Inefficiency creates a buffer

Total efficiency constrains us. We become highly invested in maintaining the status quo because that is where we excel.

However, innovation is a threat and change is terrifying. Being perfect at something is dangerous if that is all you can do.

Inefficiency forces us to develop other traits that give us the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances.

Leave aside the fear of new challenges. Leave aside the fear of not being the best. When you put yourself in situations where you aren't the most skilled, you learn and grow and adapt. When change comes, you will have a broader range of skills to explore new possibilities.

• Create a full inventory of expenses in front of you: Categorize them into fixed and variable; urgent and non-urgent; necessities and luxury; avoidable and unavoidable.
• You can create a hierarchy of needs and decide which one’s to address first. It’s all about prioritizing. 
• Accept that you have limited resources and unlimited wants. But you have to manage your resources. The sooner you accept this fact, the better you can control your impulses towards avoidable expenditures.

It’s a statement wherein you can jot down your assets and liabilities.

• Pull together your bank statements and other proofs of the liabilities
• List down your assets like the bank balance, all investments, home value, and value of other assets.
• Take a sum of all the assets to arrive at the total value of your assets.
• List down your liabilities the (car loan, home loan, credit card balances etc.)
• The sum of all the liabilities will show the value of the money you owe.
• When you subtract the value of liabilities from assets, you get your Net Worth.
  

This becomes a problem when you’re spending for a life you can’t afford. It puts pressure on your budget and encourages you to live in a paycheck to paycheck cycle.

Assess your financial situation, cut back on your expenses, prioritize your money goals, and then come up with a new spending plan.

It’s hard to stick to a budget that doesn’t have a goal.

When there isn’t one, your budget becomes an afterthought rather than a spending plan to reach your financial goals.

Technology, just like the mind, is a very good slave, but a bad master. The technologies by itself are life-giving and useful, but if we are spending the whole day on Twitter, fighting with whoever we don’t agree with, we are ruining our psychological health.

We tend to spiral into the news black hole for hours, but just looking at the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post once or twice a day should be enough.

Technology is neutral by itself, and how we use that tool matters. 

• An email is a great tool, which completely transformed how an office works, though it wasn’t designed for offices.
• Similarly, the Facebook Like button was designed as a shortcut to writing a good comment, but it unexpectedly turned out to be a tool to measure the popularity of a post.

• When automobile safety laws were introduced, the drivers started taking more risks while driving, leading to more pedestrian accidents.
• Children (and even adults) take more physical risks while playing a sport with protective gear.
• Safety features like Anti-lock brakes in vehicles ended up increasing the accidents for taxi drivers in Germany
• Child-proof caps on medicine bottles made parents careless about their being opened by kids, including the ones which don’t have the safety feature.

Having a safety device in place, and armed with the knowledge that we can push the envelope a bit, the appetite for risk increases.

• People who have an emergency fund in place tend to be less careful about their investments.
• People wearing a face-mask in this global pandemic feel like they are safer in crowded places (It’s a face mask, not an Iron Man suit).

Part of the expected value is estimating the chance or probability of the situation.

Many people have poor judgement calculating real probabilities. They overstate the chance of rare events and underestimate the possibility of common events.

For example, many people don't like to fly on planes because they are scared they might be in a crash, yet the actual chance is close to zero.

The cost or payoff is not always clear.

For example, people feel more pain from the loss of a dollar than pleasure from a dollar gained. It is called loss aversion. 

The prospect theory combines the ideas of loss aversion and over- and under-weighing the odds. It helps to calculate the real expected value.

Few people would choose to be lazy.

• Many 'lazy' people haven't yet found what they want to do or are unable to do it.
• Some people have become so specialized that they no longer grasp their purpose, and could fall into the trap of not bothering.
• Some people sabotage themselves by never trying because they fear success or they fear failure.
• There are also those that feel so hopeless that they cannot begin to think through it. 

Idleness, or to be doing nothing, is not the same as laziness. Idleness can amount to laziness, but can also be a clever way of accomplishing tasks.

Idleness can be used to observe life, gather inspiration, gain perspective or to maintain health for important tasks. Sometimes the best way of using time is to waste it.

But you don’t have to constantly be battling your fears. You only need to be courageous for 20 seconds at a time.

If you courageously confront fear for 20 seconds every single day, before you know it, you’ll be in a different socio-economic and social situation.

The first purpose of sleep is restoration.

Every day, your brain accumulates metabolic waste as it goes about its normal neural activities. Sleeping restores the brains healthy condition by removing these waste products. Accumulation of these waste products has been linked to many brain-related disorders.

The second purpose of sleep is memory consolidation.

Sleep is crucial for memory consolidation, which is responsible for your long term memories. Insufficient or fragmented sleep can hamper your ability to remember facts and feelings/emotions.

Encouraging people to be curious generates workplace improvements.

When we are curious, we view tough situations more creatively. Studies have found that curiosity is associated with less defensive reactions to stress and less aggressive reactions to provocation.

Curiosity encourages members of a group to put themselves in one another’s shoes and take an interest in one another’s ideas rather than focus only on their own perspective.

Thus, conflicts are less heated, and groups achieve better results.