Words matter. These are the best Overestimate Quotes from famous people such as Eric Hoffer, Stewart Butterfield, Michael J. Fox, Karl Iagnemma, Daniel Levitin, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people – we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.
It’s hard to overestimate how much the perception of the quality of the V.C. firm you’re with matters – the signal it sends to other V.C.s, to potential employees, to customers, to the tech press. It’s like where you went to college.
I find as long as I acknowledge the truth of something, then that’s it. I know what it is and then I can operate. But if I overestimate the downside of something or the challenge of something and I get too obsessed about the difficulty of it, then I don’t leave enough room to be open to the upside, the possibility.
We are all vulnerable to the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of vivid, cognitively available risks rather than statistically likelier, but less salient, risks.
We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that’s not true. That’s a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you’re going to lose some brainpower.
In business, we say that people overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in a decade. This is true in philanthropy as well.
People tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technological change. In the short-term, it’s not going to make that much of a difference.
The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.
There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate – not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.
Don’t underestimate your opponent, but don’t overestimate them, either.
It’s hard to avoid ‘unconscious overclaiming.’ In unconscious overclaiming, we unconsciously overestimate our contributions relative to others. This makes sense, because we’re far more aware of what we do than what other people do. Also, we tend to do the work that we value.
There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.
Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.
Just like it’s not healthy to think overly negative thoughts, exaggeratedly positive thoughts can be equally detrimental. If you overestimate how much of a positive impact a particular change will have on your life, you may end up feeling disappointed when reality doesn’t live up to your fantasy.
Where the daughter sees power, the mother feels powerless. Daughters and mothers, I found, both overestimate the other’s power – and underestimate their own.
Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term… If we can glimpse even a couple of years into the future, even that’s difficult to do.
When we overestimate the benefits of exercise, underestimate how many calories we eat, and overcompensate for a job well done, exercise is really a false protection from fattening food.
Because we make ourselves deaf to feedback, because we overestimate our abilities, because we become consumed with ourselves, we end up subjecting ourselves not just to the inevitable stumbles or difficulties of life but catastrophic, painful failures.
