Category: Attention
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Survivorship Bias
There’s a probably apocryphal story of a man who wrote to a number of wealthy people telling him that if they paid him a dollar he would accurately predict the winner of an upcoming NFL game. If he was wrong, he would refund their money. He got over a hundred takers and he sent half…
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Emotional Intensity At The Finish
When we need a pit stop during a road-trip, have you ever noticed how the urgency seems to increase just as we finally decide to pull off the freeway. By the time we arrive at the gas station, we feel like we are going to explode. Many times we assume that it’s because we just…
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Addicted to Urgency
The modern world rushes by us with a trillion distractions, each wanting to grab your focus and hold you occupied. Sometimes this is referred to as the tyranny of the urgent. It makes it sound like it holds us against our will and we just can’t help ourselves. But I think we like it. It…
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To Be, To Do, To Have : Three Kinds of Goals
When thinking through personal goals, there are three categories of goals that we might make: To Be Goals – These are self-improvement. The involve developing skillz. Examples include learning a new language, getting more sleep, being more punctual. You might think of these as goals that answer how you want to be characterized. To Do…
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The Experience and The Memory
This afternoon, I started to swim to this island. It looked like a short swim away, I mean it seemed to only be sticking out of the sea by about one or two feet. After swimming for a while, I started to see people standing on the island who had kayaked there. Given their height,…
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The Beauty and Horror of Emotions
Ever been in an argument and not be able to think of a single thing the offending person has done for you? We use words like always or never because no matter how hard we try our emotions cloud our thoughts. Yet without emotions, we would forget most of what we experience. My friend who…
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Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow
Ever had your loved one not come home when you expect? At first, we think they must have just been delayed in traffic, so we call their cell phone and don’t get an answer. Now we start to imagine some pretty creative scenarios; maybe they got in a car accident, or worse. As we dwell…
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Money and Contentment are By-Products
To see the picture in this image, you have to shake your head. Staring at the picture doesn’t work — the picture only comes through because of another action. It is a by-product. This is true of a lot of things in life: happiness, contentment, and money rarely if ever come by focusing on them.…
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How Do I Get More Done?
There are over 1700 apps on iOS for managing ToDo lists – many that cost money. If you could download and try each of them (say 1 per minute), it would take nearly 30 hours straight. When it comes to managing our life, we want something to blame. It can’t be us, so it must…
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The Know Nothing
In a study, participants were asked to estimate something about their own ability. They overestimated. Others were told that statistically every person overestimates their ability, then they were asked to make the estimate. They still overestimated their ability, BY THE SAME AMOUNT. In other words, they told themselves, “Yes, other people don’t think clearly about…