This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically.

Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit (p. 19). Random House.

There are two ways to make money. The first is the honest way: give customers something they value at $1; produce it for less. But another way is to give customers false information or induce them to reach a false conclusion: so they think that what they are getting for $1 is worth that; even though it is actually worth less.

Akerlof, George A.; Shiller, Robert J.. Phishing for Phools (pp. 7-8). Princeton University Press.

About 69 percent of American adults are overweight; and more than half of them (36 percent of Americans) are, furthermore, obese. We know that Big Phood commissions scientific laboratories to calculate consumers’ “bliss points” that maximize their craving for sugar, salt, and fat. Yet no one wants to be obese.

Akerlof, George A.; Shiller, Robert J.. Phishing for Phools (p. xv). Princeton University Press.

How your daily schedule looks like ? Here is Benjamin Franklin’s

“In many ways the yield curve reflects the “pulse of the economy,” signalling what is going on at a fundamental level. Thus, changes in the yield curve can provide bond investors with important insights that can be used to determine which bonds to include in their portfolios. For stock investors, the curve can be used as part of the macroeconomic analysis to help forecast changes in the economic outlook, which of course, directly impacts most company’s sales and earnings, and therefore their stock prices.”

Excerpt From: Pike, William. “Why Stocks Go Up and Down.”

“It’s not enough to be great at what you do, you have to catch at least one really big wave and ride it all the way in to shore”

–How Google Works, Book by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

In the Science of Hitting, Ted Williams explained his technique. He divided the strike zone into seventy-seven cells, each representing the size of a baseball. He would insist on swinging only at balls in his ‘best’ cells, even at the risk of striking out, because reaching for the ‘worst’ spots would seriously reduce his chances of success. As a securities investor, you can watch all sorts of business propositions in the form of security prices thrown at you all the time. For the most part, you don’t have to do a thing other than be amused. Once in a while, you will find a ‘fat pitch’ that is slow, straight, and right in the middle of your sweet spot. Then you swing hard. This way, no matter what natural ability you start with, you will substantially increase your hitting average. One common problem for investors is that they tend to swing too often.

– Poor Charlie’s almanack

The story of money for economists always begins with a fantasy world of barter. The problem is where to locate this fantasy in time and space: Are we talking about cave men, Pacific Islanders, the American frontier?

– Debt: The First 5,000 Years; David Graeber

“The ratings agencies were paid by the issuer of the CDO every time they rated one: the more CDOs, the more profit. A virtually unlimited number of CDOs could be created by combining different types of mortgages—or when that got boring, combining different types of CDOs into derivatives of one another. Rarely did the ratings agencies turn down the opportunity to rate one.”

Excerpt From: Nate Silver. “The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail-But Some Don’t.”

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

—WALTER LIPPMANN