The Narrative Fallacy

• “We are so eager to impose patterns upon what we see, so hardwired to provide explanations that we are capable of ‘explaining’ opposite outcomes with the same cause without noticing the inconsistency.”
• “Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.” -Daniel Kahneman
• "When we are misled into regarding the world as simpler than it really is, we not only resist testing our top-down strategies and assumptions, we also become more defensive when they are challenged by our peers or by the data. After all, if the world is simple, you would have to be pretty stupid not to understand it.”

Blame

• “Blame is, in many respects, a subversion of the narrative fallacy: an oversimplification driven by biases in the human brain.”
• “In short, we have to engage with the complexity of the world if we are to learn from it; we have to resist the hardwired tendency to blame instantly, and look deeper into the factors surrounding error if we are going to figure out what really happened and thus create a culture based upon openness and honesty rather than defensiveness and back-covering.”
• “What should be crystal clear is that a desire to apportion blame, before taking the time to understand what really happened, is senseless.”
• “There is almost no human action or decision that cannot be made to look flawed and less sensible in the misleading light of hindsight.” -Anthony Hidden

Resilience/Grit

• “The most important quality I look for in people coming to Dyson is the willingness to try, fail and learn.” -James Dyson
• “The mistaken idea that success is an instant phenomenon destroys resilience.”
• “Self-esteem, in short, is a vastly overvalued psychological trait. It can cause us to jeopardize learning if we think it might risk us looking anything less than perfect. What we really need is resilience: the capacity to face up to failure, and to learn from it. Ultimately, that is what growth is all about.”
• “If we drop out when we encounter problems, progress is prevented, no matter how talented we are. If we interpret difficulties as indictments of who we are, rather than as pathways to progress, we will run a mile from failure. Grit, then, is strongly related to the Growth Mindset; it is about the way we conceptualize success and failure.”

Other Thoughts

• "If we wish to fulfill our potential as individuals and organizations, we must redefine failure.”
• "Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” -Henry Ford
• "No one can possibly give us more service than by showing us what is wrong with what we think or do; and the bigger the fault, the bigger the improvement made possible by its revelation. The man who welcomes and acts on criticism will prize it almost above friendship: the man who fights it out of concern to maintain his position is clinging to non growth.” -Bryan Magee
• “Innovation cannot happen without failure. Indeed, the aversion to failure is the single largest obstacle to creative change, not just in business but beyond."
• “My strategy has always been: be wrong as fast as we can…which basically means, we’re gonna screw up, let’s just admit that. Let’s not be afraid of that. But let’s do it as fast as we can so we can get to the answer…I won’t get it right the first time, but I will get it wrong really soon, really quickly.” -Andrew Stanton