Megan McArdle Quotes

#1. 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

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

Megan McArdle

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

Megan McArdle

#4. 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

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

Megan McArdle

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Dweck encourages parents and teachers to praise children for their effort, rather than their intelligence, talent, or looks.

Megan McArdle

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.

Megan McArdle

#14. 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

#15. 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