Top 70 David McRaney Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t let the Dunning-Kruger effect cast its shadow over you. If you want to be great at something, you have to practice, and then you have to sample the work of people who have been doing it for their whole lives. Compare and contrast and eat some humble.”

— David McRaney

2. “You don’t believe you are an average person, but you do believe everyone else is. This tendency, which springs from self-serving bias, is called the illusory superiority effect.”

— David McRaney

3. “You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. If you win, you tell everyone.”

— David McRaney

4. “Education is as much about learning what you don’t know as it is about adding to what you do.”

— David McRaney

5. “You are a story you tell yourself.”

— David McRaney

6. “You want to believe that those who work hard and sacrifice get ahead and those who are lazy and cheat do not. This, of course, is not always true. Success is often greatly influenced by when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family, and random chance.”

— David McRaney

7. “The tendency to make poor decisions and ignore odds in favor of your gut feelings is called the affect heuristic.”

— David McRaney

8. “The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer effect, and psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology, and phrenology, or mysticism like astrology, numerology, and tarot cards.”

— David McRaney

9. “Ignorance of the halo effect can easily set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy in which attitude changes behavior, which then loops back around over and over for the persons both giving and receiving a label.”

— David McRaney

10. “You will soon realize you are not so smart, and thanks to a plethora of cognitive biases, faulty heuristics, and common fallacies of thought, you are probably deluding yourself minute by minute just to cope with reality.”

— David McRaney

11. “The next time you get a pimple on your forehead, or buy a new pair of shoes, or Tweet about how boring your day is, don’t expect anyone to notice. You are not so smart or special.”

— David McRaney

12. “As comedian Tim Minchin says in his song “Storm,” “Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.”

— David McRaney

13. “Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter.”

— David McRaney

14. “Psychologists call missing information in plain sight inattentional blindness. You believe with confidence your eyes capture everything before them and your memories are recorded versions of those captured images. The truth, though, is you see only a small portion of your environment at any one moment. Your attention is like a spotlight, and only the illuminated portions of the world appear in your perception.”

— David McRaney

15. “As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his book The Tipping Point, if a company grows beyond 150 people, productivity sharply declines until the company divides its outlying entities into smaller groups. You function better in a cluster – that way everyone in that cluster is connected to one another and only certain individuals connect your cluster to other clusters.”

— David McRaney

16. “When you need something to be true, you will look for patterns; you connect the dots like the stars of a constellation. Your brain abhors disorder. You see faces in clouds and demons in bonfires. Those who claim the powers of divination hijack these natural human tendencies. They know they can depend on you to use subjective validation in the moment and confirmation bias afterward.”

— David McRaney

17. “One of the stranger facets of consistency bias is how it can be evoked on the spot. If you are primed to believe you are an honest person, you will then act as if you are.”

— David McRaney

18. “This sense of alarm about the impact of speech not on yourself but on others is called the third person effect.”

— David McRaney

19. “You and everyone else come into the world preloaded with these pesky and completely wrong ways of seeing things, and you rarely notice them.”

— David McRaney

20. “You, too, are unaware of how unaware you are.”

— David McRaney

21. “You see people who speak slowly as being less intelligent – slow.”

— David McRaney

22. “You are unaware of the constant nudging you receive from ideas formed in your unconscious mind.”

— David McRaney

23. “Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.”

— David McRaney

24. “You might be a great judge of character, but you need to be a great judge of evidence to avoid delusion.”

— David McRaney

25. “Self-esteem is mostly self-delusion, but it serves a purpose. You are biologically driven to think highly of yourself in order to avoid stagnation. If you were to stop and truly examine your faults and failures, you would become paralyzed by fear and doubt.”

— David McRaney

26. “It is not a fallacy to trust the consensus of thousands of researchers on how to interpret the evidence provided by decades of studies.”

— David McRaney

27. “When it comes to buying lottery tickets, fearing the West Nile virus, looking for child molesters, and so on, you use the availability heuristic first and the facts second.”

— David McRaney

28. “You are always under the influence of irrational reasoning. You persist in a state of deluded deliberation. You are terrible at explaining yourself to yourself, and you are unaware of the depth and breadth of your faults in this regard. You feel quite the opposite, actually. You maintain an unrealistic confidence in your own perceptions even after your limitations are revealed.”

— David McRaney

29. “Men are easy to manipulate thanks to having fewer metrics by which they judge potential mates, and thus advertising has long been preying on their tendencies. Women will buy products in an attempt to become the impossible goal. Men will buy products in an attempt to mate with the impossible goal. Sexy and sexist advertising can kill two birds with one stone.”

— David McRaney

30. “How do you separate fantasy from reality? How can you be sure the story of your life both from long ago and minute to minute is true? There is a pleasant vindication to be found when you accept that you can’t. No one can, yet we persist and thrive. Who you think you are is sort of like a movie based on true events, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The details may be embellished, but the big picture, the general idea, is probably a good story worth hearing about.”

— David McRaney

31. “Expensive wine is like anything else that is expensive: The expectation it will taste better actually makes it taste better.”

— David McRaney

32. “Modern society is large and complex, with institutions wielding great power over the lives of many. This is why Johnson and Fowler added a dire parting shot in their predictions. Since you are programmed to become increasingly overconfident the less you understand about any given scenario, you can expect to find the most destructive overconfidence in places that are exceedingly complicated and unpredictable.”

— David McRaney

33. “In the end, Alter and Forgas concluded the happier you are, the more likely you will be to seek out ways to delude yourself into maintaining your rosy outlook on life and your own abilities. Sad people, it seems, are more honest with themselves.”

— David McRaney

34. “If you neglect your personal space and allow chaos and clutter to creep in, it will affect you, and perhaps encourage further neglect. Positive feedback loops should improve your life, not detract from it. You can’t prime yourself directly, but you can create environments conducive to the mental states you wish to achieve.”

— David McRaney

35. “You are as deluded as the rest of us, but that’s OK, it keeps you sane.”

— David McRaney

36. “The flow of consciousness is one thing; the recollection of its course is another, yet you usually see them as the same. This is one of the oldest concepts in psychology and philosophy – phenomenology.”

— David McRaney

37. “Research shows people believe others see their contributions to conversation as being memorable, but they aren’t. You think everyone noticed when you stumbled in your speech, but they didn’t. Well, unless you drew attention to it by over-apologizing.”

— David McRaney

38. “To be less dumb is to see the danger in believing in forces that do not exist and trusting them when you would do better to trust yourself.”

— David McRaney

39. “As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

— David McRaney

40. “In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

— David McRaney

41. “Remember, your capacity to fool yourself is greater than the abilities of any conjurer, and conjurers come in many guises. You are a creature impelled to hope. As you attempt to make sense of the world, you focus on what falls into place and neglect that which doesn’t fit, and there is so much in life that does not fit.”

— David McRaney

42. “If your group includes a person who can hire or fire, groupthink comes into play.”

— David McRaney

43. “Once people started coming up with ways to maintain larger groups, like armies, cities, and nations, humans started subdividing those groups. Dunbar’s number explains why big groups are made of smaller, more manageable groups like companies, platoons, and squads – or branches, divisions, departments, and committees. No human institution can efficiently function above 150 members without hierarchies, ranks, roles, and divisions.”

— David McRaney

44. “Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life.”

— David McRaney

45. “One of the greatest discoveries in recent years was to find that mirror neurons fire also when you do things. It is as if part of your brain is observing yourself as an outsider. You are a story you tell yourself.”

— David McRaney

46. “Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up opportunities to hang out with people. The loss of control in any situation can lead to this state.”

— David McRaney

47. “A bias is a tendency to think in one way when other options are just as good, if not better.”

— David McRaney

48. “Decades of research into a variety of cognitive biases show you tend to see the world through thick Coke-bottle lenses forged from belief and smudged with attitudes and ideologies.”

— David McRaney

49. “Whether it’s playing guitar or writing short stories or telling jokes or taking photos – whatever – amateurs are far more likely to think they are experts than actual experts are.”

— David McRaney

50. “So the next time you get ready to launch into one hundred reasons why your cell phone or TV or car is better than someone else’s, hesitate. Because you’re not trying to change the other person’s mind – you’re trying to prop up your own.”

— David McRaney