Pranav P.

A good philosophy to live by at work is to “always be quitting”. No, don’t be constantly thinking of leaving your job 😱. But act as if you might leave on short notice 😎.

Counterintuitively, this will make you better at what you do and open up growth opportunities.

• The key to success at work and in life isn’t really starting strong, it’s staying strong.
• Set minimum and maximum amount of action you will take toward a specific goal within a certain span of time.
• This keeps you from dropping off or losing interest, or finding yourself too exhausted to continue.

An adjective that can whet our appetites is "natural", while we tend to associate "processed" food with long lists of ingredients we can't pronounce.

Actually, naturalness doesn't automatically mean a food is healthy, says Christina Sadler, manager at the European Food Information Council and researcher at the University of Surrey.

Every activity we do uses a different set of cognitive resources. Sending an email uses one set of cognitive resources. Reading a report uses another.

The more tasks you try to do at any given time, the more cognitive energy you burn. 🤯

If one option is better for rich and experienced people while another is better for vulnerable individuals, use smart defaults, which pre-select different options for different people to try to benefit all people.

When that is not possible, always choose the option that benefits vulnerable employees, because they are typically more likely to keep default options.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica : “The Barnum Effect is the phenomenon that occurs when individuals believe that personality descriptions apply specifically to them, despite the fact that the description is actually filled with information that applies to everyone.”

So many of us think efficiency means jumping right in and making a decision. But to be truly effective, we need to be clear on what we are solving for – a clear goal in mind.

For example, walking into a car dealership and buying the first car you see may feel efficient, but may mean you end up with the car the salesperson wants to get rid of, not the car that best fits your needs and budget.

Meetings can be completely sidelined in the first 30 seconds.

The deal is this: The first speaker sets the tone for the rest of the conversation, anchoring the entire conversation.

After the first speaker sets the tone, the second speaker builds a thread from that first turn, whether they agree with the first speaker or oppose them. Before you know it, the rest of the conversation is a response to that first comment.

We can call this conversational cascade “first speaker syndrome.”

How would you change this structure so that you could put a masonry brick on top of it without crushing the figurine, bearing in mind that each block added costs 10 cents? If you are like most participants in a study reported ¹ in Nature , you would add pillars to better support the roof. But a simpler (and cheaper) solution would be to remove the existing pillar, and let the roof simply rest on the base.