Predictor Quotes & Sayings

A YEAR OR SO AGO I READ AN ARTICLE THAT SAID in the next five years we will become a conglomerate of the people we hang out with. The article went so far as to say relationships were a greater predictor of who we will become than exercise, diet, or media consumption. And if you think about it, the idea makes sense. As much as we are independent beings, contained in our own skin, the ideas and experiences we exchange with others grow into us like vines and reveal themselves in our mannerisms and language and outlook on life. If you want to make a sad person happy, start by planting them in a community of optimists. — Donald Miller

The predominant quality of successful people is optimism ... Your level of optimism is the very best predictor of how happy, healthy, wealthy, and long-lived you will be. — Brian Tracy

Who ever knows what will happen with the economy, and will it affect the Internet? There's so much pouring into the Internet; I would doubt it, but I'm not the greatest predictor. But more than any media sector, I think the Internet will hold up. — Barry Diller

In modern times, making family meals happen is hard, but family meals are a better predictor of a child's overall healthy eating, happiness, and success than the socioeconomic status of the parents or extra-curricular activities.8,9 — Katja Rowell

The best meta-emotion predictor of wellbeing is a variable known as nonjudge. — Emily Nagoski

Albert Ellis: "The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour". Apart — Marcus Tomlinson

ARTICLE THAT SAID in the next five years we will become a conglomerate of the people we hang out with. The article went so far as to say relationships were a greater predictor of who we will become than exercise, diet, or media consumption. — Donald Miller

When top scientists and psychologists talk about what's important to our overall wellbeing and how satisfied we are with our lives, the only thing that they all agree on is that social relationships are probably the single best predictor of our overall happiness. — Tom Rath

When predicting homosexual prejudice from fundamentalism and the full RWA scale, both predictors have positive beta weights (each is associated with increasing homosexual prejudice), but fundamentalism is the weaker predictor (.19 vs. 43 — Anonymous

The number of clicks on display ads is not an accurate predictor of the effectiveness of online display ads. — Gian Fulgoni

Research shows that whether you are low-income or not, mindset is a bigger predictor of success than academic skills, and how students gain great academic skills and persevere in the face of challenges. — Wendy Kopp

Many political scientists used to assume that people vote selfishly, choosing the candidate or policy that will benefit them the most. But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences. Parents of children in public school are not more supportive of government aid to schools than other citizens; young men subject to the draft are not more opposed to military escalation than men too old to be drafted; and people who lack health insurance are not more likely to support government-issued health insurance than people covered by insurance.35 Rather, people care about their groups, whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political. The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: "In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not 'What's in it for me?' but rather 'What's in it for my group?' "36 Political opinions function as "badges of social membership."37 — Jonathan Haidt

Just as an individual's ability to delay gratification at a young age is a powerful predictor of future academic and professional achievement, discipline is also central to the long-run economic health of nations. — Peter Blair Henry

The single best predictor that a family would go bankrupt was if they had a child. — Elizabeth Warren

the best predictor of whether we are happy or not is our social relationships. — Meik Wiking

Why is it so important to have fun? Because if you love your work (or your activism or your family time), then you'll want to do more of it. You'll think about it before you go to sleep and as soon as you wake up; your mind is always in gear. When you're that engaged, you'll run circles around other people even if they are more naturally talented. From what we've seen personally, the best predictor of success among young economists and journalists is whether they absolutely love what they do. If they approach their job like - well, a job - they aren't likely to thrive. But if they've somehow convinced themselves that running regressions or interviewing strangers is the funnest thing in the world, you know they have a shot. — Steven D. Levitt

...the most reliable predictor of long-term marital success was a pattern in which the wives, in nonoffensive, clear ways, communicated their needs, and husbands willingly altered their behaviors to meet them. — Terrence Real

Economists say the inability to delay gratification is a primary predictor of economic failure in life. — Brian Tracy

Knowing more about family history is the single biggest predictor of a child's emotional well-being. Grandparents can play a special role in this process, too. — Bruce Feiler

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. — Joe Navarro

Military population that has a disproportionate number of young people with a history of sexual abuse. One theory for this holds that military service is an easy way for young people to get out of their home, and so the military will disproportionally draw recruits from troubled families. According to a 2014 study in the American Medical Association's JAMA Psychiatry, men with military service are now twice as likely to report sexual assault during their childhood as men who never served. This was not true during the draft. Sexual abuse is a well-known predictor of depression and other mental health issues, and the military suicide rate may in part be a result of that. Killing — Sebastian Junger

Turns out, there was one - and only one - characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships. My empirical study of well-being among 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found a similar result - social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor, more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender, or race. In fact, the correlation between social support and happiness was 0.7. This may not sound like a big number, but for researchers it's huge - most psychology findings are considered significant when they hit 0.3. The point is, the more social support you have, the happier you are. And as we know, the happier you are, the more advantages you accrue in nearly every domain of life. — Shawn Achor

The people who run the international tests told us, "the biggest predictor of student success is choice." Nations that "attach the money to the kids" and thereby allow parents to choose between different public and private schools have higher test scores. This should be no surprise; competition makes us better. — John Stossel

The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don't accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is a wash. — Tom DeMarco

May we all be human: beautiful, stupid, temporal, endless.
And as the sun sets, I place my hand upon my heart, feel that it is still beating, and remind myself: "Past performance is not a predictor of future results. — Joseph Fink

But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job. — Daniel Goleman

Early on, the best predictor of a relationship doesn't depend on the couple's social graph at all; for the first year or so of dating, the optimal method is how often they view each other's profile. — Anonymous

Researchers have found that the way people feel about the stress in their lives is a far more powerful predictor of their general health - whether they're more likely to be depressed, anxious, smoke cigarettes, or overeat - than any other measure. — Brigid Schulte

Barometer of success in later life is not that they always win, but how they deal with failure. An ability to pick themselves up when they fall, retaining their optimism and sense of self, is a far greater predictor of future success than class position in Year 3. — Helen Fielding

Leaders can choose to grow and change, but generally the most powerful predictor of future performance is past behavior. Evaluate them realistically. — Lee Ellis

Amazingly, their belief in their own ability was an even stronger predictor of job performance than the actual level of skill or training they had. More — Shawn Achor

In our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's wealth. — Steven Pinker

the ability to attend to a task and stick to long-term goals is the greatest predictor of success, greater than academic achievement, extracurricular involvement, test scores, and IQ. She calls this grit, and first discovered its power in the classroom, while teaching seventh-grade math. She left teaching to pursue research on her hunch, and her findings have changed the way educators perceive student potential. Gritty students succeed, and failure strengthens grit like no other crucible. — Jessica Lahey

Being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed. — Daniel Kahneman

Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born. — Yanis Varoufakis

Your ability to copy is the biggest predictor of the success that you'll have in life". — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

I believe that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior when it comes to religious fanaticism. — Sam Brower

Economists had found an almost one-to-one match between PISA scores and a nation's long term economic growth. Many other things influenced economic growth, of course, but the ability of a workforce to learn, think and adapt was the ultimate stimulus package ... For students, PISA scores were a better predictor of who would go to college than report cards ... PISA wasn't measuring memorization; it was measuring aspiration. — Amanda Ripley

The greatest predictor of musical success is the quality and the quantity of practice time. — Michael Griffin

The best predictor of a child's security of attachment is not what happened to his parents as children, but rather how his parents made sense of those childhood experiences. — Daniel J. Siegel

The strongest predictor of unhappiness is anyone who has had a mental illness in the last 10 years. It is an even stronger predictor of unhappiness than poverty - which also ranks highly. — Polly Toynbee

The best predictor of quality of life is sleep. — Samantha Ettus

The most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn't make a difference. — Gretchen Rubin

We talk to a team, they've gotten new things done, that's the best predictor we have that a company will go on to be successful. — Sam Altman

A study last year showed that the page you turn to first in the newspaper can be a predictor of how long you will live. No surprise, turning first to the Comics Pages prolongs your life. — Elayne Boosler

There isn't one tight little circle of cheaters and one tight little circle of honest students. Some kids cheat at home but not at school; some kids cheat at school but not at home. Whether or not a child cheated on, say, the word completion test was not an iron-clad predictor of whether he or she would cheat on, say, the underlining A's part of the speed test. If you gave the same group of kids the same test, under the same circumstances six months apart, Hartshorne and May found, the same kids would cheat in the same ways in both cases. But once you changed any of those variables-the material on the test, or the situation in which it was administered-the kinds of cheating would change as well. — Malcolm Gladwell

Genetics, accidents of birth or events in early childhood have left criminals' brains and bodies with measurable flaws predisposing them to committing assault, murder and other antisocial acts ...
Many offenders also have impairments in their autonomic nervous system, the system responsible for the edgy, nervous feeling that can come with emotional arousal. This leads to a fearless, risk-taking personality, perhaps to compensate for chronic under-arousal.
Many convicted criminals, like the Unabomber, have slow heartbeats.
It also gives them lower heart rates, which explains why heart rate is such a good predictor of criminal tendencies. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, for example, had a resting heart rate of just 54 beats per minute, which put him in the bottom 3 per cent of the population. — Adrian Raine

First, people were not thinking about what they were doing 47 per cent of the time. Second, people were unhappier when their minds were wandering than they were not. And third, what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than what they were doing. — David Michie

Hal's internal fault predictor could have made a mistake." "It's more — Arthur C. Clarke

The best predictor of success is a sense of resiliency, grit, capacity to fail and get up. If you're prevented from feeling discomfort of failure, you have no sense of how to handle those things at all. — Julie Lythcott-Haims

Motherhood is a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender is. It's enormous. — Anne-Marie Slaughter

I'am not predictor of fights, but I know when I hit 'em good, the fight is close to an end — Mike Tyson

The storm is the best predictor of the rainbow. — Matshona Dhliwayo

I find that creative streak I think often leads in programmers to be good predictors of where culture as a whole is going to go. And that is where I think I've tried over the years to in some ways use my customers as a filter or a predictor of where technology as a whole is going to go. Or where the world as a whole is going to go. — Tim O'Reilly

RESEARCH INDICATES THAT A WOMAN'S INTUITIVE SENSE OF WHETHER OR NOT HER PARTNER WILL BE VIOLENT TOWARD HER IS A SUBSTANTIALLY MORE ACCURATE PREDICTOR OF FUTURE VIOLENCE THAN ANY OTHER WARNING SIGN. — Lundy Bancroft

The greatest predictor of social pathology in children is fatherlessness, greater even than poverty. In his book Fatherless Generation (Zondervan) John Sowers claims, "The most reliable predictor for gang activity and youth violence is neither social class nor race or education but fatherlessness." In Fatherless America (Basic Books) David Blankenhorn says, "It is no exaggeration to say that fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation. It is the engine driving our most urgent social problems". I am convinced that the damage to humanity caused by the epidemic of unfathered men and women is far greater than the damage caused by war and disease combined. — Craig Wilkinson

The past is a good predictor of the future only when conditions in the future resemble conditions in the past. And what works for a firm in one context might not work for another firm in a different context. — Clayton M Christensen

The best predictor of a woman's involvement in terrorism, whether it's a secular or religious group, is a relationship with a terrorist: her father, brother, husband or even her son. Terrorism becomes a bit of a family business. — Mia Bloom

I'm not a very good predictor in any area of art, particularly my own. I don't know how to evaluate that. — Sydney Pollack

If we're talking about brain performance, the best predictor of brain speed is aerobic capacity - how well you can run up a hill is very strongly correlated with brain speed and cognitive shifting ability, — Hal Elrod

The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger. — Ryan Holiday

The most reliable predictor of whether students liked a course, it turned out, was their answer to the question 'Did the professor respect you? — Kwame Anthony Appiah

most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself - or will use military violence against another country - is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it's violence against females. — Gloria Steinem

Research has found that loss of bone density may be an even better predictor of death from atherosclerotic disease than cholesterol levels. — Atul Gawande

Past behavior is the most reliable predictor of future behavior. — Gordon Livingston

You can predict with nearly 90 percent accuracy which projects will fail - months or years in advance. And now back to our premise. The predictor of success or failure was whether people could hold five specific crucial conversations. For example, could they speak up if they thought the scope and schedule were unrealistic? Or did they go silent when a cross-functional team member began sloughing off? Or even more tricky - what should they do when an executive failed to provide leadership for the effort? — Kerry Patterson

The best predictor of future events is probably past events. — Andre Agassi

The best predictor of preschool children's physical activity is simply being outdoors. — James Sallis

Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time. — Rick Perlstein

the strongest predictor of who got the money was not the person's credentials or the content of the pitch. The strongest predictors of who got the money were these traits: confidence, comfort level, and passionate enthusiasm. — Amy Cuddy

I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example. — Daniel Goleman

The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It's not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it's deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft. — David Brooks

God is unchangeable changer, unadjustable adjuster, unmoveable mover, unpredictable predictor, unstoppable stopper, uninvisible visible, and wonderful wonder — Osunsakin Adewale

There is no more important homework than reading. Research shows that the highest achieving students are those who devote leisure time to reading, even when the school day and year are only mid-length and homework isn't excessive. Recently, the largest-ever international study of reading found that the single most important predictor of academic success is the amount of time children spend reading books, more important even than economic or social status. And one of the few predictors of high achievement in math and science is the amount of time children devote to pleasure reading. — Nancie Atwell

But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences. — Jonathan Haidt

I'm a lousy predictor of the future. — Guy Kawasaki

One predictor for divorce is contempt, which to me is just another word for disrespect. — Elizabeth Banks

If you want to foresee the behavior of someone, their personality is a better predictor than their intelligence. — Luigina Sgarro

How good a predictor of job productivity is a cognitive test score compared to a job interview? Reference checks? College transcript? The answer, probably surprising to many, is that the test score is a better predictor of job performance than any other single measure. This is the conclusion to be drawn from a meta-analysis on the different predictors of job performance, as shown in the table below. — Richard J. Herrnstein