Megan McArdle Quotes & Sayings

Dweck encourages parents and teachers to praise children for their effort, rather than their intelligence, talent, or looks. — Megan McArdle

the people who dislike challenges think that talent is a fixed thing that you're either born with or not. The people who relish them think that it's something you can nourish by doing stuff you're not good at. — Megan McArdle

Most of the time you can get away with launching a terrible product, or with not washing your hands, but one time in a thousand, you will kill a person, or a company. — Megan McArdle

We have made it impossible for children to fall very far - and in so doing, we have robbed them of the joys of climbing high. — Megan McArdle

If they're forced into a challenge they don't feel prepared for, they may even engage in what psychologists call "self-handicapping": deliberately doing things that will hamper their performance in order to give themselves an excuse for not doing well. — Megan McArdle

By contrast, a modern person lives surrounded by strangers who are doing things they may not understand. We cannot rely on our instincts and our relationships to keep society working. So it's more important than ever to make sure that we get the rules right. If we want our economy to grow, it means looking for ways to support experimental risk-taking by trading a little more than we may instinctively be comfortable with. It means offering big payoffs to those who are willing to take big risks but also making sure that the unlucky don't starve. In short, it means accepting that a high degree of unpredictability goes with the hunting ground. — Megan McArdle

I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. — Megan McArdle

Most of all, learning to fail well means overcoming our natural instincts to blame someone - maybe ourselves - whenever something goes wrong. — Megan McArdle

Writers who don't produce copy - or leave it so long that they couldn't possibly produce something good - are giving themselves the perfect excuse for not succeeding. — Megan McArdle

object is to take lots of small, manageable risks, because that, he says, is the only way to figure out what really works. — Megan McArdle

It is a vast, and pervasive, cognitive mistake to assume that people who agree with you (or disagree) do so on the same criteria that you care about. — Megan McArdle

Like most people, I couldn't let go of the money we'd wasted. That's why so many people eat awful meals, watch horrible movies, read terrible books, and suffer through dreadful relationships. It's why I am far from the only woman who wasted her early thirties on a relationship that wasn't going anywhere. The psychological cost of conceding that you've made a huge mistake--worse, a mistake you can't fix--is too great. So you waste even more money, or time, or effort trying to somehow salvage what you've lost. — Megan McArdle

Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: We were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out. — Megan McArdle

The secret to catching your mistakes quickly is simple: treat outside information as if it were inside information. When someone tells you you're off track, don't look for reasons why they may be wrong; listen for reasons why they might be right. — Megan McArdle

If we wanted a program to help the majority of the population, we'd offer loan guarantees to help poor people get access to reliable cars so that they could have a better shot at getting - and keeping - a well-paying job ... A small amount of capital could make a much bigger difference in their lives than extra student loan relief for middle-class college kids would. — Megan McArdle

The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success. — Megan McArdle

Learning to fail well means learning to understand your mistakes, because unless you know what went wrong, you may do the wrong things to correct it. — Megan McArdle

fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you "really" are is so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome. — Megan McArdle

Entrenched customs represent a social equilibrium, and moving away from that equilibrium is difficult to do on your own. — Megan McArdle