You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
Interpretation
Self-reflection leads to deeper learning than passive information consumption.
This quote emphasizes the value of introspection and understanding oneself over merely absorbing information about others. Daniel Kahneman suggests that personal experiences and the surprises we find in our own actions can offer more profound insights and lessons than external facts that may not resonate or connect with our own lives clearly.
In practice
During a workshop on personal growth, one might say, 'As Daniel Kahneman suggests, we learn more from surprises in our own behavior.'
We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.
The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.
Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.
I was the youngest girl among my siblings, a simple village girl, who perhaps was luckier than other siblings as I have the chance to go to school.
With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.
The trouble is not that schools don't work; they do. They're excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain - and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools.
Literacy is not a luxury, it is a right and a responsibility. If our world is to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century we must harness the energy and creativity of all our citizens.
People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.
Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them.
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