# Quote — Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk

> Obviously it can be a mistake to assign brilliance in proportion to wealth. We cannot see a persons potential, only his or her results, so we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person. The normal accident theory of life shows not that the connection between actions and rewards is random but that random influences are as important as our qualities and actions.

- Author: [Leonard Mlodinow](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow.md)
- Book: [The Drunkard's Walk](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk.md)
- Page: 209
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonard_Mlodinow#The_Drunkard's_Walk_(2008)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/obviously-it-can

## More from this book

> The law of small numbers is not really a law. It is a sarcastic name describing the misguided attempt to apply the law of large numbers when the numbers aren't large.

p. 99 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/the-law-of-small.md)

> The fact that human intuition is ill suited to situations involving uncertainty was known as early as the 1930's, when researchers noted that people could neither make up a sequence of numbers that passed mathematical tests for randomness nor recognize reliably whether a given string was randomly generated.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/the-fact-that.md)

> It is one of those contradictions of life that although measurement always carries uncertainty, the uncertainty in measurement is rarely discussed.

p. 129 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/it-is-one.md)