Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking ★★★★☆

• Read on: 2013-10-08
• Authors: Malcolm Gladwell and Irina Henegar, Barry Fox
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Pages: 296
• Original Published Year: 2005

Notable Highlights

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”

“We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.”

“Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.”

“In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”

“our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way...We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way.”

“We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it...We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible an depending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”

“There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”

“When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.”

“Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; you can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.”

“[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act

“We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.”

“Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen.”

“Arousal leaves us mind-blind.”

“being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience”

“People are in one of two states in a relationship,” Gottman went on. “The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative.”

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