Dan Ariely | The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

The first two hours of the day are generally hours that people have high cognitive capacity ... 9 to 11 are usually very good hours for people. And if you come to the office at 9, and you have kind of high capacity, and in the first two hours you do email and Facebook... The hours that you have high capacity are so precious. You have a few of those a day, and they're so much more productive than the hours after lunch where you can hardly function.

Acting doesn't come about by having very general plans of what to do in life; action comes from having concrete plans and even putting it into your calendar and saying when you're going to do it.

Dishonesty is all about rationalizations. It's all about the question of 'What can you do and get away with?' And not get away with from the perspective of not being caught, get away with from the perspective of you not thinking of yourself as a bad person.

For me, I think that the human mystery is wonderful, and even though it's just in front of us, there's so much we don't know. We drink coffee every day. The truth is there's lots of things we don't understand about coffee. We use money every day; lots of things we don't understand about it. We try to motivate people every day, and we [still don't] understand what it is.

There's actually really interesting research showing that when people try to fall asleep, they interpret the difficulty as an indication that something is wrong.

If somebody is asking you to do something a year from now, ask yourself whether you would do it next week.

Implementation intention is the idea that we have very fuzzy plans for life, and we make concrete plans only in very specific cases or only when we get close to the event.