If it's a talking point on Reddit, you might be early. If it's a talking point on LinkedIn, you're definitely late.

The Early-Late Razor

If someone brags about their success or happiness, assume it’s half what they claimIf someone downplays their success or happiness, assume it’s double what they claim

Bragging Razor

If stuck with 2 equal options, pick the one that feels like it will produce the most luck later down the line.for eg- I used this razor to study Masters rejecting a lucrative job offer. In hindsight, it was the highest ROI decision I've ever made.

Luck Razor

"The value of every business is 100% subject to government interest rates" - Warren Buffett

Buffett's Law

Break down the investments your parents made in you: Time, Love, Energy, and Money.If they are still alive, aim to hit a positive ROI (or at least break even.)

Parent Rule

If worried about people's opinions, remember they are too busy worrying about other people's opinions of them. 99% of the time you're an extra in someone else's movie

Narcissism Razor

If struggling to think creatively about a subject, transform it:• Turn a thought into a written idea.• A written idea into a drawing.• A drawing into an equation.• An equation into a conversation.In the process of transforming it, you begin to spot new creative connections.

Creativity Razor

Historians now recognize the Roman Empire fell in 476 - but it wasn't acknowledged by Roman society until many generations later.If you wait for the media to inform you, you'll either be wrong or too late.

The Roman Empire Rule

If it doesn't deny the law of physics, then assume it's possible. Do not confuse society's current lack of knowledge -- with this knowledge being impossible to attain.E.g. The smartphone seems impossible to someone from the 1800s -- but it was possible, they just had a lack of knowledge.

Physics Razor

If procrastinating, you have 2 ways to solve it:• Make the pain of inaction > Pain of action• Make the pleasure of action > Pleasure of inaction

Skinner's Law

If you have 2 quality people that would benefit from an intro to one another, always do it.Networks don't divide as you share them, they multiply.

Network Razor

Assume every media article contains a % of false information.Sandbox the article from your worldview until you've:• Seen primary sources• Spoken to 3 domain experts

Gell-Mann Razor

If presented with two equal candidates for a role, pick the one with the least amount of charisma.The uncharismatic one has got there despite their lack of charisma. The charismatic one has got there with the aid of their charisma.

Taleb's Surgeon

If unsure who to work with, pick the person that has the best chances of breaking you out of a 3rd world prison.

High Agency Razor

If someone brags about "6 figures" -- assume it's closer to $100K than $900K.

The 6-Figure Razor

If unsure what action to pick, let your 90-year-old self on death bed choose it.

Bezos Razor

If you go from doing a task weekly to daily, you achieve 7 years of output in 1 year. If you apply a 1% compound interest each time, you achieve 54 years of output in 1 year.

Everyday Razor

When you see a photo of an influencer looking attractive on Instagram -- assume there are 99 worse variations of that photo you haven't seen.They just picked the best one.

Instagram Razor

The most useful razors and rules I've found!

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Health

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Motivation & Inspiration

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Learning & Education

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Books

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Society, Arts & Culture

"The most useful razors and rules I've found"

We tend to forget things that we can easily search for. Ex: "What was that movie name? God, I just read about it yesterday!"

12. 🔍Google Effect

Our failures are sensational, but our success is our hard work. Ex: "I passed that exam because I worked hard. I failed that interview because I got late."

14. 👨‍🦰Self-serving Bias

Awareness of these biases is the first step then."The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."

We believe that others are more influenced by social media and mass media than we are. And we often judge them. Ex: "You are clearly watching a lot of news"

2. 👀Third-person effect

We tend to overestimate the probability of bad outcomes. Because by default our brain leans toward negative probability. Ex: "I am sure I won't find a cab in time for the interview."

7. 😔Pessimism Bias

We tend to agree more with folks in our group, than outside of our group. Ex: "Ankur is from Delhi, so I like him more than someone from Mumbai. Because I am from Delhi."

16. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑In-group favoritism

We don't think we have biases. But we see it in others. Ex: "I am not biased."

17. 🧑‍🦯Blind Spot Bias

Once we know something, we think that everyone else also knows it. Ex: "I shouldn't share this content. It's so basic. Everyone knows this."

13. 📖Curse of knowledge

We prefer things to stay the same; change is mostly considered a negative thing. And often change is uncomfortable Ex: "Ankur continues to be friends with toxic people because they are childhood friends."

3. 💰Status Quo bias

We overestimate how much attention people pay to our words and appearance. But in reality, everyone thinks what others think of them. Ex: Ankur is worried that everyone will hate his new shoes.

1. 🔦Spotlight effect

We think future possibilities are affected by past events, even though they are independent. Ex: "Ankur is tossing the coin and heads have come up 9 times. Now it will tail for sure."

11. 💰Gambler's Fallacy

We judge others on their personality or behavior, but we judge ourselves on the situation. Ex: "Ankur is poor. He must be lazy. I am poor because I did not get the right opportunities."

15. 🧑‍⚖️Fundamental Attribution Error

We assume that the stories of those who survived are the entire story. Because the "dead" are not there to share any story and hence we don't really know of them... Ex: "So many unicorns are being made every day. Entrepreneurship must be really awesome."

4. 💪Survivorship Bias

We remember incomplete tasks more than completed tasks. It also applies to our successes and failures. Ex: "Ankur continues to feel guilty that he hasn't finished those 2 tasks, ignoring that he has finished 10 others."

5. 📝Zeigarnik Effect

We draw different conclusions from the same information, basis how the information is presented. And that makes all the difference. Ex: "Only 5% of Indians invest in the stock market. There must be something wrong with it.Only 5% of Indians invest in the stock market. Imagine the potential."

8. 🖼️Framing Effect

We invest more in things that have cost us something, even if we face negative outcomes. The sunk cost fallacy occurs because we are not purely rational decision-makers and are often influenced by our emotions. Ex: "Ankur is still holding on to that stock investment with a -80% return. In fact, he is investing more."

10. 📉Sunk Cost Fallacy

We tend to think that the past was better than the future will be. Ex: "In our times, we had a lot more patience."

9. 🔮Declinism

We tend to place a higher value on things that we have worked on ourselves. Ex: "Isn't the cake awesome? I made it."

6. 🍥Ikea Effect

I wish we were taught about these biases in school, in addition to what school taught us. These biases prepare us for life in more ways than the curriculum does. - Ankur Warikoo

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Personal Development

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Habits

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Leadership & Management

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Science & Nature

17 Ways Our Mind Plays Tricks On Us🧠

The plane crush can serve a function - it can make flying less miserable. It can help you cope with probably the worst part of travelling.
Even the plane's design can lend itself to flirtatious imaginings. The small seats and little leg room can be oddly romantic. Researchers found that when people are in anxiety-inducing situations, they may misattribute the feeling of nerves for attraction. It makes it then not unusual to believe you could meet someone you like on a plane.

A catalyst for romance

A 2008 study that surveyed 5,000 flyers found that one in every 50 people said they met the love of their life on a flight.
<ul>
<li>This expectation is regularly reinforced by movies and television, where an in-flight experience changes the character's life.</li>
<li>Another is the rise of transformative travel. Vacation is sold as a form of therapy. When planning for a vacation, the anticipation of travelling is especially thrilling for singles to imagine that they may find romance along the way.</li>
</ul>

The idea that travel is a catalyst for romance

Why do cramped seats, gross food, and no personal space make us think of … romance?

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Technology & The Future

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Communication

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Love & Relationships

The persistent myth of finding love on a plane

The need for cognitive closure, in many settings, can be a great strength. An instinct to make a judgment and then stick with it stops the needless second-guessing and prolonged debate. It feels productive. It feels like progress.But there are risks associated with a high need for closure: when people begin craving the emotional satisfaction that comes from making a decision, they are more likely to make hasty decisions and less likely to reconsider an unwise choice.

Our Need For Cognitive Closure

"The people who are most successful at learning—those who are able to digest the data surrounding them, who absorb insights embedded in their experiences and take advantage of information flowing past—are the ones who know how to use disfluency to their advantage. They transform what life throws at them, rather than just taking it as it comes. They know the best lessons are those that force us to do something and to manipulate information. They take data and transform it into experiments whenever they can. "

We’re more likely to recognize discoveries hidden in our own experiences when necessity pushes us, when panic or frustrations cause us to throw old ideas into new settings.<ul><li>The Post-it note was invented by a chemical engineer who, frustrated by bookmarks falling out of his church hymnal, decided to use a new adhesive to make them stay put.</li><li>Cellophane was developed by an exasperated chemist looking for a way to protect tablecloths from wine spills.</li><li>Infant formula was created, in part, by an exhausted father who suspended vegetable nutrients in powder so he could feed his crying child.</li></ul>

The Concept of "Creative Desperation"

Motivation is a skill that can be learned. People can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick is realizing that a condition for motivation to develop is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings.To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control. One way to prove to ourselves that we are in control is by making decisions.

Self-Motivation: Feeling In Control By Making Decisions

Here is an example of a flowchart to use when setting a goal:WHAT IS YOUR STRETCH GOAL?To run a marathonWHAT IS A SPECIFIC SUB-GOAL?Run seven miles without stoppingHOW WILL YOU MEASURE SUCCESS?Twice around the park, no walkingIS THIS ACHIEVABLE?Yes, if I run three miles a week.IS THIS REALISTIC?Yes, if I wake up early on Monday, Wednesday, and FridayWHAT IS YOUR TIMELINE?Run three miles this week, four miles next week, five miles…

The Goal-Setting Flow Chart

<ul><li>Internal locus of control translates into our belief that we can influence our destiny through the choices we make; it has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and a longer life span. This is a skill that can be learned.</li><li>Having an external locus means believing that our life is primarily influenced by events outside our control; it is correlated with higher levels of stress because an individual perceives the situation as beyond his or her coping abilities.</li></ul>

Internal Vs External Locus Of Control

Psychological safety is a "shared belief, held by members of a team, that a group is a safe place for taking risks. It is a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.”(Amy Edmondson, 1999)This characterizes a working environment filled with trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.

Psychological Safety

This system for making decisions allows us to define our dilemmas, collect data, brainstorm solutions, debate alternative approaches, and conduct iterative experiments.This approach to problem-solving removes the emotion so we can view our problems more objectively.

Decision-Making Systems: The Engineering Design Process

The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation convince us we’re in control and endow our actions with larger meaning.An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.

Choices That Influence Our Motivation

"Every choice we make in life is an experiment. Every day offers fresh opportunities to find better decision-making frames. We live in a time when data is more plentiful, cheaper to analyze, and easier to translate into action than ever before. Smartphones, websites, digital databases, and apps put information at our fingertips. But it only becomes useful if we know how to make sense of it."

Reactive thinking is how we build habits, and it’s why to-do lists and calendar alerts are so helpful: Rather than needing to decide what to do next, we can take advantage of our reactive instincts and automatically proceed.But the downside of reactive thinking is that habits and reactions can become so automatic they overpower our judgment. Once our motivation is outsourced, we simply react.

Reactive Thinking: How We Allocate Our Attention

Cognitive tunneling can cause people to become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of their eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks. It’s what keeps someone glued to their smartphone as the kids wail or pedestrians swerve around them on the sidewalk.Once in a cognitive tunnel, we lose our ability to direct our focus. Instead, we latch on to the easiest and most obvious stimulus, often at the cost of common sense.

Cognitive Tunneling

Google spent 2 years and enormous amounts of resources studying over 180 teams to figure out the answer to their question: What makes a team effective?Their findings - five key norms: Teams need to believe that their work is important. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful. Teams need clear goals and defined roles. Team members need to know they can depend on one another. But, most important, teams need psychological safety.

Understand Team Effectiveness: Google's Project Aristotle

Make sure you are exposed to a full spectrum of experiences.We all have a natural tendency to be optimistic, to ignore our mistakes and forget others’ tiny errors. But making good predictions relies on realistic assumptions, and those are based on our experiences. If we pay attention only to good news, we’re handicapping ourselves

How To Get The Right Assumptions

“Our brains crave reducing things to two or three options. So when we’re faced with a lot of information, we start automatically arranging it into mental folders and subfolders and sub subfolders. This ability to digest large amounts of information by breaking it into smaller pieces is how our brains turn information into knowledge. We learn which facts or lessons to apply in a given situation by learning which folders to consult."

At the core of Bayes’ rule is a principle: Even if we have very little data, we can still forecast the future by making assumptions and then skewing them based on what we observe about the world.Humans are astoundingly good Bayesian predictors, even if we’re unaware of it. Humans can make these kinds of calculations without having to think about them very hard. Sometimes, however, we make mistakes.

Bayesian Thinking

In the past two decades, the amount of information present in our daily lives has skyrocketed. Unfortunately, however, our ability to learn from information hasn’t necessarily kept pace with its proliferation.In theory, the ongoing explosion in information should make the right answers more obvious. In practice, though, being surrounded by data often makes it harder to decide. This inability to take advantage of data as it becomes more plentiful is called “information blindness.”

Information Blindness

<ul><li>The “star” model: executives hire from elite universities or other successful companies and give employees huge amounts of autonomy.</li><li>The “engineering” model: engineers, as a group, hold the most sway.</li><li>The “bureaucracies”: Executives write extensive job descriptions, organizational charts, and employee handbooks.</li><li>The “autocracies”: the rules, job descriptions, and organizational charts ultimately point to the desires and goals of one person, usually the founder or CEO.</li><li>The “commitment” model: a throwback to an age when people happily worked for one company their entire life.</li></ul>

Five Types Of Company Cultures

Leave work feeling satisfied with what you’ve accomplished, with help of a few “productivity hacks”.

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Problem Solving

Productivity Hacks

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of The Power of Habit comes a fascinating book that explores the science of productivity, and why managing how you think is more important than what you think—with an appendix of real-world lessons to apply to your life. At the core of Smarter Faster Better are eight key productivity concepts—from motivation and goal setting to focus and decision making—that explain why some people and companies get so much done. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics—as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters—this painstakingly researched book explains that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don’t merely act differently. They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways. A young woman drops out of a PhD program and starts playing poker. By training herself to envision contradictory futures, she learns to anticipate her opponents’ missteps—and becomes one of the most successful players in the world. A group of data scientists at Google embark on a four-year study of how the best teams function, and find that how a group interacts is more important than who is in the group—a principle, it turns out, that also helps explain why Saturday Night Live became a hit. A Marine Corps general, faced with low morale among recruits, reimagines boot camp—and discovers that instilling a “bias toward action” can turn even the most directionless teenagers into self-motivating achievers. The filmmakers behind Disney’s Frozen are nearly out of time and on the brink of catastrophe—until they shake up their team in just the right way, spurring a creative breakthrough that leads to one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. What do these people have in common? They know that productivity relies on making certain choices. The way we frame our daily decisions; the big ambitions we embrace and the easy goals we ignore; the cultures we establish as leaders to drive innovation; the way we interact with data: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive. In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charles Duhigg explained why we do what we do. In Smarter Faster Better, he applies the same relentless curiosity, deep reporting, and rich storytelling to explain how we can improve at the things we do. It’s a groundbreaking exploration of the science of productivity, one that can help anyone learn to succeed with less stress and struggle, and to get more done without sacrificing what we care about most—to become smarter, faster, and better at everything we do.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Power of Habit and “master of the life hack” (GQ) explores the fascinating science of productivity and offers real-world takeaways to apply your life, whether you’re chasing peak productivity or simply trying to get back on track. “Duhigg melds cutting-edge science, deep reporting, and wide-ranging stories to give us a fuller, more human way of thinking about how productivity actually happens.”—Susan Cain, author of Quiet   In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charles Duhigg explained why we do what we do. In Smarter Faster Better, he applies the same relentless curiosity and rich storytelling to how we can improve at the things we do.    At the core of Smarter Faster Better are eight key concepts—from motivation and goal setting to focus and decision making—that explain why some people and companies get so much done. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics—as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters—this book reveals that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don’t merely act differently. They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.   Smarter Faster Better is a story-filled exploration of the science of productivity, one that can help us learn to succeed with less stress and struggle—and become smarter, faster, and better at everything we do.

Charles Duhigg is an American journalist and non-fiction author. He was a reporter for The New York Times, currently writes for The New Yorker Magazine and is the author of two books on habits and productivity, titled The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business and Smarter Faster Better.

Charles Duhigg

Smarter Faster Better

Marie Kondo uses inversion to help people declutter their homes, by asking them to choose what they want to keep, not what they want to get rid of.This shift in mindset inverts decluttering by focusing on what you want to keep rather than what you want to discard.

Inversion and decluttering

The idea is to identify challenges and points of failure so you can develop a plan to prevent them ahead of time.Imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now. Then fast forward 6 months and assume the project or goal has failed. Tell the story of how it happened and ask yourself, “What could cause this to go horribly wrong?”

The "kill the company" strategy

Is the way of thinking in which you consider the opposite of what you want.Inversion puts a spotlight on errors and roadblocks that are not obvious at first glance. What if the opposite was true? What if I focused on a different side of this situation? Instead of asking how to do something, ask how to not do it.

Inversion

Applying inversion to productivity you could ask, “What if I wanted to decrease my focus? How do I end up distracted?” The answer to these question may help you discover interruptions you can eliminate to free up more time and energy each day.

Inversion and productivity

The ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which translates to a "premeditation of evils." 1 The goal of this exercise was to envision the negative things that could happen in life.

"The most useful razors and rules I've found"

17 Ways Our Mind Plays Tricks On Us🧠

The persistent myth of finding love on a plane

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

Smarter Faster Better

CURATED BY

"The most useful razors and rules I've found"

17 Ways Our Mind Plays Tricks On Us🧠

The persistent myth of finding love on a plane

It's time to Read like a Pro.

Smarter Faster Better

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.