When trying to pick the best among many options, how many samples should you try before you commit? This is known as the optimal stopping problem. Mathematicians tell us that, to maximize the chances of the best outcome, we ought to ditch the first 37% of any options. In psychology, people tend to either "explore" or "exploit" more.But, sadly for us, relationships are a bit messier than probability would have it.

The 37 Percent Rule: Key Takeaways

The primary puzzle is asking how long do you spend sampling options to give the optimum chances of a successful final decision? How many frogs must you kiss to secure your chances of getting a prince?Mathematicians have given us an answer: 37%. The basic idea is that, if you need to make a decision from 100 different options, you should sample and discard (or hold off on) the first 37. The 37% rule is a calibration period during which you identify what works and what does not. From the rejected 37%, we choose the best and keep that information in our heads moving forward.

The Mathematical Question And The Solution

Mathematics offers us the best answer to the “optimal stopping problem.” But there’s just one big issue with it: Humans are not rational probability-crunching machines. In fact, the opposite is usually true. We’re beautifully, infuriatingly, creatively, and messily chaotic.In psychology and economics, there is what’s known as a “explore/exploit” tradeoff. This asks whether you should go with a guaranteed “win” (the exploit) or risk going somewhere else for an unknown outcome (explore). The degree to which someone will explore or exploit will depend on our curiosity and risk appetite.

Exploit or Explore

The world of interpersonal relations is hard to put a number on. Probabilities and game theory do funny things when you input the wobbly, fuzzy variables at play in human behaviour.But the biggest problem with the 37% rule, or the idea of “exploring,” when applied to dating is that one date(or even 10) is never enough.   When it comes to buying things or making life decisions, the 37% rule is a mathematically safe starting point. There’s a lot of wisdom to be had in sampling the field before settling down.

The Complexity Of Relationships

The optimal sample rate while deciding on something.

The 37% rule states that when making any major decision in life, reject the first 37% in a list and choose the next best that comes along.

productivity

Productivity

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

problemsolving

Problem Solving

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Mathematicians suggest the "37% rule" for your life's biggest decisions

The decisions that we make are rarely impartial. Most of us already know that we prefer to take advice from people that we like. We also tend to more easily agree with opinions formed by people we like. The tendency to judge in favour of people and symbols we like is called the bias from liking or loving.We are more likely to ignore faults and comply with the wishes of our friends or lovers rather than random strangers. We favour people, products, and actions associated with our favourite celebrities. Sometimes we even distort facts to facilitate love.

The Bias Of Love

<ul><li>Most of us already know that we prefer to take advice from people that we like.</li><li>We also tend to more easily agree with opinions formed by people we like.</li><li>The tendency to judge in favour of people and symbols we like is called the bias from liking or loving.</li><li>Besides the liking tendency, there are several other factors at play: commitment/consistency bias, a bias from stress, an influence from an authority, a reciprocation effect, and some direct incentives and disincentives.</li></ul>

All Are Decisions Are Biased In Some Way

The Halo Effect occurs when a specific, positive characteristic determines the way a person is viewed by others on other, unrelated traits.In the case of beauty, we automatically assign favourable yet unrelated traits such as talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence, to those we find physically attractive. For the most part, this attribution happens unnoticed.

Appearance and the Halo Effect

<ul><li>We like people who resemble us.</li><li>Whether it's appearance, opinions, lifestyle or background, we tend to favour people who in some dimension are most similar to ourselves.</li><li>Similarity bias extends to even such ambiguous traits as interests and background.</li><li>Even if the similarities are superficial, we still may end up liking the other person more than we should.</li></ul>

Similarity

<ul><li>We love to be loved and, consequently, we love those that love us.</li><li>Joe Girard, the world's "greatest car salesman", prints "I like you" and his name on every holiday card he sends out.</li><li>Our reaction can be so automatic, that we develop liking even when the attempt to win our favour is an obvious one.</li></ul>

Praise and Compliments Affect Us

<ul><li>Repeated exposure can be a powerful tool in establishing liking.</li><li>Take a picture of yourself and create a mirror image in one of the editing tools. Choose which one you like better</li><li>Show the two pictures to a friend and ask her to choose the better one as well. Your friend will prefer the true print, whereas you will think you look better in the mirror image</li></ul>

Familiarity

<ul><li>Charisma or attraction are not prerequisites for liking - a mere association with someone you like or trust can be enough</li><li>The bias from an association shows itself in many other domains and is especially strong when we associate with the person we like the most - ourselves</li><li>For example, a sports fan and his local team can be highly personal even though the association is often based only on shared location</li><li>Even a trivial association with success may reap benefits and breed confidence</li></ul>

Loving by Association and Referral

<ul><li>Someone who is conditioned to like the right people and pick their idols carefully can greatly benefit from these biases.</li><li>The time to call out the defence is when we feel ourselves liking the practitioner more than we should under the circumstances under which we feel manipulated.</li><li>Focus on our feelings rather than the other person's actions.</li><li>Ask yourself how much of what you feel is due to liking versus the actual facts of the situation.</li></ul>

How To Curb The Liking

The tendency to judge in favor of people and symbols we like is called the bias from liking or loving and it affects how we make decisions. Let's explore...

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

communication

Communication

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

Bias from Liking/Loving: Why We Comply With Those We Love - Farnam Street

Successfully leading a company into the future is no longer relying on command-and-control leadership. Instead, the emphasis is on distributed leadership - giving people autonomy to innovate and working in flexible teams so that companies can respond to technology and external risks. Top leaders are flipping their hierarchy. Their job is not to have all the answers but to help people contribute the best of their expertise, knowledge, skills, and ideas.

The future of work requires nimble leadership

Research judged the success and challenges of two firms based on four key capabilities. <ul><li>Relating: Seeing the environment through others’ perspectives</li><li>Sensemaking: Creating and updating maps of a complex environment to engage more effectively in it.</li><li>Visioning: Aligning the leader's vision with the organisation's goal.</li><li>Inventing: Creating new structures or processes.</li></ul> The company that enacted distributed leadership fared better than the one with a command-and-control leadership model.

Distributed leadership fare better

<ul><li>Let those at lower levels who have vetted and tested ideas participate in leading the change process.</li><li>Give people a say in matching themselves with roles.</li><li>Have an honest conversation with potential team members about their capacity to implement and commit.</li><li>Senior leaders still facilitate and enable entrepreneurial activity.</li><li>The change will require some combination of command-and-control and cultivate-and-coordinate styles.</li></ul>

Moving to a distributed leadership model

Managing the future of work requires a nimble mindset focusing on small, short-term wins, and a ‘cultivate and coordinate’ approach to leadership.

career

Career

Resilience - the ability to withstand hardship and bounce back from difficult events - is helpful when it comes to work. However,  it is often presented in a way that overlooks issues while employees must bear whatever comes in the way. It is much easier to be resilient in an environment that makes it easy. It's easier to adjust and figure out a new path if you trust your manager or feel safe opening up to your team.

Resilience is not the answer to everything

Teams can put shared practices into place that make it easier for individuals to improve their well-being. Saying you want your people to have a healthy work-life balance is great, but if their calendars are filled with back-to-back meetings or they get pinged at all hours of the day, they won't feel safe taking needed breaks. Improve team well-being by creating shared rituals, such as starting weekly team meetings with a fun prompt, or putting a daily 15-minute team break on the calendar.

Make well-being a collective practice

A ritual around reflection and recognition can help your team members connect and build confidence. To take stock of all that your team has accomplished, set aside time at the end of each month or quarter to discuss the following:<ul><li>What have we learned over the past few weeks or months?</li><li>What was difficult? How would we approach it differently?</li><li>What important progress did we make?</li></ul>

Look back at how far you’ve come as a team

Leave one-on-ones for personal conversations, not for status updates. Ask:<ul><li>What one thing can I do to better support you this week?</li><li>What kind of flexibility do you need right now?</li><li>How does your workload feel right now?</li><li>What was a win for you over the past week? What was challenging?</li></ul> Ensure to communicate the action you will take. “You mentioned last week that you could use more heads-down time. Let’s work together to see if some meetings could be handled asynchronously or pushed to next week."

Use one-on-one meetings wisely

Don't push your employees to open up to you in detail. Instead, let your reports know that you’re there to support them. It’s useful to be aware of where on the emotional spectrum your reports are so you can adjust your behaviour.<ul><li>Over-emoters are people who are highly emotionally expressive and are always ready to share how they feel.</li><li>On the other end are under-emoters who are less emotionally expressive. Under-emoters can calmly figure out a way forward when they have a problem.</li><li>Even-emoters sit in the middle and can swing either way.</li></ul>

Understand and adjust for different emotional expression tendencies

Establishing a shared language can make it easier for employees to feel safe opening up and trusting one another. For example:<ul><li>Teams use a red, yellow, and green system to check in at the beginning of meetings. Red means someone is struggling, yellow means feeling stressed but manageable, and green means feeling good.</li><li>Create an OK list. For example, "It's OK to say you don't understand", "have quiet days", "ask why and why not."</li></ul>

Create shared language

Teams can be resilient when they have systems for support and dialogue.

The authors suggest five actions leaders can take to create a workplace that supports employees and fosters resilience.

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

Stop Telling Employees to Be Resilient

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze and effectively break down an issue in order to make a decision or find a solution. At the heart of critical thinking is the ability to formulate deep, different, and effective questions. For effective questioning, start by holding your hypotheses loosely.

Redefining Critical Thinking

<ul><li>First, be willing to fundamentally reconsider your initial conclusions — and do so without defensiveness. </li><li>Second, listen more than you talk through active listening. </li><li>Third, leave your queries open-ended, and avoid yes-or-no questions. </li><li>Fourth, consider the counterintuitive to avoid falling into groupthink. </li><li>Fifth, take the time to stew in a problem, rather than making decisions unnecessarily quickly. </li><li>Last, ask thoughtful, even difficult, follow-ups.</li></ul>

The Six Steps In Brief

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze and effectively break down an issue in order to make a decision or find a solution. At the heart of critical thinking is the ability to formulate deep, different, and effective questions. For effective questioning, start by holding your hypotheses loosely. Be willing to fundamentally reconsider your initial conclusions — and do so without defensiveness. Second, listen more than you talk through active listening. Third, leave your queries open-ended, and avoid yes-or-no questions. Fourth, consider the counterintuitive to avoid falling into groupthink. Fifth, take the time to stew in a problem, rather than making decisions unnecessarily quickly. Last, ask thoughtful, even difficult, follow-ups.

Critical Thinking Is About Asking Better Questions

How was Twitter's first quarter? The company will still report Q1 earnings on Thursday, but in light of the deal, there will not be a conference call for analysts.

How was Twitter's First Quarter?

"What does Musk think Twitter is for?" That's what Casey Newton asked in his Platformer newsletter Monday night. "All we have to go on is a series of cryptic tweets and statements that are short enough to allow for wide interpretation."

What Does Musk Think Twitter is For?

So: When will Musk elaborate on his plans? Will he do it through Twitter or through methods that allow for more detail and nuance?

So: When will Musk elaborate on his plans?

Will Twitter employees want to work for Musk? Some reacted to Musk's takeover "with shock and dismay," The Washington Post's Elizabeth Dwoskin reported. "Some tweeted tear-filled emoji and memes of people having emotional breakdowns, while others told The Post they were too in shock to speak."

Will Twitter Employees Want to Work for Musk?

What will happen to Twitter's current leadership team? At an all-hands meeting on Monday, Agrawal said he was "optimistic" about the future of the company, saying Musk "wants Twitter to be a powerful, positive force in the world, just like all of us." But it is hard to imagine Agrawal staying put.

What will happen to Twitter's current leadership team? 

What will Jack Dorsey's role be? On Monday night he tweeted that “Elon's goal of creating a platform that is 'maximally trusted and broadly inclusive' is the right one. This is also [Agrawal's] goal, and why I chose him. Thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation. This is the right path... I believe it with all my heart.”

What Wil Jack Dorsey's Role be?

What about Twitter's HQ? The SF Chronicle's Roland Li flagged the potential ramifications for the city since Musk has expressed “scepticism around remote work.”

What About Twitter's HQ?

How contentious will Musk v. Jeff Bezos become? As The Verge's Richard Lawler noted, "Jeff Bezos is already testing Elon Musk's commitment to free speech by trolling" Musk with some Monday night tweets about China...

How contentious will Musk v. Jeff Bezos become?

I am a long-time user of Twitter, and Musk's takeover alarms me. As a Queer Anarchist, I am already threatened and abused on the site on a daily basis! 

Three of the most honest words in journalism are "I don't know." The words are mighty useful right now, as the entire tech and media universe digests the ever-unpredictable Elon Musk's uncanny deal to take Twitter private.

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Eight questions about Twitter's future now that Elon Musk is taking over

You’ve no doubt heard the warning that employees frequently resign because of bad bosses, not bad companies. This may seem like a scary warning until you consider that the reverse is true. A full 56% of professionals would say no to a modest pay raise to keep working under a strong manager.The question isn’t as tough to answer as it might seem at first blush. The most well-respected founders, CEOs, and supervisors tend to share some distinct qualities. Here are some of those commonalities as well as methods for you to adopt them into your leadership style.

Working With An Authentic Leader

To avoid sending mixed messages to colleagues and spurring their mistrust, write down at least five things you value. They could be anything from honesty and humour to spirituality and selflessness.At the end of each day, rate yourself on how well you practised your values. Were you true to them? Remember that what makes an authentic leader is being true to yourself, even when you don’t like the answers.

Authentic Leaders Hold Personal Values Sacred

Many people hold onto the notion that you have to be tough as nails if you’re in charge. To be sure, a “line in the sand” attitude can be helpful in some situations.Can it be challenging to admit to others that you need their help or insights? Is it hard to acknowledge that you’ve made the wrong choice or that you’re feeling worried about the future? Of course. You’re human.Still, leading with your humanity instead of trying to be an omniscient ruler is what makes an authentic leader. Walking around with your “guard up” all the time limits the bonds you could be forging with team members.

Authentic Leaders Show Vulnerability

Some of the world’s most recognized business and political figures are voracious readers. Why? They realize that reading helps you become a better communicator, speaker, and goal-setter.Do you set aside time for learning? Even if you’re not someone who’s apt to pick up a book every night, you can still listen to podcasts or audible books. Or, you could sign up for a self-directed course to make personal discoveries and build your professional acumen. In time, you may even want to launch a company-backed book club to foster camaraderie, collaboration, and innovation.

Authentic Leaders Have a Thirst for Knowledge

Leaders who listen because they have to are more interested in making the problem go away. But leaders who listen because they want to are genuinely interested in helping their employees. Why? Helping someone solve an issue can be beneficial in the long run. After all, you might encounter a similar problem later.There’s no doubt that it can be hard to calm your mind and focus your attention when team members need your ear. Research shows that most people forget half of what they hear only moments after they hear it.

Authentic Leaders Are Eager to Listen

More than three-quarters of professionals admit that they’ve experienced burnout.  As a leader, you can’t afford to allow yourself to get to the stage of true burnout. If you do, you won’t be effective and you may end up hurting your organization. This means you need to be like other strong leaders and make time for yourself.Several fantastic outcomes will happen when you begin to prioritize your health and wellness. According to studies, you’ll sleep better and feel more relaxed, which will allow you to absorb information more easily.

Authentic Leaders Take Care of Themselves

Now that you know what makes an authentic leader, you can start to work on new characteristics and behaviours in your everyday life.In time and with effort, you’ll become a more trustworthy, reliable leader. And you’ll have an incredibly devoted, engaged team to prove that you’re on the right path.

The Bottom Line

Have you ever wondered what makes an authentic leader? Here are 5 leadership examples that you can learn from.

What Makes an Authentic Leader? 5 Examples

The traditional model of the leader-hero who saves the day knows it all, is the smartest person in the room, and is too often driven by power, fame, glory, or money is not appropriate in today’s environment.People today expect a different kind of leader. Here are five attributes that characterizes leaders who are able to unleash the kind of human magic you see at work at some of the most high-performing companies.<ol><li>First, be clear about your purpose.</li><li>Second, be clear about your role.</li><li>Third, be clear about whom you serve.</li><li>Fourth, be driven by values.</li><li>Finally, be authentic.</li></ol>

Purposeful Leadership: The Five Principles

Today’s fast-changing, complex, and unpredictable environment necessitate a different kind of leadership. Nobody can claim to have all the answers to solve the complex crises we’re facing, and the most adaptable organizations are those in which decisions are being decentralized.With the idea that a company’s purpose is about far more than making money gaining ground, the hard-charging, profit-optimizing hero-leader model has lost much of its appeal.

The New Kind Of Leader

That is, your purpose, the purpose of those around you, and how that connects to your company’s purpose.The staggering number of employees leaving their jobs or seriously thinking about it over the last several months has shed renewed light on the pre-Covid realization that purpose, both individual and collective, is at the heart of the business. For corporate purposes to be successful, leaders themselves must first be clear about what drives them and the people around them.

Be Clear About Your Purpose

You cannot choose circumstances, but you can control your mindset. Your mindset determines whether you generate hope, inspiration, and energy around you — or bring everyone down. So, choose well.More generally, your role as a leader is to create the right environment for others to flourish in support of the company’s purpose.

Be Clear About Your Role

A fundamental element of purposeful leadership is to be clear about who you serve in your position, both during good and challenging times. As a leader, you must serve the people on the front lines, driving the business. You serve your colleagues. You serve your board of directors. You serve the people around you, by first understanding what they need to give their best so you can do your best to support them.Golden Rule: View everyone as a customer. The way you treat airline employees or waitstaff, for example, will greatly influence the service you receive.

Be Clear About Whom You Serve

It takes vigilance and a healthy dose of self-awareness to avoid sliding into the trap set by power, fame, glory, and money. Before speaking or acting, be clear about your motivation and whom you’re trying to serve.The best leaders don’t climb their way to the top over the backs of others, they are carried to the top.

Be Self Aware And Vigil To Your Behaviour

Doing what is right is not always simple, of course, particularly during crises, when overwhelming stress and pressure can obscure our sense of values. For the most part, we all agree on what is right: honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, and compassion. On paper, every company has great values. But values are no good if they remain on paper. Being driven by values is doing right, not just knowing or saying what’s right. A leader’s role is to live by these values, explicitly promote them, and make sure they’re part of the fabric of the business.

Be Driven By Values

It may take some time to embrace the true meaning of being authentic for many of us.“Be”: Be yourself, your true self, your whole self, the best version of yourself. Be vulnerable. Be authentic. Being vulnerable and authentic does not mean offloading everything to your colleagues. For leaders, it means sharing emotions and struggles when appropriate and helpful to others.

Be Authentic

As many of us were forced to work from home over video over the past two years, we revealed more of our whole selves — children, dogs, cats, wifi problems, etc. This was not always comfortable or easy. But we all had to see each other in a new light, as full human beings. Employees expect leaders too to be human. This starts with making ourselves vulnerable, including by acknowledging what we do not know. Vulnerability is at the heart of social connection. And social connection, in turn, is at the heart of the business.

The Surfacing Of Our Vulnerability

The way we lead has profound implications for people around us and how we do business. We cannot transform companies, and more generally capitalism unless we reflect on who we are as leaders, and particularly on the following questions:<ul><li>Have you decided what kind of leader you want to be?</li><li>How would you describe your purpose?</li><li>How would you describe your role?</li><li>What are you doing to create an environment in which others can thrive and flourish?</li></ul>So, start with yourself. Be the leader you’re meant to be. Be the change you want to see.

The traditional model of the leader-hero who saves the day, knows it all, is the smartest person in the room, and is too often driven by power, fame, glory, or money is not appropriate in today’s environment. People today expect a different kind of leader. While each company needs to define its own leadership point of view, the author presents five attributes that characterizes leaders who are able to unleash the kind of human magic you see at work at some of the most high-performing companies. First, be clear about your purpose. Second, be clear about your role. Third, be clear about whom you serve. Fourth, be driven by values. Finally, be authentic.

5 Principles of Purposeful Leadership

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Each day we are confronted with hundreds, probably thousands of decisions. Most of which are insignificant or unimportant or both. Do we really need a whole aisle for toothpaste?</li><li class="ql-align-justify">In response to all of these decisions, most of us adopt a strategy of satisficing, a term coined by Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon to describe something that is perhaps not the best but good enough. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">For things that don’t matter, this is a good approach. You don’t know which pizza place is the best but you know which ones are good enough.</li></ul>

Decisions Decisions

Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behaviour; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.Example: For most of us, we clean our houses until they are clean enough, reaching a kind of equilibrium between effort and benefit. It is this cost-benefits analysis that is at the heart of satisficing.

Satisficing: Not Perfect But Good Enough

In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%– 85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store.This comes with a cost.Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload. Although most of us have no trouble ranking the importance of decisions if asked to do so, our brains don’t automatically do this.

Decision Overload

Our world has exploded. Information is abundant. We have a limited number of decisions. After all, there are only so many we can make in a day without compromising quality. Once we’ve hit that limit it doesn’t matter how important they are.The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize.We can have trouble separating the trivial from the important, and all this information processing makes us tired. Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue.

A Limited Mind, An Unlimited World

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time. While a great deal occurs below the threshold of our awareness, and this has an impact on how we feel and what our life is going to be like, in order for something to become encoded as part of your experience, you need to have paid conscious attention to it.

The Speed Of Our Mind

In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. Under most circumstances, you will not be able to understand three people talking at the same time.With such attentional restrictions, it’s clear why many of us feel overwhelmed by managing some of the most basic aspects of life.

The Limited Bandwidth Of Our Brain

Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism. It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness. For this to happen, millions of neurons are constantly monitoring the environment to select the most important things for us to focus on. These neurons are collectively the attentional filter. They work largely in the background, outside of our conscious awareness.

Our Most Important Mental Resource

Most of the perceptual remains of our daily lives don’t register.When you’ve been driving on the freeway for several hours at a stretch, you don’t remember much of the scenery that has whizzed by: Your attentional system “protects” you from registering it because it isn’t deemed important. This unconscious filter follows certain principles about what it will let through to your conscious awareness.

Missing The Beautiful Sunset

The attentional filter is one of evolution’s greatest achievements. In nonhumans, it ensures that they don’t get distracted by irrelevancies. <ul><li>Squirrels are interested in nuts and predators, and not much else. </li><li>Dogs, whose olfactory sense is one million times more sensitive than ours, use smell to gather information about the world more than they use sound, and their attentional filter has evolved to make that so. </li></ul>If you’ve ever tried to call your dog while he is smelling something interesting, you know that it is very difficult to grab his attention with sound— smell trumps sound.

Dogs And Squirrels

Successful people— or people who can afford it— employ layers of people whose job is to narrow the attentional filter. That is, corporate heads, political leaders, spoiled movie stars, and others whose time and attention are especially valuable have a staff of people around them who are effectively extensions of their own brains, replicating and refining the functions of the prefrontal cortex’s attentional filter.These highly successful persons have many of the daily distractions of life handled for them, allowing them to devote all of their attention to whatever is immediately before them.

Buying Freedom From Distractions

The brain’s change detector is at work all the time, whether you know it or not. If a close friend or relative calls on the phone, you might detect that her voice sounds different and ask if she’s congested or sick with the flu. When your brain detects the change, this information is sent to your consciousness, but your brain doesn’t explicitly send a message when there is no change. If your friend calls and her voice sounds normal, you don’t immediately think, “Oh, her voice is the same as always.” Again, this is the attentional filter doing its job, detecting change, not constancy.

The Attention Filter Reports Anomalies, Not Routine Signals

If you’re driving, a billboard for your favourite music group might catch your eye (really, we should say catch your mind) while other billboards go ignored. If you’re in a crowded room, at a party, for instance, certain words to which you attach high importance might suddenly catch your attention, even if spoken from across the room. If someone says “fire” or “sex” or your own name, you’ll find that you’re suddenly following a conversation far away from where you’re standing, with no awareness of what those people were talking about before your attention was captured.

Catching The Mind

The human brain has evolved to hide from us those things we are not paying attention to. In other words, we often have a cognitive blind spot: We don’t know what we’re missing because our brain can completely ignore things that are not its priority at the moment— even if they are right in front of our eyes. Cognitive psychologists have called this blind spot various names, including inattentional blindness.

The Mind Makes Us Intentionally Blind

iPhones and iPads, email, and Twitter are the new revolutions.Each was decried as an addiction, an unnecessary distraction, a sign of weak character, feeding an inability to engage with real people and the real-time exchange of ideas.Our brains have collectively gone over the danger mark as information gets fed into it in truckloads.

When The Internet Happened

The industrial revolution brought along a rapid rise in discovery and advancement. Scientific information increased at a staggering clip.Today, someone with a PhD in biology can’t even know all that is known about the nervous system of the squid! Google Scholar reports 30,000 research articles on that topic, with the number increasing exponentially. The amount of scientific information we’ve discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.

Information Overload

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

Learning How To Think

Attention is created by networks of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (just behind your forehead) that are sensitive only to dopamine. When dopamine is released, it unlocks them, like a key in your front door, and they start firing tiny electrical impulses that stimulate other neurons in their network. But what causes that initial release of dopamine? Typically, one of two different triggers:<ul><li>Something that is salient to your survival, with evolutionary origins.</li><li>You effectively will yourself to focus only on that which is relevant to a search or scan of the environment.</li></ul>

How The Attention Process Works

<ul><li>As knowledge becomes more available— and decentralized through the Internet— the notions of accuracy and authoritativeness have become clouded. </li><li>Conflicting viewpoints are more readily available than ever, and in many cases, they are disseminated by people who have no regard for facts or truth. </li><li>Many of us find we don’t know whom to believe, what is true, what has been modified, and what has been vetted.</li></ul>

Why Curation Is Important

Highly successful people have many of the daily distractions of life handled for them, which allows them to better focus their attention.

philosophy

Philosophy

mindfulness

Mindfulness

The History of Cognitive Overload

Whether you're just starting or building your career, you've undoubtedly faced new challenges that no textbook or classroom could have prepared you for. Using a simple set of core principles can help you start and build your career.

Career Success Guide

Treat your career lifecycle as a company.<ul><li>You start as a high-growth startup.</li><li>You grow into a bigger business.</li><li>You IPO and are a public company.</li></ul> At each phase, you will encounter a variety of difficult and new decisions. Traditionally, people have turned to mentorship to guide them through the uncharted waters. A better approach is building a personal board of 5 -10 advisors comprising of individuals (not family) from varying backgrounds willing to give you raw feedback.

Build a Personal Board of Advisors

The “frog” is a complex or annoying task your boss doesn’t want to do. However, that frog is your opportunity to get ahead early in your career. <ol><li>Observe your boss.</li><li>Figure out what they hate doing.</li><li>Teach yourself to do it.</li><li>Take it off their plate.</li></ol>

Swallow the Frog for Your Boss

Establish a decentralised friend group to learn from and grow with. Interacting with this group will expose you to new ideas, industries, and opportunities. Features of a decentralised friend group: <ul><li>Unconnected to other groups</li><li>Different backgrounds</li><li>Range of experience sets</li><li>Novel perspectives</li></ul>

Create a Decentralized Growth Tribe

If you can sell, you'll always make it. Selling means learning to tell a compelling, convincing story. The more you progress in any field, the more of your job becomes sales: <ul><li>You sell yourself when you want a company to hire you.</li><li>You sell your idea when you want investors to back you.</li><li>You sell your vision when you want customers to pay you.</li><li>You sell your culture when you want employees to join you.</li></ul>

Learn to Sell

The biggest mistake young people make early in their careers is to prioritise salary. Instead, think long-term.  A foundation-building experience will be more effective than extra money. What are the opportunities, experiences, and relationships that will build the strongest foundation for your future?

Prioritize Experience, Not Salary

<ul><li>The comparison trap is the desire to compare ourselves and our progress to others. But comparing ourselves to others is also dangerous.</li></ul> <ul><li>The zone of excellence trap is the area where you are highly competent but don't have a passion or energy for. You'll be told you are great, but it's not where you want to be. Instead, find your zone of genius. It is where your interests, passions and skills align.</li></ul>

Avoid the Comparison Trap and the Zone of Excellence Trap

When you start, you won't be good at most things. Most jobs are apprenticeship-oriented. You have to learn by following and doing, meaning you will make mistakes. That's ok. What's not ok is not owning your mistakes or making the same mistake twice. So when you make a mistake, own it and build a system to avoid it in the future.

Own Your Mistakes

In every company, there are certain rooms where the big stuff happens: The important negotiations, the critical decisions, or the conflicts and debates. Find these rooms and ensure to get in there. It could be as simple as offering to take notes and send around action items. Then, when you're in the room, listen and observe. You will get a huge learning experience.

Get In "The Room"

T-Shaped knowledge has breadth & depth. <ul><li>Breadth allows you to be thoughtful and constructive across various business areas.</li><li>Depth allows you to be world-class in a specific area of expertise. You get there through hard, task-specific effort over time.</li></ul> Ensure you are building breadth and depth. Breadth makes you an asset to an organisation, while depth makes you critical to your organisation.

Build "T-Shaped" Knowledge

10 principles to help you navigate the challenges of your early career

The Career Success Guide

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