At a very young age I was predicting outcomes, trying to take all the information and find the best route to wherever I was going. I avoided a lot of pitfalls because of that.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.
A teacher told my mother that I would never become successful, which illustrates the difficulty of long-run forecasting on inadequate data.
In my life, I have made the occasional catastrophic choice, and it's just a case of moving on and learning from it.
One of my few shortcomings is that I can't predict the future.
My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.
As much as my parents were worried about me moving to London at 17, they could see that I was hungry to find my path. And it probably helped that they saw me succeeding at it, slowly but surely.
Early in my investment-banking career, I realized I was on a path that others had set out for me.
Tests conducted before I graduated predicted a future for me in journalism, forestry, or the teaching of music; persons who know me well could recognize some truth in those seemingly errant prognoses.
When I was younger, I talked to the adults around me that I respected most about how they got where they were, and none of them plotted a course they could have predicted, so it seemed a waste of time to plan too long-term. Since then, I've always gone on my instincts.
Some of the things I did in my early career were massive learning curves because I had no one to guide me. You learn very quickly because it costs you torment and trouble.