All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They're fascinated with incentives.

I think the reason we might hesitate to pay cash to students for doing well on tests or getting good grades or reading books is that we sense that the monetary payment is an extrinsic reward.

Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.

My father offered me a dollar for every pound I would lose as a kid. It didn't work. And it doesn't really work in the long run.

If you want people to perform better, you reward them, right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. [...] But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.

There's so many lessons I get from chess, it's incredible, but I think the biggest thing for me has always been is that losing is learning.

Mistakes are often the best teachers.

Once you become complacent and once you're happy with your performance or whatever it is, I don't think you'll get better as quickly.

History teaches us hope.

There are days when I don't feel motivated and I don't want to get up to go to practice. I'm a very goal-oriented person, so I set short-term goals and try to reach those goals. And when I have those days, I think about those goals, and it gets me motivated.

Competition is healthy. It makes you work harder and strive for more and try to find that extra one or two percent in your game that you could possibly improve.

I was lucky in that I had a mother that was full of this colloquial wisdom and she used to say to me 'You know, failure is not the opposite of success, it's the stepping stone to success. There is nobody who has not failed along the way.' So I think its very important for young women, especially as they are starting in life, to recognize that because otherwise, they only see people's success. So, when I speak, I speak of my failures.

Mistakes are lessons that you need to learn!

Just like I described in health care, yeah, somebody comes in, they got new ideas, maybe ideas that are completely opposite of my ideas. Maybe some of it goes, maybe some of that progress goes back. Maybe they think of some things we didn't think of, and so in some other areas - we can learn something.

I've never changed my approach to acting. I've always felt like I've gotten better. I think that all of us can get better. I feel like, in my acting, I'm better than I was three pictures ago. I think about it. I'm a slow study. It takes me a long time to grasp the material, in order to perform it. But when I come to the set, on the first day, I know the whole movie. That's why I have to start early.

I think it is good that fashion is a challenge because when something is a challenge, you want to do it better.

Money can extinguish intrinsic motivation, diminish performance, crush creativity, encourage unethical behavior, foster short-term thinking, and become addictive.

I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.