State of Energy & Change
Sep 1st
You’re taking a pleasantly hot afternoon stroll with a little time on your hands, and you come across a table with a couple of people offering you a free beverage if you’re willing to help them out with a small survey. You see the survey is only a few questions and is anonymous, the juice looks good, so you agree. After completing the survey, they offer you one of two beverage choices: a mint-ginger-acai juice, or a strawberry lemonade. Both are in glasses that are sweating from the cold and look delicious, which one do you choose?
A similar activity was performed as part of a behavioral economics study to try to understand people’s openness to new experiences compared with the amount of change they were experiencing in their lives. Those that had recently moved, changed jobs, or experienced other large changes more often chose the mint-ginger-acai instead of the strawberry lemonade. Those with more constancy chose the opposite.
This surprised me. Why would those with so much uncertainty gravitate toward something more uncertain? When we’ve attained some sense of comfort, it’s easy to simply try to maintain that and not to explore something new and uncertain. Without a doubt, change is stressful, but with it, we open ourselves to entirely new experiences in life.
(Photo Courtesy of Len Wick)
Epistemology And Human Fallibility
Aug 25th
I read quite a bit. I’m constantly energized by new ideas and books provide a way for me to swim in them. As I read, it’s fascinating to see interesting themes that tie different books together. I don’t recommend every book I read, but there are three books that I think are must reads.
- The Black Swan – Nicholas Taleb
- Amusing Ourselves To Death – Neil Postman
- Revising Prose – Richard Lanham
These three books are all extremely well written and all deal in one way or another with our epistemology — how we know what we know.
The Black Swan illustrates how poorly we, as humans, understand random events. We proudly predict the future, then something happens that we didn’t expect. We then rationalize that it was totally predictable, thereby returning our pride in our predictions. Knowing how much you don’t know is critical. Many of my blog entries illustrate this very theme. We delude ourselves into believing our perspective is whole when it is only partial.
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a polemic on how our culture establishes its standard for truth. A cultures media for discourse affects its standard of truth. We’ve moved from an oral culture, to a written culture, to a pictorial culture. Postman’s well written polemic reveals the TV’s inadequacies as a medium of discourse.
I’ve long had a hard time watching most news programs and this book enumerated why. Recently, my mother-in-law was watching the news and one reporter made a passionate plea for the US to exit Afghanistan. People are dying for a reason that no one knows, he argued sincerely. This was then followed by: “The Rockies lost the game against the Dodgers 3-2 last night…”. *sigh*
Revising Prose is the most specialized of these three and may only interest you if you’re interested in writing. Nevertheless, it shows the horrendous nature of the “Official Style”. He revises sentences like:
“The purpose of an environmental scan is to obtain a general understanding of the external business environment we are currently in and expect to be in over the near-term”
into:
“An environment scan surveys the current and foreseeable business environment.”
Revising Prose requires us to consider how we write is an expression of how we think. Writing vaguely indicates vague thinking.
We are limited in our ability to know. We prefer to think without considering how we think. All three of these books will challenge and provide clarity on how we can swim in the world of ideas with greater clarity.
Periods and Question Marks
Aug 17th
Sometime ago I worked with someone who I occasionally meet for lunch. I found that I enjoyed the conversation so long as I ended all of my sentences with question marks. If I did so, he would talk and share a wealth of opinion. As soon as I started using periods, he started looking at his watch.
I was reminded of him this last week when I met with a cadre of sales and marketing people. People full of opinions they want to share. I decided that one way to measure someone is by the ratio of periods to question marks they use. Question marks indicate a desire to listen and share. Periods simply mean you’re talking.
Some people presume to know exactly what we need to hear and are full of periods. Some don’t have enough information yet to target their comments, and so instead of adding insight, add frustration. Others know they don’t know things and wait for questions and ask some of their own.
Of course, when I judge others like this, my first thought is to wonder about my ratio. Like when I was eating dinner at a friend’s house, and his wife said sternly to his daughter: “You’ve spilled spaghetti all over your shirt!” At which point both my friend and I looked down at our own shirts just to check before making any further comments.
So have you ever considered your ratio of question marks to periods?
Where Chocolate Goes to Die
Aug 11th
Perhaps no one is like my wife and me, but we have a place in our pantry where chocolate goes to die. Actually, for quite some time, we had a place where all snack food would go to die. We would eat most of a particular snack food, but then since no one wanted to finish it (because then we wouldn’t have any more), it would get placed in a particular pantry that I called “The Snack Graveyard”. Turns out this is a fairly common human trait.
The New York Times had an article on this tendency: Carpe Diem? Maybe Tomorrow. They say:
Once you start procrastinating pleasure, it can become a self-perpetuating process if you fixate on some imagined nirvana. The longer you wait to open that prize bottle of wine, the more special the occasion has to be.
Unfortunately, we overestimate the pleasure we will get from big enjoyable experiences. We are better off enjoying small pleasures throughout our life: eating a nice chocolate, buying a nice smelling soap, or splurging on nice dinner out. The sum of these will exceed the pleasure we get from buying a new house or a new car. So instead of procrastinating a small pleasure, consider whether now is a good time to savor life.
You Can’t Think Your Way Out
Aug 4th
You’ve come down with a serious cold. You feel miserable. You start trying to figure out who or what gave you this cold: Was it not washing your hands after that bus ride? Was it that guy that coughed on you while you were standing in line to get groceries? We all want answers to these questions. We’re also good at concocting explanations for why something is the way that it is.
Unfortunately, most of the time we don’t have nearly enough information. That doesn’t stop our emotions from telling us that we need to avoid whatever caused this, so our intellect works overtime trying to figure it out. But you can’t think your way out. No matter how hard you try, your brain doesn’t have sufficient building blocks to reconstruct the explanation with any form of certainty. The result of this is two-fold. First, we waste a lot of energy seeking an explanation this forever alludes us. Second, when our brain gets tired, we might settle on one or more of our explanations, creating needless fear about something innocuous.
It isn’t just explaining past events that create this situation. We also face this when making a very difficult decision about our future. We collect data. We think through pros and cons. We think through the possible outcomes and try to assess the statistical risk. But in the end, there is no assurance, no simple solution, no “right” answer.
In either case, we have to recognize our own limitations — to admit that there are some things, we will simply never know. Recognizing this can let us move on to things that we can impact. We stop trying to reach perfection in our decisions (or explanations) and start focusing on what’s next. We make the best decision we can, and trust God with the result.
Our ability to think is an amazing gift and we should use it to the best of our abilities but it is finite. You can’t think your way out of every problem.
The Fear of the Remembered
Jul 28th
It’s amazing to me how many people worriedly ask me about the safety of our living in Mexico. Yes, Mexico has lots of news of drug wars, kidnapping and murders. Each of these events is tragic as well as memorable. This is why it casts a shadow on the entire country. In Guadalajara, where we live, it feels as safe as any urban city in America and in many respects safer. The reason people fear Mexico comes mostly from something called the Availability Heuristic: We associated the chance of something happening with how easily we are able to recall an incidence of it happening.
For example, newspapers reported recently that 16 people died at the Love Parade [a huge electronic music fest in Germany] this year by being trampled to death. Scary! You can imagine worried parents urging their children not to go next year. Of course, when you think about it, there were 1.4 million people there so the chance of dying at the Love Parade is roughly 1 in 100,000. Compare that to the odds of dying in an automobile accident in a year: 1 in 6500. Yet how many parents urge their kids not to drive?
The problem with worrying about the things we most easily remember is that they are not worth worrying about and distract from other important things in life. This is the root of terrorism’s power. Create a powerful, tragic, easily remembered incident and people will live in fear. Governments will go to ridiculous lengths to protect from these things happening again, detracting attention from better ways to improve security.
Fears are most often countered by experiencing the event without anything going bad. People feel safer near the place where they live day to day, and yet are petrified of some other place even if statistically it’s safer. My parents were living in Israel for some time and they visited Afghanastan. While they were there, they talked to some local Afghan’s who said, “You live in Israel! How could you live there?! It’s so dangerous!”. This coming from people who are living in a country that has been at war for decades.
Our fear is heavily affected by tragic horrible stories that we remember rather than reality. So when you’re tempted to be afraid of some tragic thing on the news, you should stop and consider whether the fear is justified, or if you are falling prey to the availability heuristic.
Life By Autopilot
Jul 21st
We live in a highly complex world but with a very limited amount of focus. This limits the amount of conscious decisions we make. The rest of our life runs in autopilot: we decide not to decide. This, as it turns out, is our default choice. It’s why states that require you to opt-in for organ donation have significantly lower participation than states where you opt-out. How many of us want to actively decide on where our organs go after we die?
As discussed in the commencement speech I linked to in my last entry, we can choose what we think about. Everyday thousands of things scream for our attention. By default, we think about the loudest of those things and the rest are decided on without thought. We simply use our autopilot.
Living life without challenging the autopilot will result in moments of surprise. Drown by the urgent, we occasionally gasp wondering how we got here. Unfortunately, the autopilot doesn’t sound alarms for significant things: autopilot will happily crash into a mountain it doesn’t know is there.
It’s easy to let our autopilot make the hard decisions and instead focus on the things that seem more fun at the moment. However, our health, relationships, and life are far more impacted by our default actions day-in and day-out, than they are by a brief decision to do something different once. Reflecting on our own autopilot can teach us ways to specifically improve it, and over the years, this can make all the difference.
Have you considered whether your autopilot is making the right choices?
Is It Their Personality or Just Circumstances?
Jul 13th
Last summer I read my first Kindle book Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It’s a perfect book for the kindle since it’s over 1,000 pages, 100 of which are footnotes, vital to understanding the book, if understanding is really fully possible. While I was glad for the experience, the book is not for everyone. What is for everyone is his Commencement Address given at Kenyon college, where he discusses the way we experience our lives in contrast to the way we view others lives.
I was reminded of this speech because twice in the last week I came across different descriptions of the Fundamental Attribution Error. This essentially states that we are prone to assess the cause of action in others as coming from their personality rather than the circumstances they are in. One example last week came from Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirkey. He discusses how Generation-X was at one time described as slackers without ambition. This assessment was made during an economic slump and as the economics picked up, the Gen-Xers suddenly went to work with gusto. They are now described as having an entrepreneurial spirit. Actions (acting like a slacker vs. being industrious) are heavily dependent on the circumstances (economy). Generational observations, however, ignore circumstances and commit the Fundamental Attribution Error by assigning observed actions to some character trait in that generation. Even when subsequent predictions came to opposite conclusions (industrious vs lazy), they continue to be made.
This error applies to us at a personal level as well. When someone cuts us off on the road, we likely attribute this to them being a jerk; however, the circumstances might be that they were rushing home because their wife was going into labor. Or when you call someone you don’t know, and they are short with you. Are they just a rude person? Or was it that their two-year old just threw a tantrum right before the phone rang? Since we are unable to know most of the circumstances that affect others around us, we make judgments about their personality. We attribute their actions as coming from the core of who they are.
However, when we judge our own actions, we judge them entirely based on circumstances. We are fully aware of our own circumstances and see our actions as stemming from them. We think: “oops, I just cut that person off; I didn’t see them in the other lane” instead of what we often think about others: “What a jerk!”. We know it was just a mistake, the other driver thinks it’s our personality.
Because this error is common to all of us, knowing about it can help us pause when we make a rash judgment about another person or even an entire group of people. Instead, we can take a moment to recognize the many circumstances that are unknown to us and if we are creative, can imagine circumstances where their action might be justified. Doing this can help us feel less offended and ultimately, much happier.
[If you haven't already and have some time, I highly recommend you check out the commencement speech. It covers a deeper theme about thinking about what we think about and has a good joke at the beginning to boot. As always, let me know what you think. Also, if you are interested in what I have been reading, I keep my reading list up to-date in my Books Section]
The Unstated Rules
Jul 7th
Earlier today, my wife, Ann, and I were eating at a restaurant and we watched a two-year old solve a maze like the one above, connecting point A with point B. She solved the maze in a couple of seconds, then moved on to the next activity on her placement. How did she do it so quickly? She simply connected point A and B with a straight line. The visceral reaction to this — “that’s cheating, it’s not how a maze should be solved” — is exactly the kind of reaction we have when the rules that we believe are constant suddenly change.
We like to believe that the rules of the past remain immutable. A constant we can depend on. But they do change, and this is often how newcomers to a field are often able to pull off what the establishment couldn’t. Like the 2-year-old, they didn’t know you must not cross the lines when solving the maze and suddenly the game changes. Interestingly, the arguments made by the establishment when someone disrupts the game are the same as those who watch someone else solve a maze by simply drawing a straight line.
The problem is that when rules change they don’t tell you that they have changed. They don’t stand up and scream to be heard; they simply no longer apply. It is only by reevaluating the rules that you discover their absence.
So if you’re facing a difficult problem relationally or in your business and you can’t see an easy solution, is it because you are playing with rules that no longer exist? Are their rules that you depend on to keep your competitive edge? Are you sure they still apply?
In Search of Simplicity
Jun 30th
I just finished reading When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein. This book documents yet another example of humans desire to seek simplification even when that simplification doesn’t truly model reality.
In short, LTC believed they had figured out a way to make money that was very low risk. Each transaction could only make a little money, so they took out huge amounts of loans in order to maximize their return. For 3 years, they returned double digit percent returns to the fund only to lose more than they had made in 5 weeks during 1998. In their models, the chance of this happening was zero; the reality is that they had ’simplified’ the complexity of life into a formula, and failed.
Many entries on this blog document the various ways that we try to find a simple answer to the complex world around us. This commoditization of life helps us deal with the complexities that we face every day. But if we don’t recognize our over-simplifications, we can easily fall into a false sense of confidence that leads to our own disgrace.
Other entries that illustrate our desire for simplicity: