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.

Stashed ideas

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

In any industry, your business regularly needs to improve if you want it to succeed.
When change is required at your organisation, acting on a plan without evaluating the progress can be harmful to a business. The Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle (PDCA) can be beneficial to facilitate change.

Success depends on improvement

PDCA is a continual cycle of improvement of people, products, services, and business processes. It consists of four steps. <ol><li>Plan</li><li>Do</li><li>Check</li><li>Act</li></ol>Each step sets you up for success in the next stage.

PDCA

Ask the following questions:<ul><li>What problem do you need to solve?</li><li>What resources will you need to fix the issue?</li><li>What resources do you already possess?</li><li>How can you best solve the problem with your available resources?</li><li>What does success look like?</li></ul>

Plan

With your plan sorted out, it's time to focus on executing your ideas. Of course, issues will arise even if you have a solid plan, so be willing to adjust as you go. Effective communication with your team members will limit the number of problems as everyone will have a clear idea of their responsibilities.

<ul><li>How did your plan work in the controlled environment?</li><li>Did you achieve your goals?</li><li>Identify the flaws in the process and correct them. </li></ul>

Check

If you met your goals during the Check phase, you could apply your initial plan. This becomes the best practice for this part of your organisation. It becomes the starting point for your next change implementation.

<ul><li>Ensure that upper management agrees with the changes.</li><li>Never stop improving. ThePDCA is a repeat cycle, making improvements with each revolution.</li><li>Once you've implemented a policy change, do so for the entire organisation.</li></ul>

PDCA best practices

The Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle helps your business plan and innovate — learn how to implement the process at your own business. 

What Is PDCA? Understanding the Plan-Do-Check-Act Method

Injecting Botox or botulinum toxin is the most common cosmetic procedure when looking at aesthetic interventions.
Botox is not just used to treat wrinkles but also spasticity, eye twitch, neck contracture, migraines, an overactive bladder and severe underarm sweating.

Botox are used for many conditions

Botox (botulinum toxin) is produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Infection with Clostridium botulinum causes a disabling paralytic illness named botulism. Botulism first paralyzes the face, mouth, and throat muscles before spreading to other parts of the body. When breathing is affected, the person can die. Clostridium botulinum comes in eight serotypes -A, B, C1, C2, D, E, F, and G. Only A and B are used in clinical preparations.

Botox comes from a bacterium

When botulinum toxin is injected into the muscle, it spreads to the nerve terminal and prevents a neurotransmitter from releasing, stopping muscle activity. This site-specific paralysis smoothes wrinkles and stops spasms. Botulinum toxin also prevents the release of pain and inflammatory mediators - an effective way to treat migraines. But the effects of botulinum toxin wear off. The nerves take about 120 days before it regenerates, explaining why people sometimes get serial treatments.

How botox works

Belgian scientist Emile Pierre van Ermengem discovered Clostridium botulinum after a botulism outbreak in Belgium. In the 1920s, scientists tried to isolate botulinum toxin, but it took another 20 years before it was isolated in crystalline.In the 1970s, scientists tested a treatment for strabismus (crossed eyes) on monkeys and noticed reduced wrinkles in the skin between the eyebrows and above the nose. After the toxin proved successful, Allergan licensed the treatment and branded it Botox.

The origins of botox

Botox is a wrinkle treatment derived from the bacteria Clostridium botulinum. Learn how this versatile agent came to be as well as its other uses.

The Remarkable Story of Botox

People crave progress. But that desire can distort what we work on. Some pursuits are more easily measured than others. This leads to tractability bias - the tendency to focus on goals with more noticeable progress.
Vital pursuits with greater potential often have less tangible progress.

Understanding tractability bias

With real work, frustrations and fatigue get bigger with each failure. If we don&#39;t show signs of success, we may abandon a project altogether. It&#39;s much easier to work on routine tasks that deliver immediate rewards.
But the more manageable routine tasks that we can tick off don&#39;t steer us to the real work that helps us advance in our career.

Routine tasks vs Real work

Tractable tasks are easier. Most people will reach for the easier tasks, increasing competition for that work.
But people often shrink back from complicated work. If you can slog through the difficulties, it becomes more valuable because the competition is reduced. However, not all important work is intractable. We have to pay attention to where intractability and importance meet.

Tractability is inversely related to opportunity

There are efforts we can make in our productivity that can keep us from easy satisfaction.
<ul>
<li>Elevate the status of your sincere attempts. Measure your day by the deep work you took on.</li>
<li>Narrow what counts as the &quot;real&quot; work. Only keep track of your deep work, and not by email, calls and other simple activities.</li>
<li>Stop tracking. If counting the number of books you read keeps you from reading longer important works - stop counting.</li>
</ul>

Making real work more tractable

Humans crave progress. This helps us feel productive, but it distorts our attention away from thorny problems onto easier to-do lists.

Problem Solving

Beware Tractability Bias | Scott H Young

Any customer-service oriented company knows that managing wait times are crucial for their customer satisfaction and bottom-line. Whether on the phone, at the checkout counter, or in a restaurant, long wait times lead to a subpar customer experience and a drop in sales.
Customers&#39; patience can be psychologically manipulated by selective colour choices (like blue), temperature, or the visuals that surround them during their wait times.

The Inevitable Wait Time

New studies reveal that customer’s patience levels increase when they are provided with a feeling of nostalgia, alleviating the negative effects of waiting long.
The experiment shows that being in a state of nostalgia relaxes us and puts us in a positive mood, as we remember a unique or favourite experience of the past, which we are unlikely to experience again. Example: A long waiting line at the checkout counter can benefit from 70s music playing in the background.

Nostalgia As A Waiting Tool

Feelings of Nostalgia Can Make Us More Patient

The creative process is the act of making new connections between old ideas or recognizing relationships between concepts.While being creative isn't easy, nearly all great ideas follow a similar 5 step creative process.

Creativity

<ol><li>Gather new material directly related to your task as well as learning general material by becoming fascinated with a wide range of concepts.</li><li>Thoroughly work over the materials in your mind.  Examine what you have learned by looking at the facts from different angles and experimenting with fitting various ideas together.</li><li>Step away from the problem. Next, you put the problem completely out of your mind and go do something else that excites you and energizes you.</li><li>Let your idea return to you. After you have stopped thinking about it, your idea will come back to you with a flash of insight and renewed energy.</li><li>Shape and develop your idea based on feedback. For any idea to succeed, you must release it out into the world, submit it to criticism, and adapt it as needed.</li></ol>

The 5 Step Creative Process

Some people are primed to be more creative than others.However, nearly every person is born with some level of creative skill and the majority of our creative thinking abilities are trainable.

Creativity is learned

<ol><li>Give yourself permission to create junk.</li><li>Create on a schedule. Genius arrives when you show up enough times to get the average ideas out of the way.</li><li>Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work.</li><li>Stop judging your own work. Laugh off your mistakes and continue to produce the thing you love.</li><li>Hold yourself accountable. Share your work publicly. It will hold you accountable for creating your best work. </li></ol>

How to Be Creative

Finding your creative genius is easy: <ul><li>do the work, </li><li>finish something, </li><li>get feedback, </li><li>find ways to improve, </li><li>show up again tomorrow. </li><li>Repeat for ten years. Or twenty. Or thirty.</li></ul>Inspiration only reveals itself after perspiration.

How to Find Your Creative Genius

This page pulls together my most essential information about creativity. I'll share how creativity works, how to find your hidden creative genius, and how to create meaningful work by learning how to make creative thinking a habit. I've tried to present the basics of everything you need to know to start mastering creativity, even if you don't have much time.

How to Master Creativity and Uncover Your Creative Genius

Our various cognitive biases make us behave irrationally, even though we believe we are acting logically. If we are tired, in a rush, or are distracted we tend to rush towards a bad decision. Other factors include working with an authority figure or in a group.
The rule to follow is to never make important decisions when one is emotionally weak, tired, distracted, or in a hurry.

Making Bad Decisions: Being Intentionally Stupid

The real problem is rarely visible in the first instance, as we only look at the symptom or the result. If we let someone else define the problem, we are far away from it. We might be too close to the problem and need an objective view. 
The rule is to not let others define your problems

Making Bad Decisions: Solving The Wrong Problem

We normally trust people and believe we have the right information. The resulting outcome is akin to chinese whispers, the phenomenon when information is passed on to a lot of people in a chain, leading to distortion and falsification.
The thumb rule here is to seek information from credible, first hand sources.

Making Bad Decisions: Wrong Or Incomplete Information

It is easier to portray being virtuous, to create the image, than to actually be virtuous. We are by default programmed to do what is easy and not what is right. If we get too focused on optics rather than outcomes or results, we will start being biased and selfish. We would then be away from our true nature, making decisions because of external factors.
The rule here is to act like you own the company.

Making Bad Decisions: Focusing On Optics

Making mistakes is fine, but making the same mistake over and over is not. We need to make mistakes, and learn from it, or else we will keep living the same year in repeat mode. If we don’t analyse and reflect on our actions, we will never learn from our mistakes and will be unable to calibrate our decision making.
The thumb rule here is to be less busy, and maintain a daily journal to think and reflect on your past actions.

Making Bad Decisions: Learning To Fail

Avoiding Bad Decisions

Meta-learning is when you learn about how much you know and don’t know in a particular domain.Meta-learning is important because it’s easy to delude yourself into believing you know more than you actually do.

Meta-learning

<ul><li>Familiarity is the sense that you’ve seen something before. That feeling of, “ah, I’ve seen this before,” is commonly confused with actually being able to recollect said information. </li><li>Recollection is much more than familiarity. To recollect something, you need to be able to produce the answer without prompt. </li><li>When something feels familiar, but you can’t actually recollect it when self-testing, you have an incorrect assumption about your own knowledge.</li></ul>

Familiarity and recollection

<ul><li>Self-testing: Doing practice problems, flashcard reviews or even creating your own questions gives you the chance to see past familiarity and get more accurate information about what you know and don’t know.</li><li>Self-explanation: Articulation is a difficult task, so weaknesses in your knowledge get exposed quickly.</li></ul>

Tools for enhancing meta-learning

The Importance of Knowing What You Know | Scott H Young

Many people, who are otherwise perfectly healthy can create patterns and have an illusion that they are somehow in control of the external events that no one could influence. 
The belief is so strong that it can affect their behaviour and make them do superstitious actions that make no sense.

The Illusion Of Control

Scientists studying the illusion of control phenomenon in many of us state that the exaggerated belief patterns are actually a useful tool for success, as the overconfidence of our actions influencing the outside environment can act as a catalyst.
Being in control does wonders to our self-esteem and the sense of power creates a chain reaction that helps us even if it is just a delusion.

Optimistic Belief Patterns

<ul>
<li>Psychophysics is an experimental branch of psychology that investigates the limits of human perception.</li>
<li>Humans are hardwired to be delusional about their actions and are extremely sensitive to how the world responds to whatever they do.</li>
<li>The key takeaway of this puzzle is that even though our beliefs may be false, they create a rational inference that may be needed in an uncertain world.</li>
</ul>

The Puzzle Of Human Perception

Far from being a sign of delusion, the so-called ‘illusion of control’ shows that we’re highly attuned to the world

It’s not necessarily deluded to feel in control when you’re not | Psyche Ideas

A decision matrix is a table that helps you to visualize the best option between your different alternatives.It works by getting you to list your options as rows on a table, and the factors you need consider as columns. You then score each option/factor combination, weight this score by the relative importance of the factor, and add these scores up to give an overall score for each option.

Decision Matrix Analysis

Making a Decision by Weighing Up Different Factors Imagine that your boss has put you in charge of taking on a new outsourced IT supplier. You've already identified several different suppliers, and you now need to decide which one to use. You could decide to go with the low-cost option.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Oscar T.
@osc_t

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

What Is PDCA? Understanding the Plan-Do-Check-Act Method

The Remarkable Story of Botox

Beware Tractability Bias | Scott H Young

Feelings of Nostalgia Can Make Us More Patient

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Oscar T.@osc_t

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

What Is PDCA? Understanding the Plan-Do-Check-Act Method

The Remarkable Story of Botox

Beware Tractability Bias | Scott H Young

Feelings of Nostalgia Can Make Us More Patient

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Oscar T.
@osc_t