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A Leap Of Foolishness: The Cost of Ignoring What You Already Knew
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 20 2026
Pages: 204
Weight: 0.62
Height: 0.43 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Why do intelligent people keep making the same expensive mistakes?
Not because they lack intelligence.
Because hope, ego, loneliness, desire, fear, pride, and urgency are stronger than intelligence when they arrive dressed as something else.
A Leap of Foolishness is a psychologically rich, emotionally honest book about the most human thing we do: ignore what we already know.
In comment sections across social media, thousands of people type seven words beneath videos that find them at exactly the right moment:
Thank you. I was just about to...
Followed by the specific foolishness they nearly committed. The text they nearly sent. The investment they nearly made. The person they nearly went back to. The decision they nearly let urgency make for them.
This book asks the question nobody in those comment sections is asking:
If you already knew - why were you about to do it anyway?
Through twelve chapters of psychological insight, compassionate storytelling, and painfully recognisable composite accounts, Steven Ssamba examines the full spectrum of how intelligent people rationalise catastrophic decisions - in relationships, careers, money, faith, leadership, family, and identity.
You will meet the physician who saw every warning sign before the wedding and attended anyway. The executive who commissioned a second report because the first one's conclusions were inconvenient. The entrepreneur who confused motivation with preparation. The person who called avoidance faith and trusted people away from her. The man who demolished a twenty-year marriage because he mistook restlessness for revelation.
You will recognise them.
Not as strangers.
As mirrors.
The Leap of Foolishness Cycle - the seven-stage pattern from emotional trigger to hard-won wisdom - runs beneath every chapter, giving readers the framework to catch the pattern earlier. Before it becomes the regret. Before it becomes the lawyer's office. Before it becomes the quiet, devastating sentence people whisper to themselves in the aftermath:
Deep down, I knew.
This is not a self-help book built on slogans.
It is a serious, psychologically grounded examination of the forces that temporarily overpower wisdom in otherwise capable human beings - and a compassionate, practical guide to recovering the wisdom that was always there.
What readers will gain:
- A clear framework for distinguishing genuine intuition from anxious noise
- The ability to identify which emotional driver is currently overriding their judgment
- Psychological insight into confirmation bias, sunk cost fallacy, motivated reasoning, attachment wounds, survivorship bias, and ego defense - translated into human language
- The specific questions that produce honest answers rather than sophisticated rationalisations
- A recovery practice that is built on genuine understanding rather than the pressure to appear improved
For readers who have ever said: I knew better. Why didn't I do better?
This book does not judge that question.
It answers it.
The tragedy is not that you didn't know. The tragedy is that you knew - and then worked very hard not to.
Readers of Daniel Kahneman, Morgan Housel, Brené Brown, and Mark Manson will find in A Leap of Foolishness a book that combines the psychological rigour of behavioural science with the emotional intimacy of the best narrative nonfiction.
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