Maria Konnikova Quotes

You're only as good as your options and your surroundings.

It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

All of my work is based on nature. I grew up in a rural environment and living in the Bay Area allows for immediate access to wonderful natural environs. Basically nature is my Genus Loci, or the place where my spirit resides.

I think that being in an extreme natural setting, and letting the natural world and what it's doing permeate your thoughts, is super-interesting and super-important.

In principle, I think the idea of rewarding a good effort is interesting, but movies are generally different from each other as are performances and the conditions on how the performances are given and how they're edited and so forth.

The most important thing to realize is we're not blank slates at birth. We don't start off with nothing in our heads, and then get imprinted entirely by our environment. There's something in our heads on the day we're born, and then we grow up and make choices.

I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results.

I am I plus my circumstances.

Landscape is more than flat land covered by floodwater, the seeping of peat bogs, a river of liquid pewter viewed from a sentry tower. It's an influence on what a person values, what she is willing to sacrifice or argue for.

As much as we think of performance management as numeric and thus perfectly quantifiable, it is as much a product of context and social science as the products we design and develop.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

I'm very obsessed with the energy of New York and the idea of the way people behave in the city versus the way they behave in a natural environment.

There's so much grey to every story - nothing is so black and white.

I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

Offbeat questions are nearly impossible to prepare for, and they don't achieve the interviewer's objective - to test out-of-the-box thinking and the ability to perform under pressure. That's the bad news. The good news is that companies are moving away from them.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

Why did God create economists? To make weather forecasters look good.

Anything is respectable in its own realm.

An old friend of mine, an economist by trade, once explained to me that the statistical definition of 'dilemma' is 49.9% in favor and 50.1% against. If the gap is greater, there is no dilemma, because the answer is clear.

Landscape affects you.

Every time I'm in a private interview with teams, I have an opportunity to get on the board, and every team's been impressed with my football IQ.

In the beginning, I was truly trying to take what I felt when I was in a field or in an outdoor space and directly translate it into the music.

It's counterintuitive to take a long time to hire someone, but it will save you enormous amounts of time and money later. Our biggest mistakes in hiring stem from speed.

Anything can be taken out of context and anything you say or do is not necessarily an accurate reflection of who you are in your totality. There are small moments of your life that when taken into account with the rest of your life start to paint a picture.