Late in her twenties she starts getting serious about her leadership potential and she reads Leadership Presence, The Prince, Primal Leadership, Drive, and Leadership and Self Deception.

FORBES: How Real Women Negotiate their Lives and Careers

Yet Petterson is novelistically acute about human motive and self-deception.

NEWYORKER: Late and Soon

"I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the participants' reports of change were credible and not self-deception or outright lying, " he wrote.

CNN: STORY HIGHLIGHTS

For committed meditators, cultivating this wisdom of seeing clearly is at the very heart of the mindfulness meditation practice that trains us to step out from behind the curtain of our restless minds and touch life directly, getting a full, authentic measure of our experience beyond self-deception and impulsiveness.

FORBES: Lead By Achieving Nothing. Seriously

Triumphalism on the basis of an inflated stockmarket and rising corporate and consumer debts would be mere self-deception.

ECONOMIST: Global politics

But in other respects this becomes a classic undercover story, exploring conflicted personal and professional loyalties, the cost of living a lie, and, paradoxically, the human facility for self-deception.

CNN: Review: Cooper brilliant in OK 'Breach'

And what forces may be seeking to perpetuate that self-deception?

FORBES: The 5 Hour Energy Scam And The Power Of Self-Deception