Why do successful people follow such eccentrically specific habits? And why are we so keen to read about them and mimic them in our own lives?The answer lies in a powerful psychological process called ‘superstitious learning’. The brain is constantly looking for associations between two events. While it is mostly correct, it sometimes mistakes coincidence for causality – leading us to attribute success to something as arbitrary as the colour of our notebook or the number of beans in our brew, rather than our own talent or hard work.

Mimicking The Successful

By giving us a sense of self-determination, the adoption of rituals – including the completely random behaviours that we have learnt ourselves or borrowed from those we admire – can help us to overcome anxiety, and may even bring about a noticeable boost in performance.When we hear of others' triumphs, we often end up copying their habits, too, including the arbitrary rituals that they had acquired through superstitious learning - a phenomenon known as 'over-imitation'.

Positive Usages Of Imitation

Superstition is a kind of maladaptive behaviour that arises from what is normally a very good thing - the ability of the brain to predict.It seems that the brain is constantly looking for associations between our behaviour, our environment and the rewards that we seek - and quite often, it can come to the wrong conclusions.If superstitious behaviours arise as a by-product of our ability to form associations, then you would expect more superstitious people to perform better on this task.

The Problem With Rituals

<ul><li>Once rituals informed by superstitious learning exist, they can extend their influence beyond their creator.</li><li>We're conditioned to admire successful people and mimic their habits, even if some of these habits are eccentric.</li></ul>

The Problem of 'Over-Imitating'

We love to mimic the routines and rituals of the rich and famous – but they may be no more insightful than random behaviours.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

habits

Habits

Superstitious learning: Can 'lucky' rituals bring success?

Two biased forms of thinking that involve taking things too personallyPersonalisation: believing that you're the cause of a negative event, despite having little or no evidence to support the belief.Mind reading: believing someone is making a critical judgment about you, especially in an ambiguous situation where you've received no direct feedback.<ul><li>Misleading thoughts about social situations can become habitual.</li><li>Social situations are always somewhat unclear, so it's natural to try to make sense of them.</li></ul>

The Two Forms Of Thinking

If you experience a social setback or can’t get a good read on what another person is thinking, being self-aware can help you pinpoint and correct social problems. But if you resort to personalising or mind-reading whenever there’s a bit of social ambiguity, these well-rehearsed thoughts will start to appear automatically, even when you don’t have much evidence to suggest they’re true.

A Lack Of Self-Awareness

If you struggle with taking things too personally, it’s likely that these self-critical thoughts have been rehearsed so often that you don’t even notice them anymore, particularly if you’re wrapped up in the uncomfortable feelings and urges that accompany them. You can compare these well-learned automatic thoughts to the procedural ones that help you perform activities you’ve done countless times, like driving a car.

Your Mind On Autopilot

If you tend to take things too personally, it’s important to recognise your patterns of personalisation or mind-reading before deciding what to do with them. This can be challenging, however, because the line between feelings and thoughts is often blurred. A good way to distinguish feelings from thoughts is to remember that feelings can often be summarised in one word – nervous, happy, surprised, scared – and thoughts are the ideas that drive or follow the feelings.

Distinguish Your Feelings from Your Thoughts

To help you understand and separate the connections between feelings and thoughts, practise labelling them whenever you have the opportunity.Remember that feelings are not debatable – you just feel how you feel, even when you wish you didn’t. Your thoughts, on the other hand, can be challenged, revised or replaced with more realistic and useful ones.

The Labelling Exercise

The next time you’re experiencing a strong or difficult emotion, tune in to your thoughts.For example, you run into an acquaintance you haven’t seen in a long time, and after a brief and somewhat awkward conversation, you feel a sudden sadness. These thoughts might have an even greater emotional impact due to other events in your life – perhaps your brief encounter triggered a disappointing reminder that some close friends recently moved away, and you’re concerned that your interactions with people will more frequently resemble the superficial conversation you just had.

Look for Signs that You Are Personalising or Mind Reading

Remember that your thoughts may reflect biases in thinking, which is an important starting point. Now is your opportunity to consider the evidence for and against your thoughts, which will help you decide whether to stick with your original understanding of a situation or go with an alternative explanation that seems more plausible.

List the Evidence for And Against Your Thoughts

The best way to go through the process of gathering evidence is to write down your thoughts.Get out a sheet of paper. On the left side, write down a brief description of the situation.On the right side, write down how you felt: ‘sad’ or ‘anxious’ or ‘annoyed’. Between the situation and the feeling, write down your explanations for what happened and how you felt.Below the situation, thoughts and feelings, write down what you know that suggests your thoughts are true. Write down anything that tells you that your thoughts might not be true.

Find Out If The Feeling Is About You Or Not

<ul><li>Distinguish your feelings from your thoughts</li><li>Look for signs that you are personalizing or mind reading</li><li>List the evidence for and against your thoughts.</li><li>Consider whether it makes more sense to adopt an alternative account of what happened</li><li>Accept a reasonable amount of uncertainty</li></ul>

The Checklist

When you're overwhelmed by intense and persistent emotions, and you're grappling with the urge to overthink, run away, lash out or engage in some other counterproductive behaviour, it can be helpful to acknowledge and try to relate differently to your inner experience.Four interrelated components of emotional experiences, which you can remember by using the acronym STUF: <ul><li>Sensations: what is your body doing?</li><li>Thoughts: what’s going through your mind?</li><li>Urges: what do you want to do or not do?</li><li>Feeling labels: what do you call your emotion?</li></ul>

The STUF

Ask yourself, what’s useful?Once you’ve had a chance to explore, challenge and revise your thoughts, consider what would be useful for you to know or do now. So, what’s useful? If you take things too personally because you regularly overlook details that would help you think objectively, it might be useful to acknowledge the biases in your thinking.

Asking Yourself About What Is Really Useful In The Situation And Your Thoughts

By their nature, social interactions contain a certain degree of ambiguity or uncertainty. Although you can’t control what others think nor actually read their minds, you can make plans for change, practise social behaviour that’s generally effective, and learn to tolerate the uncertainty that comes with taking social risks. You can’t always know what people are thinking about you, but you can decide how you’d like to conduct yourself.

Accept a Reasonable Amount of Uncertainty

To bring more clarity to your thinking about your STUF, here are some good questions to ask yourself. You might find it helpful to write down your answers.<ul><li>What does my STUF mean or say about me?</li><li>Do I accept my STUF or criticise myself for it?</li><li>Do I try to distance myself or react impulsively to my STUF?</li><li>Am I satisfied with the way I think about and respond to my STUF?</li><li>What would I like to do differently? Why?</li></ul>

The STUF Thinking: Bring Some Clarity By Asking Questions

Practice accepting your authentic inner experience, without judgment, before redirecting your attention and behaviour to a productive response that's driven by your values and long-term goals.Below are some further ways to understand and relate to your feelings and urges:<ul><li>Objectivity</li><li>A tolerable annoyance.</li><li>Patience, warmth and kindness.</li></ul>

Accept And Redirect

Give some thought to the emotion-driven choices you make when you take things personally and consider the value-driven behaviours you’d like to choose in the future. These can include the plans for effective social behaviour we considered earlier. Examples of value-driven action:<ul><li>treating people with respect;</li><li>asking for feedback to improve relationships;</li><li>accepting responsibility for your actions; and</li><li>being kind to yourself when you’re feeling overwhelmed.</li></ul>

Value-Driven Action

Self-awareness is the key to conquer your feelings.

Always blaming yourself or assuming others think ill of you? A CBT therapist shares ways to break these self-critical habits

How to take things less personally | Psyche Guides

According to research by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Norton, participating in regular group bonding rituals, such as doing the Walmart Cheer or firing a Nerf toy gun to conclude a project, increased how meaningful employees judged their work by 16%. Employees who engage in these rituals show better "organizational citizenship" and tend to go the extra mile for the company.

Work rituals

Many group activities involve food, from community potlucks to global design firm IDEO’s tea time. Group rituals have three core elements:<ul><li>physical, such and specific words or actions</li><li>communal, meaning we're all doing it together at the same time.</li><li>psychological. It feels good to do this in the way we do it.</li></ul>

Rituals take many forms

Managers shouldn't start mandating daily chants or trust falls. To develop a group ritual with more meaning, consider using these steps: <ol><li>Observe. What are teams already doing? Watch, for example, how meetings get started.</li><li>Keep it employee-driven. Look for ways to encourage employees to create their own team rituals.</li><li>Provide resources. If team members tend to eat lunch together every Thursday, an employer can consider providing money for them to venture out regularly as a group.</li></ol>

How to create workplace rituals

Rituals—even seemingly silly ones—help employees bond and add meaning to their work, says research by Michael Norton, Francesca Gino, and colleagues. After two years of pandemic disruption, who wouldn't welcome a workday pick-me-up?

career

Career

teamwork

Teamwork

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Rituals at Work: Teams That Play Together Stay Together

Deep breathing is good for you all the time (and can also help you get to sleep at night) Consciously engaging your diaphragm and slowing your breathing can also resettle and revive you when you're feeling listless after lunch.  Purposeful breathing can trigger your parasympathetic system, or the part of your autonomic nervous system that opposes the fight-flight-freeze response. As a result, it may help you feel rested and relaxed.

Take Two Deep Breaths

There are specific reasons you might want to enjoy a chapter of that new page-turner before getting back to your desk after lunch.  Disconnecting, focusing on something else, and then re-engaging can pry you out of that state of being stuck or demoralised in dealing with what you're dealing with,

Read a chapter of fiction

A lot of folks snack to get through the afternoon slump. How well that works depends not just on what you eat. Taking the time to prepare yourself a visually appealing, healthy plate can help refocus your mind and body for the rest of the day.

Up your snack game

Your space has an outsize impact on your mood which you can use that to your advantage. Tidying or organizing the physical space around you might feel like a little thing, but it's a way to physically and proactively attend to yourself and care for your space.

Take an organisation break

Rituals might seem like hocus-pocus, but modern psychology shows they can radically impact our state of mind nonetheless. Use that knowledge to beat stress, set yourself up for a more productive workday, or mentally wind down at night. The content of your ritual is up to you. But whether you decide on a quick meditation break, moment of gratitude, or something else, the key is to be intentional about creating a script that mentally moves you into the right frame of mind.

Create an afternoon transition ritual

Can't nap, slam some coffee, or hit the gym? Try these less well-known alternatives.

productivity

Productivity

health

Health

5 Ways (That Aren't Coffee or a Nap) to Boost Your Afternoon Energy

Most people think money makes startups successful. Money is necessary but does not make a company more successful. What is needed is to hire great people that can go from ideation to execution. The best way to hire the right people is to pay them well and to help them work on something that's meaningful. Then set them loose.

It's about the people you hire

An entrepreneur is someone who is willing to tolerate a lot of pain to see their vision become a reality. It is rewarding when it works, but can also be very difficult in unfamiliar and uncertain times. It is then that you have to do your best work and hope it works out. That is what makes the greatest founders stand out - their willingness to keep on going through anything.

Entrepreneurs are willing to endure

Money isn’t everything: Why a meaningful mission is key for startup success, with Austen Allred Subscribe to Big Think on YouTube ►► https://www.youtube.com/c/bigthink Up next ►► The entrepreneur's guide to success https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMM3zxVoGZc Money is important for startups and in venture capital, but having a lot of it doesn't make a company successful. What is actually in short supply is great people, those who can execute on ideas. To find and retain the best people requires not only paying them well, but ensuring that they are working on something that is impactful or meaningful to them. Read the video transcript: https://bigthink.com/videos/entrepreneur-success ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About Austen Allred: Austen Allred is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lambda School. A native of Springville, Utah, Austen’s start-up journey began in 2017 with him living in his two-door Civic while participating in Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based seed accelerator. This experience became the foundation of Lambda School’s rapid growth.Before founding Lambda School, Austen was the co-founder of media platform GrassWire. He co-authored the growth hacking textbook Secret Sauce, which became a best-seller and provided him the personal seed money to build Lambda. Austen’s disruptive ideas on the future of education, the labor market disconnect, and the opportunity of providing opportunity at-scale have been featured in: The Harvard Business Review, The Economist, WIRED, Fast Company, TechCrunch, The New York Times, among others. Austen is fluent in Russian and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two kids. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Read more of our stories on entrepreneur success: Unfiltered lessons of a female entrepreneur ►► https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/digital-goddess-female-entrepreneur/ ​’Zuckerbergism’: Why the young founder myth is a trap for entrepreneurs ►► https://bigthink.com/the-present/young-entrepreneurs/ Anthony Scaramucci: How entrepreneurs can manage fear in times of crisis ►► https://bigthink.com/leadership/entrepreneurs-in-crisis/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About Big Think | Smarter Faster™ ► Big Think The leading source of expert-driven, educational content. With thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, Big Think helps you get smarter, faster by exploring the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century. ► Big Think+ Make your business smarter, faster: https://bigthink.com/plus/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Want more Big Think? ► Daily editorial features: https://bigthink.com/popular/ ► Get the best of Big Think right to your inbox: https://bigthink.com/st/newsletter ► Facebook: https://bigth.ink/facebook ► Instagram: https://bigth.ink/Instagram ► Twitter: https://bigth.ink/twitter

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

startup

Startups

videos

Videos

Money isn’t everything: Why a  meaningful mission is key for startup success, with Austen Allred
Subscribe to Big Think on YouTube ►► https://www.youtube.com/c/bigthink
Up next ►► The entrepreneur's guide to success https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMM3zxVoGZc 

Money is important for startups and in venture capital, but having a lot of it doesn't make a company successful.

What is actually in short supply is great people, those who can execute on ideas.

To find and retain the best people requires not only paying them well, but ensuring that they are working on something that is impactful or meaningful to them.

Read the video transcript: https://bigthink.com/videos/entrepreneur-success  

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About Austen Allred: 
Austen Allred is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lambda School. A native of Springville, Utah, Austen’s start-up journey began in 2017 with him living in his two-door Civic while participating in Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based seed accelerator. This experience became the foundation of Lambda School’s rapid growth.Before founding Lambda School, Austen was the co-founder of media platform GrassWire. He co-authored the growth hacking textbook Secret Sauce, which became a best-seller and provided him the personal seed money to build Lambda. Austen’s disruptive ideas on the future of education, the labor market disconnect, and the opportunity of providing opportunity at-scale have been featured in: The Harvard Business Review, The Economist, WIRED, Fast Company, TechCrunch, The New York Times, among others. Austen is fluent in Russian and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two kids.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Read more of our stories on entrepreneur success:
Unfiltered lessons of a female entrepreneur
►► https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/digital-goddess-female-entrepreneur/ 
​’Zuckerbergism’: Why the young founder myth is a trap for entrepreneurs
 ►► https://bigthink.com/the-present/young-entrepreneurs/ 
Anthony Scaramucci: How entrepreneurs can manage fear in times of crisis
 ►► https://bigthink.com/leadership/entrepreneurs-in-crisis/ 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

About Big Think | Smarter Faster™
► Big Think 
The leading source of expert-driven, educational content. With thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, Big Think helps you get smarter, faster by exploring the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century. 
► Big Think+
Make your business smarter, faster: https://bigthink.com/plus/

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Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life. Other Frequent contributors include Michio Kaku & Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Head to bigthink.com for a multitude of articles just as informative and satisfying as our videos. New articles posted daily on a range of intellectual topics. ​Join Big Think+ to gain access to an immense library of content. It features insight from many of the most celebrated and intelligent individuals in the world today.

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Why a meaningful mission is key for a successful startup | Austen Allred

Evolution in data and technology has changed the world of marketing. Marketing’s impact is now quantified, measurable, and attributable.&nbsp;The KPIs for marketing’s own performance are no longer limited to NPS scores, brand awareness, and/or affinity. Even the more quantitative measures like open rates, CTRs, unique visits are now deemed vanity KPIs. Instead, Marketing is now accountable for and hence measuring installs, registrations, subs, conversion rates, average order size, DAU (D1, WAU D14, D60, etc), MAU, LTV, reactivation rate or addressing churn rates, and others.

Marketing Now Means Growth

A big reason why users churn is when their Expectations do not match the Experience. Marketing now has the ability to understand “EXPECTATIONS” before it delivers the “EXPERIENCE” — a big shift forward.

Understanding Expectations

... in 3 key levers:<ol><li>Purpose — Understanding Core Value Proposition for your Product; without this your product will not exist</li><li>Core Action — The one action you want your users to take as soon as possible.</li><li>Cycle — How often/frequently do you want them to take that action.</li></ol>

Growth Measurement and Analytics Framework

Evolution in data and technology has changed the world of marketing. Marketing’s impact is now quantified, measurable and attributable. It is not just impact top of the funnel brand awareness but the…

Marketing Needs Growth Planning Not Media Planning

The North Star Metric (NSM) is a powerful concept that has emerged in recent years from Silicon Valley companies with breakout growth. It helps teams move beyond driving fleeting, surface-level growth to instead focus on generating long-term retained customer growth.The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers. Optimizing your efforts to grow this metric is key to driving sustainable growth across your full customer base.

Drive Your Company’s Sustainable Growth with a North Star Metric

To uncover your North Star Metric you must understand the value your most loyal customers get from using your product. Then you should try to quantify this value in a single metric. There may be more than one metric that works, but try to boil it down to a single NSM.

Finding Your North Star Metric

When growth is broken down to actual value delivered to customers it becomes clear that this is not just a marketing responsibility.Most teams within an organization play some role in delivering value to customers. Sales and marketing attract new customers into the funnel, but the product and customer support teams play a key role in ensuring prospects and customers are able to experience the core value of a product.Coordinating these siloed teams to work together on growth initiatives can be very challenging without a metric that focuses them around a common goal.

Focusing Your Team with a North Star Metric

Once you understand your North Star Metric, it’s important to document the variables that work together to move this metric. These variables generally include parts of the customer lifecycle such as new user signups, new user activations, and improving engagement/retention of users.By understanding the relationship between these interdependent variables and your current conversion rates, you’ll gain insights into potential high leverage opportunities for growing your NSM.

Using Your North Star Metric to Drive Growth

The North Star Metric (NSM) is a powerful concept that has emerged in recent years from Silicon Valley companies with breakout growth. It helps teams move beyond driving fleeting, surface-level…

What is a North Star Metric?

Scaling a start-up requires careful preparation and a timely launch. <ul><li>Scaling is exponential growth, where your revenue grows faster than you spend. The net income is often reinvested to further the growth of the company.</li><li>Growth is often a linear term. The start-up revenue increases as more resources are added, such as capital, people and technology.</li></ul>

Scaling start-ups

A start-up often fails because of premature or late scaling. 90% of start-ups fail: 10% fail in the first year and 70% in the following 2 - 5 years. The following questions can help assess if your start-up is ready for scaling. <ul><li>Are the sales figures growing?</li><li>Do all the founders have a shared vision about future development and growth?</li><li>Is cash flow positive?</li></ul>

Premature scaling

A common mistake for start-ups is to fail to consistently gather and analyze key indicators. Marketing approaches that secure start-up growth is brand marketing, performance marketing, and product marketing. Each approach is connected to a specific stage of the sales funnel: awareness, acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, referral. If you move from one task to the next, you may waste time, opportunities, and investment. So instead, focus on one or two tasks from the list.

Start-up Lost its Focus

Vanity metrics reflect how well you grow your social media followers, get more website visits, and gain trial users, but they fail to meet your business goals. Sometimes start-ups choose too many metrics. Despite their progressive increase, they don't contribute to business growth or help to attain business goals. The issue is that the start-up does not have a relevant metrics base. You should choose two or three relevant metrics and set a deadline for them.

Relying on Vanity Metrics

Understanding your client's real needs are essential for a long-lasting relationship.  To help get to know your clients, consider the following questions: <ul><li>What problems do our clients need to solve?</li><li>Why should they choose us?</li><li>How can we be useful to them in the long term?</li></ul> It is sufficient to identify the needs of your best users. They are loyal and independently promote your product.

Don’t Really Know Their Customers

Marketing strategies are pointless if a product is not validated and the audience does not see its value. Marketing is used to highlight your product's advantages.

Failure to Identify Product Value

Long-term success is achieved through a clear marketing strategy, not by the individual aspects - customer knowledge, brand awareness, product validity, etc. The main goal of a start-up is growth. Therefore, understanding the start-up market can help find the right marketing tools to influence the audience.

Focused on Short-Term Goals

The journey of a startup is often bumpy. A startup can fail when there is a lack of patience and respect for you and your team.  Be patient, respect the ideals and be grateful for the continued experience.

Neither the Team nor You get Appreciated

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

The Seven Deadly Sins of a Growth Marketing Strategist

First coined in 1956 by John McCarthy, AI involves machines that can perform tasks that are characteristic of human intelligence.<ul><li>General AI would have all of the characteristics of human intelligence, including the capacities mentioned above.&nbsp;</li><li>Narrow AI exhibits some facet (s) of human intelligence, and can do that facet (s) extremely well, but is lacking in other areas. A machine that’s great at recognizing images, but nothing else, would be an example of narrow AI</li></ul>

Artificial Intelligence

At its core, machine learning is simply a way of achieving AI. Arthur Samuel coined the phrase not too long after AI, in 1959, defining it as, “the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.” So instead of hard-coding software routines with specific instructions to accomplish a particular task, machine learning is a way of “training” an algorithm so that it can learn how. “Training” involves feeding huge amounts of data to the algorithm and allowing the algorithm to adjust itself and improve.

Machine Learning

Deep learning is one of many approaches to machine learning. Other approaches include decision tree learning, inductive logic programming, clustering, reinforcement learning, and Bayesian networks, among others.Deep learning was inspired by the structure and function of the brain, namely the interconnecting of many neurons. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are algorithms that mimic the biological structure of the brain.

Deep Learning

<ul><li>Machine learning and deep learning have led to huge leaps for AI in recent years. As mentioned above, machine learning and deep learning require massive amounts of data to work, and this data is being collected by the billions of sensors that are continuing to come online in the Internet of Things. IoT makes better AI.</li><li>Improving AI will also drive the adoption of the Internet of Things, creating a virtuous cycle in which both areas will accelerate drastically. That’s because AI makes IoT useful.</li></ul>

AI and IoT

We’re all familiar with the term “Artificial Intelligence.” After all, it’s been a popular focus in movies such as The Terminator, The Matrix, and Ex Machina (a personal favorite of mine). But you…

Discover the world of business and economics.

Superstitious learning: Can 'lucky' rituals bring success?

How to take things less personally | Psyche Guides

Rituals at Work: Teams That Play Together Stay Together

5 Ways (That Aren't Coffee or a Nap) to Boost Your Afternoon Energy

Why a meaningful mission is key for a successful startup | Austen Allred

Justin Brown