Why haven’t I parted with it?

Have you got anything you’re hanging on to?

What is The Endowment Effect?

We irrationally overvalue goods we own, regardless of their objective market value.

A good example from Kahneman et al:

A wine-loving economist we know purchased some nice Bordeaux wines years ago at low prices. The wines have greatly appreciated in value, so that a bottle that cost only $10 when purchased would now fetch $200 at auction. This economist now drinks some of this wine occasionally, but would neither be willing to sell the wine at the auction price nor buy an additional bottle at that price.

Thaler (1980) called this pattern—the fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it—the endowment effect.

Why is this interesting?

The endowment effect is worth knowing about so you can make more rational decisions around the stuff in your life. And it goes beyond gym gear.

The endowment effect causes us to hold onto stuff we don’t use. I came across this practical advice: if you are trying to let something go, researchers suggest:

…keeping a memento of an item being sold, such as a picture of the item or a smaller item associated with it, can help reduce feelings of loss and sadness, resulting in more willingness to sell.

Or maybe for now just check out one of my fave clips! Some George Carlin brilliance:

Want to go deeper?

🔖 Studies and more studies if you want to dive in.

🎥 Have you ever watched Hoarders? I wonder if this is endowment effect on steroids.

Revisit related mental models

Build your latticework!

🏔️ Status Quo Bias change is hard

💸 Sunk Cost Fallacy when you’ve come this far

💎 Scarcity Bias scarce isn’t always valuable

Got comments?

Reply to this email to contact me, I love hearing your reactions!

What is Signaling?

In this context, signaling is when something about you affects how others perceive you.

We are all constantly broadcasting a tonne of information about our personality, beliefs, and lifestyle via what we wear, what we do, what we share online and so on. Some of it is done intentionally, some unintentionally.

I like how Farnam St blog puts it:

We are constantly signaling. Every minute of the day, we send signals to others to convey that we are intelligent, successful, attractive, healthy, well-adjusted people with impeccable taste … instead of telling others who we are and how great we are, we use signals. …

Signaling is the area where you live and the car you drive. It’s how you take your coffee… it’s the shoes you wear, the newspapers you read, how you spend your Friday nights.

Why is this interesting?

There are lots of things us humans try to signal, and we might not even be aware of it. Here are a couple of types of signaling:

How we present ourselves visually. How you dress and groom yourself causes other people to make judgements about you. You might not like it, but it is how our brains work. We might try to signal wealth through an expensive watch or handbag. Or we might countersignal that we don’t care (or don’t need to care) about status by wearing an old hoodie.

What we communicate about is signaling. How you communicate about social issues (virtue signaling) is another type of signaling that is easy to recognize:

As a quick stroll on social media reveals, most people love showing that they are good. Whether by expressing compassion for disaster victims, sharing a post to support a social movement, or denouncing a celebrity’s racist comment, many people are eager to broadcast their high moral standing.

Want to go deeper?

🔖 Rory Sutherland's full post on signaling made me chuckle

🔬 This study had some interesting findings on the impact of how you dress

💎 This reminded me a bit of a concept I love: idiosyncracy credits. It’s defined as:

[The} accumulation of positively disposed impressions residing in the perceptions of relevant others; it is… the degree to which an individual may deviate from the common expectancies of the group.

Edwin Hollander

🦚 The peacocks with the largest and brightest tails mate more often. Peacocks shake those feathers to get attention.

💙 RIP Charlie Munger. Revisit his great speech The Psychology of Human Misjudgment

Revisit related mental models

🧠 Build your latticework

• Enclothed Cognition 🧑‍⚕️ your clothes affect you more that you realize

• Fundamental Attribution Error 🤷 maybe it’s just situational factors

• Social Proof 👥 we do it because others did it

Bayes’ Theorem comes to us from probability, and is crucial if you wish to think clearly, and not be fooled twice.

What is Bayes' Theorem?

Bayes' Theorem helps answer the question “What is the chance that…”.

It is the formal method to determine the probability of an event based on the occurrences of prior events. It’s used so that we can revise prior probabilistic beliefs – and change our minds – in response to new evidence.

You start with an initial probability, then consider new evidence, and then revise the initially assigned probability based on the new evidence.

Why is this interesting?

Bayes’ Theorem can be done formally with math and your dataset, or you can adopt a Bayesian mindset and use it informally as well.

Einstein said:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The key to being a Bayesian thinker is remembering that everything isn’t binary, but that it has a probability. In other words things are not black and white, but shades of grey.

Bayesian thinkers update their probability assessment when they encounter new info, as Einstein was alluding to.

Want to go deeper?

👨‍🌾 I think the English are talking about being a Bayesian thinker when they say

Don’t keep stepping on the same rake

🔖 Here’s a good longer write up on Bayes Theorem, to understand the underlying equation

🤔 In a good Bayesian updating opportunity, it turns out that Einstein didn’t actually say that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, it’s commonly misattributed.

🤯And to truly blow up the Bayesian updating opportunity - and undermine the whole post - in quantum mechanics you can do the same thing many times and get different results.

Revisit related mental models

Build your latticework

• 🐴 Base Rate Neglect so important to remember the base rate!

• 🏀 Regression to the Mean after an extreme, more average is likely

• 🪒 Occam's Razor shave away extraneous assumptions

What is discretionary time?

Discretionary time is the time you have left over, once you’re finished with work or chores or other essential tasks.

Authors of the book Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom, explain in more detail things you have to take care of first:

You have to satisfy bodily necessities: you have to spend at least a minimal amount of time eating, sleeping and otherwise taking care of your body.

You have to satisfy financial necessities: you have to spend at least a minimal amount of time securing the cash that you need to purchase the things you need from the cash economy.

You have to satisfy household necessities: you have to spend at least a minimal amount of time cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids and otherwise keeping your household functioning.

Whatever time you have left over, you can use at your discretion.

Why is this interesting?

How much time do you have to use to use at your own discretion?

How do you use it?

The authors of Discretionary Time contend that the amount of discretionary time we have is as significant as our financial resources.

We are often concerned with how much money we have, and many of us focus less on the resource of time.

The philosopher Seneca wrote:

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

It’s worthwhile pondering how important discretionary time is to you, and if you want more if it, how might you be able to carve it out?

I’ll leave you with some more confronting but encouraging Seneca:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted … we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. … Life is long if you know how to use it.

Want to go deeper?

💎 The Busy Trap is a top piece of writing - and a bit of a ode to enjoying your discretionary time.

👩‍💻 I’ve done a time audit before and it was illuminating. Here’s a PDF if you want to do it a lo-fi way. I also just redownloaded RescueTime time tracking app, here’s my referral link if you want to try it too.

📖 Seneca is a must read, On The Shortness of Life is so much value for $0.99!

📖 Drucker also had some interesting thoughts for managers, about consolidating discretionary time (popularized as “deep work” lately).

…[the executive] needs large chunks of time and [knows] that small driblets are not time at all. ….even three-quarters of the working day are useless if it is only available as fifteen minutes or half an hour there. The final step in time management is therefore to consolidate the time that …[is] under the executive’s control.

📖 Most of us will have roughly 4000 weeks in our lives.

The outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.

Revisit related mental models

🧠 Build your latticework

• Scarcity Bias it’s scarce, but is it valuable?

• Regret Minimization Framework what might you regret not doing?

• The Boiling Frog are you being slowly brought to a boil?

Got comments?

Reply to this email to contact me, I love hearing your reactions!

What is Fast Cheap Good?

There’s not much criteria that can’t be fit into three categories: Quality, speed and price.

The problem is, that you can’t have it all. Quality, speed, and low price form an elusive triangle—pick two, but the third slips away. Want top-notch quality fast? It'll cost you. Looking for a bargain without compromising quality? Brace yourself for a wait. It’s a trade off.

I like to remember it even more simply as: fast, cheap, good.

It’s a very useful model for evaluating multiple options because they tend to be universally understandable and applicable.

How fast?

Speed — How fast can we get this solution in place?

Consider the time element of the option.

How cheap?

Price — How much is it going to cost to get this solution in place?

Consider how expensive this option is. Keep in mind that costs might not be entirely monetary.

How good?

Quality — What’s the quality level of this solution?

Consider how good the fit of this option is to the problem or decision.

Why is this interesting?

I’ve applied this simple framework to many different types of decisions. At work it’s been useful to illuminate the trade-offs for vendor selection, software tools or architectural options, and even hiring decisions.

But no one said it better than Neil Gaiman. So I’ll leave you with his neat advice on how to stay employed, which makes me smile:

You stay employed when your work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three!

Two out of three is fine.

People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time.

People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you.

And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.

Want to go deeper?

🔖 I wrote a longer guide here: A Guide to Smarter Decision-Making For Startup Leaders

🎥 Watch the whole speech by Neil Gaiman, I’m not a big commencement speech inspo person but I do LOVE this:

🔖 Versions of this are sometimes called the Unattainable Triangle, the Project Management Triangle, or the Triple Constraint

😂 OK I have to admit it did remind me of the Crazy Hot Matrix, which I want to be offended by but it does makes me laugh.

Revisit related mental models

🧠 Build your latticework

• Divergent vs. Convergent Thinking start broad and finish narrow

• Satisficing a life changing way of operating

• Parkinson’s Law the work expands to fill the time

What is Yum, Yuck or Meh?

I came across this simple framework this on a popular health podcast called Huberman Lab.

Huberman talks about how our neural circuits in the brain divide our sensory experiences along three dimensions: Yum, Yuck or Meh.

Yum, you want more.

Yuck, you want to avoid it.

Meh, so-so.

It’s as simple as that, neurons are pretty basic! And yes sensory experience includes taste, but also sight, sound, smell, and touch.

Why is this interesting?

For most foods your are probably very aware of your intuitive reaction preference, but this model can be used as a metaphor more broadly. It’s a great way to get in touch with intuitive preference for about just about anything.

You could ask customer how they feel about a new product feature on a yum-yuck-meh scale for a change, instead the regular types of satisfaction spectrums. You might get more of a gut feeling response from them this way, rather than a reasoned response that might have more bias.

Or if you think you might not be too in touch with your own intuitive preferences, when faced with a choice, try asking yourself if a particular option feels more yum, yuck, or meh.

Want to go deeper?

🤔 Even more simply: just bring to mind your job, or your startup, or a hobby, or even a relationship, and see if you get a feeling of yum, yuck, or meh.

🔖 I’d be remiss not to leave a Kahneman reminder: intuition is not magic:

Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous.

The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

🔖 This is a more simple and less mundane scale that hits intuitive preference more that Satisfaction Spectrum or Emotional Valence scale might.

💎  This reminded me of this quote that always has rang true, from writer Elie Wiesel:

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

🎧 Here’s the whole podcast episode, he talks about yum, yuck, meh at 49:23.

Revisit related mental models

🧠 Build your latticework

• Sensory Food what do you ingest via all the senses?

• Myelination how do things get wired in the brain?

• Regret Minimization Framework what might you regret not doing?

What is an alloy?

Alloying is the process of creating an alloy.

I like this definition of an alloy:

An alloy is a metal that’s combined with other substances to create a new metal with superior properties. For example, the alloy may be stronger, harder, tougher, or more malleable than the original metal.

When an alloy is created the results is more than the sum of it’s parts. It’s a time when 1+1 equals more than 2.

Why is this interesting?

Alloying is interesting in a limited literal scope - it allows us to build amazing things - physical structures like bridges.

The idea of alloying is also interesting metaphorically. Think about social structures - have you ever been part of a really great team at work? Where the process of coming together allowed you all to build something much better than the sum of what you all could have done alone?

I also like the idea as applied to personal relationships - friendships, marriages etc. I read once that the reason you know you should marry someone is that you are the best version of yourself when you're with them.

The word synergy has a very similar meaning, but you might find thinking about alloying a bit more vivid.

It reminds me a bit of something Francis Bacon wrote, so I’ll leave you with his words on how wonderful it is to have a great person to “soundboard” something with:

Whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up, in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly, he seeth how they look when they are turned into words: finally, he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour’s discourse, than by a day’s meditation.

Want to go deeper?

📖 Did this make you think of antifragility?

While alloys can symbolize the merging of strengths and capabilities, antifragility refers to the ability to transform and excel in the face of adversity. It deserves it’s own post, and it’s a must read book:

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

🧀 Alloying also makes me think of some food pairings, like tomato and basil, or chocolate and banana. This food pairing database and book is pretty cool.

Revisit related mental models

🧠 Build your latticework

• Zero Sum Game some basic game theory

• Action Bias our penchant for action

Do you agree a half truth is a whole lie, as the proverb says?

Does it matter if it’s fully conscious or not?

What is Response Bias?

In simple terms, response bias means that when people answer questions, they might not always tell the truth - their answer might have bias.

And this happens particularly when we are answering a question about ourselves. There is a difference between reported behavior - what we say we do - and actual behavior - what we really do.

The common examples of response bias focus on responses on surveys, when people often answer in a biased way because they want to to fit in or look good.

I know I get caught by this one when asked questions by any kind of health professional. If asked what I eat, I might say I like to eat steamed fish and vegetables for dinner, and the odd burger, but in fact the reverse is true - it’s the odd fish. Part is probably self delusion, part is wanting to look good in front of the doctor.

Why is this interesting?

When looking at existing data or collecting new data - maybe for customer research - it’s crucial to try to look at what people actually do, rather than what they say they do. If you can get data of what people actually do then great, but if you can only get reported data like surveys or interviews then keep response bias front of mind. Understanding the gap between what people claim versus their actual behavior is essential for making the right decisions for any product or service.

It’s worth being aware of personally too. I’ll leave you with this hilarious data-supported take from a data scientist’s book Everybody Lies:

Everybody lies.

People lie about how many drinks they had on the way home. They lie about how often they go to the gym, how much those new shoes cost, whether they read that book. They call in sick when they’re not. They say they’ll be in touch when they won’t. They say it’s not about you when it is. They say they love you when they don’t. They say they’re happy while in the dumps. They say they like women when they really like men. People lie to friends. They lie to bosses. They lie to kids. They lie to parents. They lie to doctors. They lie to husbands. They lie to wives.

They lie to themselves.

And they damn sure lie to surveys.

Want to go deeper?

📖 Everybody Lies is a fun and fascinating read in the growing pop-data science genre. It’s a illuminating insight into humanity today via the huge Google search dataset studied by the author, and really drives home the message:

Don’t trust what people tell you; trust what they do.

🤔 Some people hold honesty as a very high value. I’m not sure I am evolved enough for Sam Harris’s ideas on lying, but they sure are thought provoking:

“By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make—and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.”

🤔 I wonder what the interplay is with response bias and Decision Fatigue (although suffering from replication issues I find it’s still a useful concept)

😂 This reminded me of the Morning Guy Seinfeld bit, which will make you smile:

Revisit related mental models

🧠 Build your latticework:

• The Hawthorne Effect we change when being watched

• The Theory of Planned Behavior wikipedia, heavier psychology

• The Future-Self Delusion a old post lamenting my stasis

What is The Third Story?

The Third Story isn’t my side of the story. And it isn’t your side of the story.

The Third Story is one an impartial observer would tell; it’s a third version of events both sides can agree on.

Why is this interesting?

We have our perceptions, and we all too often equate them with reality. The truth is that everyone has their own subjective perceptions - which don’t align perfectly to objective reality - however much they feel like they do. It’s powerful to simply acknowledge that a third version - The Third Story - exists!

Furthermore our brains/ego has a self preservation mechanism that makes us believe we are in the right more often that we really are. Acknowledging there are three versions, and cultivating some curiosity about The Third Story is a good way of reframing the conflict to focus on shared goals and interests, rather than individual positions.

It reminds me a bit of what philosopher John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

The bottom line? Explore the Second Story (their side) if you can, and see if you might catch a glimpse of the Third Story too.

Want to go deeper?

😝 Do you like it a bit more pithy?

There are three sides to every story – yours, mine & the truth.

🤔 I read this about interpreting toddler behavior more positively. (I think I’ve also heard versions from any therapist/counsellor too.) Ask yourself:

“What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened?”

📖 Do you read any fiction? I’ve been trying to read a bit more fiction this year, I really enjoyed the beautiful prose of The Goldfinch and Beach Music. Send me your recommendations for charming storytelling!

💎  I think a lot about perception vs reality. I love this quote from Ruth Benedict:

The eye that sees is not a mere physical organ but a means of perception conditioned by the tradition in which its possessor has been reared. 

Revisit related mental models

🧠 Build your latticework

• The Narrative Fallacy 📰 - so key to everything in life, worth revisiting

• Fundamental Attribution Error 🤷 - this drives the need for The Third Story

• Expectations vs Agreements 🤝 - very concrete and practical

• The Law of the Instrument 💇🏼 - another idea well worth your time

I like this concept of sensory food that I came across in readings about religions. The concept comes from Buddhism, where it’s called The Four Nutriments. (I cherry pick from all the religions - I hope you find that beautiful rather than blasphemous.) Let me tell you a little about sensory food.

What is Sensory Food?

From The Buddha:

There are four kinds of nutriments which enable living beings to grow and maintain life.

What are these four nutriments?

The first is edible food, the second is the food of sense impressions, the third is the food of volition, and the fourth is the food of consciousness.

These second nutriment could be referred to as “sensory food”, meaning the information that we take in through our senses: sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch.

Why is this interesting?

I find the nutriment of of sense impressions or sensory food particularly interesting. There’s so much focus in society today about what we eat - and little focus on what we ingest via sound, sight, smell, and touch. From Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh:

We’re familiar with edible food … But that’s not the only kind of food we humans consume; it’s just one kind. What we read, our conversations, the shows we watch, the online games we play, and our worries, thoughts, and anxieties are all food.

It’s worth asking yourself:

What are you seeing? smelling? touching? hearing?

Who are the people you are surrounding yourself with?

What are you reading, watching, focusing on?

All of these sense impressions are making you into who you are.

I’ll leave the last word to Jac Vanek, I like her poetic take on it all:

You are the books you read, the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, and the conversations you engage in.

You are what you take from these.

You are the sound of the ocean, breath of the fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every day. So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and the colors fill your mind

Want to go deeper?

💎 I really enjoyed Rolf Dobelli's thought-provoking manifesto on a Low New's Diet - I highly recommend reading it in full here if you find news very tempting like I do!

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits … like bright colored candies for the mind.

📖 I liked some of the advice in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction:

Don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens.

Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefly by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much.

📖 There is a lot of wisdom in Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise

🧠 Build your latticework! Revisit related mental models:

• Emotional Contagion

• Anchoring

• The Hawthorne Effect

🙏 I aim to make every issue bite sized, top shelf sensory food! If you have a friend who’d like it too, please share!

The last few months I haven’t been writing. The new wave of generative AI tools and the implications startled me, and stopped me in my tracks.

I’ve always used writing as a tool for creating meaning, but now that machines write so well it feels less meaningful. Can I spin this into a neat post about cognitive dissonance?

What is cognitive dissonance?

Cognitive dissonance is the psychological tension we feel as we try to reckon with some kind of internal conflict.

It might occur when we hold beliefs, values, or ideas at the same time that are contradictory, or when our behavior is inconsistent with our beliefs or values.

Most of the time we quickly try to get rid of the discomfort. Maybe we will dismiss the information that is in conflict so we can feel comfortable again.

A simple example is that of quitting smoking. Someone who’s trying to quit smoking might experience cognitive dissonance if they continue to smoke, despite knowing that it is harmful to their health. (Or substitute any other habit you want to make or break for more examples.)

Or in my latest case of dissonance I just stopped writing because it felt uncomfortable, and I think that was because I have a conflict over whether it is worthwhile or not in a world where the machines can do it so well.

Why is this interesting?

Becoming aware of your own moments of cognitive dissonance can have a huge impact on your ability to think clearly and make high quality decisions. If we can sit with the dissonance - instead of reacting quickly to quash the discomfort - we can get more clarity.

Sitting with the dissonance can also help us to develop greater tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. By learning to sit with uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, we can develop greater resilience and EQ.

Roger Martin talks about how great leaders and innovators handle dissonance:

[They] have the predisposition and the capacity to hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both. This process of consideration and synthesis can be termed integrative thinking. …

“the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” is the sign of a truly intelligent individual.

This also reminds me of staying focused on the shades of grey that make up most of our reality, instead of seeing everything in black and white binary. I’ve heard variations of this called “both/and” thinking instead of “either/or” thinking. (You can be both a cat AND a dog person!)

I’ll leave the last word to Victor Frankl who had this relevant advice about choosing a response instead of just having a reaction:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Want to go deeper?

🔖 This post called Neurons Gone Wild is fascinating, it’s an easy read but introduces thought provoking ideas which seem like they might be related to the experience of dissonance.

📖 Man’s Search for Meaning should be on your list if you haven’t read it.

📖 I was reminded of this gem from Skin in the Game:

I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;

at the state level, Republican;

at the local level, Democrat;

and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.

😂 Also this wry take of unknown origin:

Communist until you get rich, feminist until you get married, atheist until the airplane starts falling

📖 I liked The Opposable Mind which introduced the idea of integrative thinking to me. (If you don’t want to read the whole book this is a great summary that introduces the idea.)

What is the Cognitive Switching Penalty?

The cognitive switching penalty is the impact on your brainpower of task switching.

It’s called a penalty because it’s a punishment from switching from one thing to another - it takes time to “download” the new task context into your working memory.

I like this explanation from Stolen Focus:

When people think they’re doing several things at once, they’re actually …‘juggling. They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over, to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment to moment, task to task—[and] that comes with a cost.’

Why is this interesting?

I can’t summarize it better than this, again from Stolen Focus:

So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do.

I noticed myself switching all the time, I thought it was just inefficient but it turns out it’s much worse! I need to start using one of those focus apps again.

I’ll leave the last word to Marcus Aurelius:

Concentrate every minute like a Roman … on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.

Want to go deeper?

📖 Deep work is a good read

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

🔖 How to save your team from meeting misery is something relevant I wrote a while back

📖 Stolen Focus will make you feel better if you have difficulty focusing

🔖 Paul Graham's well circulated Maker vs Manager post has aged well

😂 Reminds me of a colleague who had a large warning placard on her desk stating:

Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part

👉 Enjoy this newsletter? Reply and tell me your thoughts!

But this special word underpins the use of all of the models.

What is metacognition?

Metacognition is an awareness of your own thought processes.

Or if you like a more formal definition:

Knowing, perceiving, and/or attending to your own mental states; or knowing, perceiving, and/or attending to the fact that you have certain mental states.

Some like to say that metacognition is thinking about thinking.

Why is this interesting?

Metacognition is about awareness of your mind. It’s a good core starting point for a few related concepts.

To add another layer, Daniel Kahneman explains about two systems in the mind, calling them system 1 and system 2:

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

Metacognition could include knowledge of these two systems. Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow is a long but great read, and goes into much more detail on these systems.

I think metacognition is most interesting in terms of how it might help us become less reactive. It reminds me of the ideas of cause and effect and stimulus and response. I’ve read about the idea of recognizing that there can be a gap between a stimulus - some change in your environment - and your reaction or response to that stimulus.

Sometimes it’s talked about as reacting vs. responding. Meaning that reacting is your impulsive immediate reaction, and responding is a more calculated response. I’ll leave you with Victor Frankl’s more poetic way of saying it:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Want to go deeper?

💎 I like this one from Lao Tzu

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?

📖 Thinking Fast & Slow is worth reading, and re-reading.

📖 A truly epic tale: Victor Frankl’s must read book Man’s Search For Meaning.

🧘 Yes another reason to carve out that time to meditate! Meditation trains metacognition.

🔖 A nice simple primer on stimulus vs response.

🔊 This podcast episode excerpt about our openness to novelty is so interesting! (It’s more related to my post on myelination, but it’s SO interesting it’s landing here.)

“What you wind up seeing is basically if you are not listening to a certain style of music by the time you’re 28 or so, 95 percent chance you’re never going to. By age 35, if you’re not eating sushi, 95 percent chance you never will. In other words, these windows of openness to novelty close. But then as a biologist, the thing that floored me is: you take a lab rat and you look at when in its life it’s willing to try a novel type of food, and it’s the exact same curve! The equivalent of 10-year-old lab rats hate broccoli as much as 10-year-old humans do. And late adolescence, early adulthood, there’s this sudden craving for novelty. And that’s when primates pick up and leave their home troops and transfer into new ones. And then by the time you’re a middle-aged adult rat, you’re never going to try anything new for the rest of your life. It’s the exact same curve, which fascinated me."

⏯ I liked this longer advice from The Growth Equation blog:

Reacting is quick. Responding is slower. Responding creates more space between an event and what you do (or don’t do) with it. In that space, you give immediate emotions some room to breathe, better understand what is happening, make a plan using the most evolved part of your brain, then go forward accordingly.

Responding is harder than reacting. It takes more time and effort. It often requires letting a strong itch—the yearning to immediately do something, anything, about whatever just happened—be there without scratching it. But, like most things that require effort, responding also tends to be advantageous. You rarely regret deliberately responding to a challenging situation. You often regret automatically reacting to one.

🧠 Build your latticework! Revisit the back catalog of mental models.

What is the Frequency Illusion?

The frequency illusion is a cognitive bias that occurs after you notice something for the first time. You then have a tendency to notice it more often. This leads you to think that thing has an increased frequency of occurring, but it’s just an increased frequency of you perceiving it.

In simpler words, your attention is very selective.

For me, the classic example about cars rings true. Every time I have decided to buy a certain make and model of car it’s been surprising to see how many other people have the same car all of a sudden! Of course it’s not the case that there are more of these cars appearing, it’s just what I am perceiving has suddenly shifted. I’m no longer filtering out all the Volkswagens - I’m noticing them.

Why is this interesting?

The Frequency Illusion gives us incredible insight into our perception. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we see ALL the information coming to us from the world around us. But in reality our brains are heavily filtering what we perceive!

The brain is exposed to an incredible amount of information, and we cannot absorb every detail. The brain decides what to focus on and what to discard.

The Selective Attention Test is a really cool experiment that demonstrates how strongly attention shapes our perceptions.

I guess one of the lessons is to be careful what you pay attention to - because you probably will see more of it!

Want to go deeper?

💎 It definitely gives credence to Jim Rohn’s gem:

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

🎥 If you liked that selective attention test, here’s another good one, although not sure it works as well if you’re primed.

📖 I’m still getting through the mind bender The Case Against Reality which seem related to all these perception related models.

🔖 The Frequency Illusion is sometimes known as Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, selective attention bias or frequency bias.

🧠 Build your latticework! Revisit related mental models:

• Unknown Unknowns

• The Boiling Frog

• The Law of the Instrument

• Hindsight Bias

• The Observer Effect

• Base Rate Neglect

• Confirmation Bias

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What is Nature vs. Nurture?

Nature vs nurture is a long standing debate in science about the balance of factors that determine why we are each the way we are.

To what extent are you shaped by your genes?

To what extent are you shaped by the environment you’ve grown up in?

Is it nature - genetics, are we born that way?

Or is it nurture - our environment?

This is a complex debate, and it turns out it’s not so much nature versus nurture - but nature with nurture.

Why is this interesting?

I always find myself wondering about the massive mix of factors that make up ourselves and our lives. It’s fairly easy to imagine the impact of nurture - the influence of our parents or caregivers and our friends for example.

Sometimes it’s harder to see the impact of genes. Some would say in today’s society we tend to downplay the impact of genes:

“our intellectual mainstream is committed to” …[the false idea of the blank slate, which is] “the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves”

- The Blank Slate

What’s more, nature and nurture can interact. More complexity is added when you consider epigenetics - the study of how your behaviors and environment affect the way your genes work.

I like how Gabor Mate puts it:

In the real world there is no nature vs. nurture argument, only an infinitely complex and moment-by-moment interaction between genetic and environmental effects.

Want to go deeper?

🔖 This New Scientist post is a great deeper dive

💎 I like this gem:

It’s not that good parenting produces good children,

it’s that good children produce good parenting.

📖 The Nurture Assumption is a long but fascinating read, it’s worth it.

🤔 What’s your natural happiness level? Research shows a “happiness set point” that might be inborn:

The baseline level of happiness, or set point, is higher for some people than for others. In other words, some of you are naturally, or dispositionally, happier than others.

📚 Biographies are fun to read, but best considered fictional:

if we look at one particular person, it’s easy to come up with a story about how the home environment (the critical, demanding mother, the ineffectual father) shaped the child’s personality and produced the messed-up grownup we see today. That kind of post hoc speculation—unprovable, undisprovable—is the stock-in-trade of biographers.

🙃 To flip it all upside down read the mind bending The Case Against Reality!

🧠 Build your latticework. Revisit related models:

• Myelination

• The Narrative Fallacy

Convergent thinking.

It’s a bit of a mouthful. But these two different modes of thinking are an extremely useful way to think about your work.

What is it?

It is most interesting for knowledge workers, which most of you are.

[A knowledge worker is someone] whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include programmers, physicians, engineers, scientists ... etc [anyone] whose job is to "think for a living".

Knowledge work include stages of divergent thinking and convergent thinking.

What is divergent thinking?

The simplest way to describe divergent thinking is as using imagination. You might have heard of brainstorming, blue sky thinking, or ideation? All of these things involve divergent thinking.

In this mode of thinking you “diverge” in your ideas, meaning you can go in different directions without constraints.

Tiago Forte explained it well:

A creative endeavor begins with an act of divergence. You open the space of possibilities and consider as many options as possible.

The purpose of divergence is to generate new ideas, so the process is necessarily spontaneous, chaotic, and messy. You can’t fully plan or organize what you’re doing in divergence mode, and you shouldn’t try. This is the time to wander.

What is convergent thinking?

As important as divergence is, if we only diverge then we never get anywhere or finish anything! At some point we must narrow our focus and “converge” on a result of some kind. The result might be shipping the product feature or publishing the post.

Again from Tiago Forte:

Convergence forces us to eliminate options, make trade-offs, and decide what is truly essential. It is about narrowing the range of possibilities so that you can make forward progress and end up with a final result

In this mode of thinking we stop wandering, and add constraints. We need to make choices so we can execute the project and get to the finish line.

Why is this interesting?

Most work benefits from stages of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking.

Early on it is generally worth encouraging divergent thinking - having time to think in an unconstrained way. This allows valuable options to be generated.

But just as crucial is making a clear transition to convergent thinking, so you can delivery the finished work item.

Being aware of these two modes, and being able to frame conversations and “signpost” them - for yourself and collaborators - is very powerful.

Want to go deeper?

📌 Managers at Apple are said to run two meetings:

One is a free for all – a meeting to innovate with no constraints….totally blue sky.

… [The second] is a meeting that is more structured, and where constraints are considered…..where the how and the feasibility is really worked out.

Sounds a lot like a divergent thinking meeting then a convergent thinking one.

🤔 So what about lateral thinking vs. vertical thinking?

🔖  IDEO is a good resource if you want to learn more about design thinking.

📖 Building a Second Brain is a good read if you want to improve your personal information systems.

🧠 Build your latticework! Revisit related mental models:

• The Planning Fallacy

• Parkinson’s Law

• Groupthink and more about Groupthink

What is an Interviewer? And what is a Volunteer?

This model suggests there are two kinds of conversationalists: ‘Interviewers’ and ‘Volunteers’. Writer McKinley Valentine explains in her post:

Everyone knows about Interviewers. These are people who like to be asked lots of questions … And if they like you, they’ll show it by asking you lots of questions.

I’m not an Interviewer. I hate being asked a tonne of questions — it makes me feel like I’m being interrogated. Instead, I like my conversation partners to offer up information about themselves, and then leave a pause so I can offer up some info about myself in return. “Offerer” is clunky so I call this type a Volunteer —as in, they freely volunteer information.

Why is this interesting?

It’s useful to know which way you lean. The post has good advice to help you work it out. Ask yourself - how do you feel about talking about yourself?

If you feel it’s arrogant that might be a clue you have more of an Interviewer approach, but if you feel it’s being vulnerable it might suggest you have more of a Volunteer approach.

Interviews are relatively easy to identify by all the questions they ask. Volunteers can be less obvious, Valentine explains:

“a Volunteer will say “I like x because y…” They’ve revealed personal information and then left a pause which allows you to contribute your own response but doesn’t force you to, because there’s no direct question.

I lean more towards Volunteer. I wish I was better at asking questions. I have a habit of asking questions in indirect ways, by making a statement intended as an offer for comment. This has got me in trouble at times with Interviewer types, who think I’m disinterested!

What about you?

Want to go deeper?

🔖 Read the full origin post: How to Salvage Awkward Social Situations by Understanding Conversation Styles

💎 Yes, of course it’s never that simple! It’s a good time to remember this:

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

- George Box

🧠 Build your latticework! Revisit related mental models:

• Askers vs Guessers

• Expectations vs Agreements

• Fundamental Attribution Error

• Unknown Unknowns

What is Buridan’s Donkey?

The story of Buridan’s Donkey has many variations.

In one memorable variation it describes a hypothetical situation in which a hungry donkey stands between two identical piles of hay. The donkey normally goes to eat whichever hay is closest to him. In this case though, both piles are exactly the same size and distance apart. Unable to decide, the donkey eventually dies of hunger!

Why is this interesting?

The story of Buridan's Donkey can be interpreted in a few different ways.

It could be read as a warning against indecision, or so-called analysis paralysis. If they donkey just made a decision - any decision - it would not have starved. Similar to the idea of having a bias for action.

It could also be read as promoting the benefits of longer term thinking. The donkey would have survived if it have realized that it could go to eat one hay pile now, and go to the other later. Similar to this great advice not to be short sighted.

Or it could get you thinking about the nature of free will. This story can be read as a demonstration that there is no free will. You can go down that rabbit hole here.

Want to go deeper?

🔖 I just reread D. Siver's short and sweet Don't Be a Donkey post

💎 Choose your own analogy from all these gems! There are sources back to Aristotle for versions of this story. Sometimes the variation was a donkey stuck between hay and water. Another had a donkey who could not decide between oats and hay. One had a man faced with the choice of equally good dates.

🧠 Build your latticework! Revisit related mental models:

• The Planning Fallacy 🗓️

• Scarcity Bias 💎

• Regret Minimization Framework ⚰

• Action Bias 💥

🤔 Wondering if OpenAI's GPT-3 or GPT-4 could/should write this newsletter for me going forward?

Want to know why?

It’s called The Law of the Instrument. Let me explain…

What is The Law of the Instrument?

The law of the instrument is a cognitive bias in which people tend to rely too heavily on the same ‘tool’ for every purpose. We have a tendency to rely on the tool that is familiar to us. Like Buffet's barber holding his or her scissors thinking you need a haircut.

When Buffet said “don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut", he elaborated:

Be careful who you ask for advice as salespeople’s job is to sell you on what they’re selling. I’ve made this mistake many times, asking the salesperson if he thinks what he’s selling is worth it. They’ll always say yes. 

Why is this interesting?

It's great to keep this law in mind when consulting any kind of specialist. The law of the instrument extends further into higher risk areas - beyond just the barber. It applies broadly when dealing with specialists of any kind.

Specialists can include doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, mechanics and so on. Their framing, and often their incentives are not always totally aligned with yours.

I’ll leave you with this wise advice via Nassim Taleb:

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.

Want to go deeper?

🔖 Read my extended post Don't Ask the Barber if you Need a Haircut, in which I argue the merits of becoming more of a generalist in order to manage your specialist.

💎 The French have a concept called déformation professionnelle, which is our tendency to assess situations from the perspective of our profession. 

💎 Similarly, the Einstellung effect occurs when "a repeated solution to old problems is applied to a new problem even though a more appropriate response is available".

🤔 Maybe it’s most easily remembered with a little latin — caveat emptor — buyer beware.

🔨 Of course I have to include the classic quote, often attributed to Abraham Maslow:

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail

🧠 Build your latticework! Revisit related mental models:

• The Curse of Knowledge 🎓

• The Four Stages of Competence 💡

• Regression to the Mean 🏀

• Cognitive Reframing 🖼️

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This one sticks with you as you navigate the world. Read on, and become obsessed with base rates.

What is Base Rate neglect?

Base rate neglect is the tendency to base judgments on specifics, ignoring general statistical information.

In simpler words, we tend to put too much weight on the details of our one case, ignoring all the cases that came before it.

Here's a great example that illustrates base rate neglect:

Karen was a successful athlete in high school and college and continues to compete in several team and individual sports. Karen also follows professional sports and can recite team statistics with remarkable accuracy.

Which of the following descriptions is more likely?

a. Karen is a high school physical education (PE) teacher and coach.

b. Karen is an elementary school teacher. *

* Elementary school is called primary school where I'm from.

If you are like most people you guessed option a. Even if you did guess b, you can probably feel the intuitive pull towards option a.

The answer is option b, because there are far higher rates of elementary school teachers than high school PE teachers who are also coaches.

As this paper explains, "we tend to ignore or to underweight base rate probabilities (i.e., the proportion of elementary school teachers to high school PE teachers who are coaches). Instead we tend to "rely heavily on descriptive, individuating information" such as the fact Karen was an athlete.

Why is this interesting?

Base rate neglect comes up all the time. You'll notice yourself and others getting caught up in the details frequently.

Got a bad headache? It's unlikely you have a terminal illness.

Tested positive for a disease? It still might be unlikely you have the disease, check the false positive rate.

Password isn't working? It's probably not a software glitch, it's more likely you just got your password wrong.

Refactoring your SaaS app? It is likely to take longer than you expect, as the majority do. Ditto your kitchen remodel.

To combat base rate neglect? Daniel Kahneman suggests to say to your team "before we discuss this situation, what is the relevant base rate?” 

I'll leave you with this pithy advice often taught to new doctors:

When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

Want to go deeper?

🤔 Why are there more covid vaccinated people hospitalized than unvaccinated? Do vaccines not do anything? Take into account base rates of vaccination in the population.

📖 Kahneman's ever relevant classics Thinking Fast and Slow and the more recent Noise should be on every bookshelf.

📖 Factfulness is a top read that might help you internalized some base rates about the world.

🔖 Want to forecast better? Read more about Reference Class Forecasting in my post about The Planning Fallacy.

🧠 Build your latticework! Revisit related mental models:

• Occam's Razor 🪒

• Survivorship Bias 💰

• Regression to the Mean 🏀

• The Planning Fallacy 🗓️