The prepared mind: How to Approach Craft

The Prepared Mind: How to approach craft

READING TIME: 8 MINUTES

Photo by Franck V.

This past weekend, I attended a conference focused on one of the latest buzz terms “transformative tech.” I’ve been tracking them since they started and it appears to be nice marketing to VCs for—you guessed it—tech, but specifically tech “for mental health, emotional well being, and human flourishing.” For this group, there needs to be electricity, or a battery involved so the work of teachers, coaches, seekers, etc. are not emphasized.

One of the speakers was extrapolating on how one day, we will have tech that “gets us to flow” or “helps us jump quickly to a meditative state.” This is not the first time I’ve heard this idea being discussed and I listened intently, thinking through the potential consequences of what amounts to “skipping the [learning] journey” of learning and moving right into integration.

Learning, the kind that moves us forward in our lives and work, is fraught with struggle. There is struggle to accept a new idea, reason with it, and integrate into a new, broader understanding. Reasoning is a skill that is in precarious decline as reliance on data increases. What depth of experience (and insight) might be lost if technology could help us avoid the ungainliness, awkwardness, anxiety-prone beginner’s mind of a new idea or activity? What would be lost if we were able to skip important phases of developing mastery?

In an age obsessed with tech, repackaged ideas, and Instagram soundbites, some of the great tech thinkers get lost to history. I’d like to share some learning from the great Richard Hamming. Hamming was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. He programmed IBM’s calculating machines. He was involved in nearly all of Bell Laboratories' most prominent achievements. After retiring, Hamming took a position at the Naval Postgraduate School and devoted himself to teaching and writing books. He delivered his last lecture in December 1997, just a few weeks before he died from a heart attack on January 7, 1998.

You can see it here. I call out some of his major ideas as they relate to my research on Master Craftsmen, how they get better at what they do, and what we (in tech and in business) can learn from them.

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How to Work With Craft In Whatever You Do

Insight, skill, or the state of consciousness gained by daily, deliberate practice, are rarely handed to you on a silver platter. Einstein argued that genius was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. Picasso referred to “inspiration [existing] but needs to find you at work.” While we can acknowledge that luck plays a role, we often use that as a crutch to avoid doing what we can do to intelligently prepare for opportunities. Perspiration and work are, in my opinion, integral to effective integration.

We only get one life, “and it seems to be it is better to do significant things than to just get along through life to its end,” writes Richard Hamming in his 1997 book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. The book and his 1986 lecture, 'Luck favors the prepared mind', You and Your Research, explore how we do great work. Specifically, he refers to “Nobel-Prize type work.” Nobel level work raises the standards of what we thought possible and teaches us to think in new ways. In many ways, Nobel prize winners are the craftsmen in their respective fields.

From cooking to coding, there are methods to engage in order to do something with Craft. That’s how LEAN, DMAIC. 6Sigma and my other methodologies came to be. There are also mental disciplines we can learn for more effective thinking. But, where to start?

Hamming suggests that preparation is what separates the good from the great. This means the way you live your life—the extent to which you intelligently prepare—makes a huge difference in what you can accomplish.

As human beings, we tend fixate on what we can see with our eyes. We think focusing on the concrete is being objective. It’s how we rationalize. When we look at transformations in other people’s lives, we see good luck, natural talent, unfair advantage, or the right connections. We concentrate on the visible signs of opportunity and success. We do this with organizations too — and it’s an illusion. 

The key to any change is insanely simple. Stop fixating on the external and focus on smaller, internal changes. It is the difference between grasping at an illusion and immersing yourself in reality. Reality is what transforms you. 

The major objection cited by people against striving to do great things is the belief it is all a matter of luck. I have repeatedly cited Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind”. It both admits there is an element of luck, and yet claims to a great extent it is up to you. You prepare yourself to succeed, or not, as you choose, from moment to moment, by the way you live your life.

Hamming, Richard R. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 209)

Luck is always part of the equation. Philosophers, political theorists, and strategists have long acknowledged the large role that luck plays in every aspect of our lives. Even Nicolo Machiavelli, the cataloger of each and every lever that a prince can pull in the pursuit of power, acknowledged that “I believe that it is probably true that fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half to be controlled by ourselves.” What was true in Italian politics centuries ago is just as true in management today.

Yet if life were all about luck, the same people wouldn’t repeatedly do great things. Galileo Galilei did many great things. So did Newton and Einstein. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos have been successful in multiple sectors. The list goes on.

When someone repeatedly achieves greatness, it is because they prepared in advance to recognize, work on, and fill in the blanks when necessary. This is the essence of intelligent preparation and the foundation of deliberate practice—greatness is a byproduct. So often, in the attempt to optimize and recreate, we forget that.

Intelligence comes in many forms. A lot of the time it’s not easily recognized — a lot of people who repeatedly do great things were poor students. IQ does not ensure academic success. Being smart is nice but it’s better if you know how to apply your knowledge.

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Believe that you are capable of doing work that matters.

How you regard yourself and your ability to contribute determines how you experience the people in your life, the work you choose, and the tactics and strategies you choose to solve problems.  

With the belief that you can do work that matters, why is that most of us spend time on work that doesn’t matter?

…direct observation, and direct questioning of people, shows most scientists spend most of their time working on things they believe are not important nor are they likely to lead to important things.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 210).

If what you are working on is not important and aligned with your values—and a lot of what you are working on, what you are saying and what you are doing isn’t either. Think about that.

Is health important to you? When was the last time you invested in it?

Are relationships important to you? What do you do to invest in them?

Do you value the process, really? When was the last time you valued, really valued the many, many small decisions that enable you to achieve the results you are after?

The question you need to ask yourself if why are you not working on and thinking about the important problems in your area? How can we expect to achieve great things if we are not working on the right problems?

Be willing to be an outlier. 

Think of this as confidence meets courage. You might look like an idiot because you are doing something new. You might not be immediately understood by those around you because you are challenging the status quo.

[Claude] Shannon had courage. Who else but a man with almost infinite courage would ever think of averaging over all random codes and expect the average code would be good? He knew what he was doing was important and pursued it intensely. Courage, or confidence, is a property to develop in yourself. Look at your successes, and pay less attention to failures than you are usually advised to do in the expression, “Learn from your mistakes”. While playing chess Shannon would often advance his queen boldly into the fray and say, “I ain’t scaird of nothing”. I learned to repeat it to myself when stuck, and at times it has enabled me to go on to a success. I deliberately copied a part of the style of a great scientist. The courage to continue is essential since great research often has long periods with no success and many discouragements.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

Embrace horizonal goals. 

You have to see excellence as a pursuit not an outcome. This isn’t as easy as it sounds but it as an essential feature of engaging in Craft.

Without such a goal you will tend to remain three degrees off course. You will be headed in the right direction, almost. Three degrees seems small, but that is when you stay the course and say to yourself, “I’m ok, I can still see the hill I’m headed toward.” It isn’t until twenty years later that you realize something isn’t right. You can no longer see that hill. The cumulative effect of being three degrees off course for a long period of time means that it’s either time to backtrack, make a pivot toward that hill, or try some other approach to get you back on course.

…with the goal of doing significant work, there is tendency for the steps to go in the same direction and thus go a distance proportional to the number of steps taken, which in a lifetime is a large number indeed.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

What most people think are the best working conditions, are not—learn to dance between failure and fame.

Constraints can lead to innovation. But constraints is just another word for reality, or the lack of the ideal (budget, resources, environment, or other qualities you are seeking). The feedback of reality in order to keep your feet planted on the ground.

Age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.

Work with your door open.

I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.   

People who do great things typically have a great drive to do things.

…most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, “How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, “You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” I simply slunk out of the office!

Focused investment of only one hour a day can double your lifetime output. 

Intelligent preparation is like compound interest, the more you invest, the more situations you can handle, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do, etc. The advantage of investing in just one hour a day to learning new things is an overlooked gem hiding in plain sight.

This isn’t about who works the hardest but rather who focuses their limited energy on the right things. Learning things that (1) change slowly and (2) apply to a wide variety of situations could be a better use of time than learning something incredibly time-consuming, rapidly changing, and of limited application.

Hamming dedicated his Friday afternoons to “great thoughts.” Setting aside time to think is a common characteristic of people that do great things. Not only does this help you live consciously it helps get your head out of the weeds. The rest of us are too busy with the details to ask if we’re going in the right direction.

Consider that advice against a well-intended behavior not truly lived. Google’s 20% time was eventually abandoned. Only about 10% of Googlers were using it. But that didn’t matter much as long as the idea of it exists, according to Google HR boss Laszlo Bock in his new book, "Work Rules!"

Tolerate ambiguity.

Believe and not believe at the same time. You have to believe that where you work is the best place in the industry, and capable of improving.

It took me a while to discover the importance of ambiguity. Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance. But most great scientists are well aware of why their theories are true and they are also well aware of some slight misfits which don't quite fit and they don't forget it. Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind. When you find apparent flaws you've got to be sensitive and keep track of those things, and keep an eye out for how they can be explained or how the theory can be changed to fit them. Those are often the great contributions. Great contributions are rarely done by adding another decimal place. It comes down to an emotional commitment. Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem. Those who don't become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work.

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Still Interested? Check our my Hamming compendium.

Avoiding loss is an easier starting point than seeking gain.

Simon Ramo, an engineer, businessman, and author, wrote a neat little book that most people probably haven’t heard of: Extraordinary Tennis Ordinary Players.

I’m not a huge tennis follower. The reason this book is interesting to me is that Ramo highlights the difference between the Winner’s Game and a Loser’s Game adopting the lens of pro v amateur.

Some amateurs believe they are professionals but professionals never identify as amateurs. Both play by the same rules and scoring, use the same court, and sometimes even the same equipment.

The main difference?

All things being equal, professionals score points whereas amateurs lose points. It’s a professional’s game to win, and an amateur’s game to lose.

Consider a professional match. Opponents are equally matched. They play nearly a perfect game. They go back and forth until the ball is just too far out of reach. The positioning, control, spin of the ball is no accident. It’s a game of milliseconds and centimeters.

Two Games, Two Kinds of Decisions
Ramo came by his philosophy not by looking at total scores, but by focusing on points won versus points lost.

In pro tennis roughly 80 percent of the points are won; in amateur tennis, roughly 80 percent of the points are lost. These games are distinct and create the perfect foil for one another.

Since there are two discrete games, a generic strategy will not work for both games Simon devised a strategy by which ordinary players can win by losing less and letting the opponent defeat themselves.

… but you have to recognize that the game is won and lost on decisions. You have to choose to win at tennis. You have to decide to make fewer mistakes v simply enjoying yourself.  That means you play a tighter, more conservative game.  Keeping to solid basics, you give your opponent a lot of space in which to make as many mistakes as possible because he, being an amateur will play a losing game and not know it.

If you’re an amateur your focus should be on avoiding making bad decisions.

Play Your Own Game
Warren Buffett and Ben Graham gathered a group of people called the “Buffett Group.” At one such meeting Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett’s mentor and teacher, gave them all a quiz. The reference comes from Benjamin Graham on Value Investing: Lessons from the Dean of Wall Street.

A true-false quiz where half of the answers were true and half were false. Most in the room scored less than 10 correct.

Deceptively simple, Buffett explained. “It was to illustrate a point, that the smart fellow kind of rigs the game.” In the late 60s, there was a lot of questionable accounting going on, much like today. And if you think you can find an “in” to take advantage of it, you are playing the other guy’s game, not your own.

We Are All Amateurs, All Of Us
None of us want to believe it. The engineer who looks back on a 25-year career, the CEO who has run a few companies, the founder who has a few exit stories–male, female, young, old–we are all amateurs. If we really care about what we do, we are always learning to become better.

If we identify with professionals we mistakenly think we are playing a professional game. With greater self-awareness, we need to approach the game with new eyes. Rather than trying to play a winner take all game, focusing on the win, the review, the bonus, or the payoff–we should avoid making mistakes.

We should focus on the obvious, return to and relearn the basic mechanics of good management and leadership.

This was a point Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett, made a long time ago.

In a letter to Wesco Shareholders, where he was at the time Chairman (and found in the excellent Damn Right!: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger), Munger writes:

Wesco continues to try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. … It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, `It’s the strong swimmers who drown.’

I miss the Mungers, the Druckers, the Woodens–and so many other greats. In the repacking of their ideas by others decades later, the simplicity and wisdom of their message gets lost amidst the din of Tweets, 4-day workweeks, and 3-steps toward more effective meetings.

Someone needs to make that quote into a poster.

How Negative Thoughts and Complaining Affect Your Brain

[from the New Yorker]

In July of 1838, Charles Darwin was twenty-nine years old and single. Two years earlier, he had returned from his voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle with the observations that would eventually form the basis of “On the Origin of Species.” In the meantime, he faced a more pressing analytical problem. Darwin was considering proposing to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, but he worried that marriage and children might impede his scientific career. To figure out what to do, he made two lists. “Loss of time,” he wrote on the first. “Perhaps quarreling. . . . Cannot read in the evenings. . . . Anxiety and responsibility. Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool.” On the second, he wrote, “Children (if it Please God). Constant companion (and friend in old age). . . . Home, & someone to take care of house.” He noted that it was “intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working. . . . Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps.”

Beneath his lists, Darwin scrawled, “Marry, Marry, Marry QED.” And yet, Steven Johnson writes, in “Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most,” “we have no evidence of how he actually weighed these competing arguments against each other.” Johnson, the author of “How We Got to Now” and other popular works of intellectual history, can’t help but notice the mediocrity of Darwin’s decision-making process. He points out that Benjamin Franklin used a more advanced pro-and-con technique: in what Franklin called “Prudential Algebra,” a numerical weight is assigned to each listed item, and counterbalancing items are then eliminated. (“If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three . . . and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies,” Franklin explained to a friend.) Even this approach, Johnson writes, is slapdash and dependent upon intuition. “The craft of making farsighted choices—decisions that require long periods of deliberation, decisions whose consequences might last for years,” he concludes, “is a strangely under-appreciated skill.”

We say that we “decide” to get married, to have children, to live in particular cities or embark on particular careers, and in a sense this is true. But how do we actually make those choices? One of the paradoxes of life is that our big decisions are often less calculated than our small ones are. We agonize over what to stream on Netflix, then let TV shows persuade us to move to New York; buying a new laptop may involve weeks of Internet research, but the deliberations behind a life-changing breakup could consist of a few bottles of wine. We’re hardly more advanced than the ancient Persians, who, Herodotus says, made big decisions by discussing them twice: once while drunk, once while sober.

Johnson hopes to reform us. He examines a number of complex decisions with far-reaching consequences—such as the choice, made by President Barack Obama and his advisers, to green-light the raid on Osama bin Laden’s presumed compound, in Abbottabad, Pakistan—and then shows how the people in charge drew upon insights from “decision science,” a research field at the intersection of behavioral economics, psychology, and management. He thinks that we should apply such techniques to our own lives.

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Christine Haskell, PHD has built her practice on credible, published research and data. In the Research Series, you’ll find highlights, shareable statistics, and links to the full source material.

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Why Quality of Thinking Is So Important

Some facts are chilling. Consider this one: the quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. It is chilling because its implications are enormous. The critical takeaway is that there is nothing – nothing—more important in developing organizational effectiveness than ensuring that people think for themselves with rigor, imagination, and courage. Every day, in every meeting, and in every interaction.

It begs the question: In hierarchical structures often driven by the alternation between reward and reprisal, what does it take for people to think clearly and for themselves? And how do we find the time?

The answer is not in our innate intelligence, education, experience, or power. It is not even the amount of time we allot to thinking. The main factor in whether or not people can think clearly for themselves is the way they are being treated by the people with them while they are thinking. The impact of our behavior on people’s ability to think is, whether we realize it or not, that big.

The ability to hold our attention is a meditative and psychological tool that helps us perceive the subtle patterns continuously occurring between others and ourselves. These patterns determine our behavior and the automatic ways in which we react. When we do not hold our attention we cannot be fully aware of our impact, nor can we perceive the unconscious subtle pulls continually placed upon us by others.

When we hear or watch any story, our brains go wholly into perceiving mode, turning off the systems for acting or planning to act, and with them go our ability to see reality clearly. This is one reason why humans have such trouble recognizing lies. First, we believe what we are told. Then, we have to make a conscious effort to assemble facts and disbelieve. Only when we stop perceiving to think about what we have seen or heard, only then do we assess its truth-value.

In other words, we have to fight the tendency to form opinions immediately, work to deconstruct what we’ve learned, and reconstruct it through a more objective stance.

Would you or your team benefit from a consultation? Let’s talk!

Book Shelf: Thinking, Fast and Slow - by Daniel Kahneman

Overview

The topics that Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman addresses are both complex and integral to the human mind: He asks you to think about thinking by considering how your mind habitually contradicts itself, distorts data and misleads you. His prose is lucid, his reasoning rigorous and his honesty refreshing – more than once Kahneman illustrates conflicted thinking with examples from his own life. The result is a fairly slow read, but an ultimately rewarding experience.If you liked “Predictably Irrational” or “Stumbling on Happiness” or any of those pop-psychology books, well, this is the Godfather of all of their work. Huge thorough book gives a great overview of much of his work.

3 Key Points

• How your mind works “fast and slow,”
• How your “two selves” affect your perspective, and
• How to think better.

Take-Aways

• To understand how thinking works, consider this model, which says people use two cognitive systems.
• “System 1” works easily and automatically and doesn't take much effort; it makes quick judgments based on familiar patterns.
• “System 2” takes more effort; it requires intense focus and operates methodically.
• These two systems interact continually, but not always smoothly.
• People like to make simple stories out of complex reality. They seek causes in random events, consider rare incidents likely and overweight the import of their experiences.
• “Hindsight bias” causes you to distort reality by realigning your memories of events with new information.
• “Loss aversion” and the “endowment effect” impact how you estimate value and risk.
• Your “two selves” appraise your life experiences differently.
• Your “experiencing self” lives your life; your “remembering self” evaluates your experiences, draws lessons from them and decides your future.
• These two contrasting systems and selves disprove economic theories that say that people act rationally.

Summary

Your “Two Systems” and What They Mean

When you have to make sense of something, you think about it. To understand this process, consider a model that says people apply two cognitive systems.The first is “System 1,” or the mental processing that reads emotions and handles your automatic skills, like driving your car or adding two plus two. System 1 takes over your thinking when you comprehend simple statements (such as “complete the phrase ‘bread and . . .’”), instinctively turn to see where a noise is coming from or grimace when you see a gruesome image. System 1 supplies associated meanings (including stereotypes) rapidly and involuntarily.

“Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book.”

By contrast, you use “System 2” when you’re focusing on specific details, like counting or figuring out how to complete your income tax forms. System 2 applies effort consciously, such as when you do complicated math, try new physical activities or search for a specific person in a crowd. System 2 thinking is slower, but you need it for methodical thinking processes such as formal logic.

“The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it.”

Human beings tend to value the measured System 2 while dismissing the mechanical System 1, but reality is much more complicated. These mental processes engage in a “division of labor” when it comes to thinking, and they constantly interact. You usually live in System 1’s world, where its fast processing is extremely efficient. In fact, you can be reasoning about a task in System 2, get tired or distracted, and find that you’ve shifted over to System 1 without realizing it. If you’ve ever puzzled over an optical illusion, you’ve experienced what happens when these two systems work at cross-purposes.

Duality and Collaboration

Which system you use and how you think depends a lot on the effort you are expending. If you are doing something easy, like strolling on a known path, you’re using System 1 and have a lot of cognitive capacity left for thinking. If you push the pace to a speed walk, System 2 switches on to maintain your effort. Now try to solve an arithmetic problem, and you’re likely to stop walking altogether; your brain can’t handle the additional burden. Recent lab studies show that intense System 2 concentration lowers the body’s glucose levels. If your System 2 is busy, you’re more likely to stereotype, give in to temptation or consider issues only superficially.

“People who are ‘cognitively busy’ are...more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language and make superficial judgments in social situations.”

System 1 likes to jump on the straightforward answer, so if a seemingly correct solution quickly appears when you face a challenge, System 1 will default to that answer and cling to it, even if later information proves it wrong. System 1 performs rapid “associative activation.” Pair two words, or a word and an image, and your mind will link them, weaving a story from those scraps of information. In the phenomenon of “priming,” if you see the word “banana” followed by the word “vomit,” your mind creates an instantaneous connection that causes a physical reaction. Similarly, if exposed to the word “eat,” you will more likely complete the sequence S-O-_-P as “soup” rather than “soap.”

“A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.”

If you want to persuade people, appeal to their System 1 preference for simple, memorable information: Use a bold font in your reports, try rhyming slogans in your advertising and make your company’s name easy to say. These tendencies are markers of System 1’s larger function, which is to assemble and maintain your view of the world. System 1 likes consistency: Seeing a car in flames stands out in your mind. If you see a second car on fire at roughly the same spot later on, System 1 will label it “the place where cars catch fire.”

Making Meaning, Making Mistakes

System 1 prefers the world to be linked and meaningful, so if you are dealing with two discrete facts, it will assume that they are connected. It seeks to promote cause-and-effect explanations. Similarly, when you observe a bit of data, your System 1 presumes that you’ve got the whole story. The “what you see is all there is” or “WYSIATI” tendency is powerful in coloring your judgments. For example, if all you have to go on is someone’s appearance, your System 1 will fill in what you don’t know – that’s the “halo effect.” For example, if an athlete is good looking, you’ll assume he or she is also skilled.

“When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate the surprise.”

System 1 is also responsible for “anchoring,” in which you unconsciously tie your thinking on a topic to information you’ve recently encountered, even if the two have nothing to do with one another. For example, mentioning the number 10 and then asking how many African countries belong to the United Nations will produce lower estimates than if you mentioned 65 and asked the same question. System 2 can magnify your mistakes, though, by finding reasons for you to continue believing in the answers and solutions you generate. System 2 doesn’t dispute what System 1 presents; rather, it is the “endorser” of how System 1 seeks to categorize your world.

“Facts that challenge...basic assumptions – and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem – are simply not absorbed.”

The natural tendency to focus on a message’s content rather than its relevance affects your ability to judge. People seize on vivid examples to shape their fears and plans for the future. For example, media coverage of dramatic but infrequent events like accidents and disasters – as opposed to dull but common threats like strokes and asthma – sets those events up as anchors that people use to make wildly inaccurate assessments about where the risks to their health lie.People also reason incorrectly when they don’t recognize the “regression to the mean.” Over time, everything tends to return to the average, but people create and apply “causal interpretations” to what are, in effect, random events. For example, if a baseball player who has a strong first year subsequently falters in his sophomore slump, sports fans will ascribe the decline to any number of rationales – but, in reality, the player was probably just more fortunate in his initial outings than in later ones.

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”

Distorted Reality and Optimism

Simplification is at work in the “narrative fallacy,” or the mind’s inclination toward the plain, tangible and cohesive instead of the theoretical, contradictory and vague. People derive meaning from stories that emphasize individual characteristics like virtue and skill, but discount the role of luck and statistical factors. You will tend to “focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.” Due to “hindsight bias,” you will distort reality by realigning your memories of events to jibe with new information. And when telling stories about events you’re involved in, you tend to be overly optimistic and predisposed to overvaluing your talents relative to those of others. You also will give your knowledge greater weight than it should have.

“We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But ease and coherence do not guarantee that a belief held with confidence is true.”

This intense, pervasive optimism is useful for the economy in many ways because entrepreneurs and inventors tend to start new businesses all the time, notwithstanding the overwhelming odds against them. Despite knowing that roughly only a third of enterprises make it to their fifth anniversary, more than 80% of American entrepreneurs rate their ability to beat that statistic as high; fully a third “said their chance of failing was zero.”

Experts and Risk

System 1 influences how candidly people assess their own “intuition and validity,” which means that not all experts always provide great counsel. Expertise relies on an individual’s skill, “feedback and practice.” For example, firefighters’ repeated practice in weighing the risks posed by specific types of fires and their experience in extinguishing those fires give them an impressive ability to read a situation intuitively and identify crucial patterns. Similarly, an anesthesiologist relies on regular, immediate medical feedback to keep a patient safe during surgery.

“Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.”

However, don’t put too much trust in the judgment of experts in fields where challenges vary greatly, where luck determines success, and where too great a gap exists between action and feedback. Those who predict stock values and political contests, for instance, are prone to fall into this category. Because System 1 lulls experts with “quick answers to difficult questions,” their intuition may be flawed, but your System 2 is unable to detect those inconsistencies.

“Organizations that take the word of overconfident experts can expect costly consequences.”

You’re especially prone to unclear thinking when making decisions about risk and value. Most people are “loss averse”: You hate to lose $100 more than you like winning $150. But financial traders tend to demonstrate less of an emotional, System 1-type reaction to losses. Individuals also suffer from the “endowment effect”: When something belongs to you, even if only for a brief period of time, you tend to overestimate its value relative to the value of things you don’t own. Homeowners exemplify the endowment effect, often overvaluing their properties.When you combine all this with the fact that people misjudge how likely rare events are or, alternatively, give rare events too much weight when making decisions, you have the foundations of the modern insurance industry. How you frame risk shapes your evaluation of it. For example, if you hear a life-saving vaccine has “a 0.001% risk of permanent disability,” your reaction is much different than it would be to the same treatment that leaves one of 100,000 individuals forever incapacitated. Yet the two are identical. When you take all these tendencies into account, it is hard to believe any economic theory based on the idea that people are rational actors. But making good decisions depends on paying attention to where your information comes from, understanding how it is framed, assessing your own confidence about it and gauging the validity of your data sources.

“Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion.”

“Two Selves,” One Mind

Just as two systems interact in your mind, two selves clash over the quality of your experiences. The “experiencing self” is the part of you that lives your life; the “remembering self” is the part that evaluates the experiences you have, draws lessons from them and “makes decisions” about the future. For the remembering self, happiness is not cumulative, and the final stages of any event play a critical role in your recollection of its quality. For example, when researchers asked subjects to evaluate the life of someone who lived happily to the age of 65, relative to someone else who lived happily through 65 but was only moderately content for another five years, the subjects rated the first life as more desirable.

“The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from experience, and it is the one that makes decisions.”

Your remembering self’s evaluation of your life story is one part of how you judge whether you are happy. You rate your life by standards or goals you set. The moment-to-moment assessments of your experiencing self provide the other side of your happiness. These conclusions may conflict because they account for different aspects of reality. Work benefits and status that affect “general job satisfaction” do not shape people’s everyday moods at work. Instead, job context contributes more to happiness, including such factors as chatting with co-workers and being free from “time pressure.”The things you pay attention to have major implications for your mood. “Active forms of leisure,” like physical activity or spending time with good friends, satisfy you a lot more than the “passive leisure” of, for example, watching television. You can’t necessarily change your job or your disposition, but you can change what you focus on and how you spend your time. Focus shapes your self-assessments: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

“The way to block errors that originate in System 1 is simple in principle: recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down and ask for reinforcement from System 2.”

Your two selves are intertwined with your two mental systems: System 2 constructed your remembering self, but your tendency to weigh experiences by their final moments and to favor “long pleasures and short pains” comes from System 1. The relationship between your selves holds implications for philosophers and policy makers. You would make different decisions about which social, health and economic issues to address, and how to address them, depending on whether you see the perspective of the remembering self or of the experiencing self as primary.In general, recognizing how these different mental systems work can help you realize that the purely rational beings favored by economic theory are fictional, and that real people need help making better judgments in their financial and life choices. Understanding how your mind works can help you advocate for policies that take those issues into account. The converse is also true: Because your mind doesn’t function optimally in all instances, rules should protect people from those who would “deliberately exploit their weaknesses.” Because individuals find it difficult to catch glitches originating in their own System 1 processing, an organization can operate with more methodical rationality than can the separate individuals within it. 

About the Author

Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton and a Nobel laureate in economics, has written extensively on the psychology of judgment and decision making.

Pete Carroll's Book Recommendations

When I mentor folks, or even in my client work, I emphasize the context of decision making. Too often people look at the end result of someone's performance, or a flashy title--they see the external outcomes.It's an illusion. What matters is someone's internal processing. When people are looking outside of themselves for advice, common questions include:

• Looking for guidance on how to get to the next level? Who do you look to?

• See someone who's career or life situation looks appealing? How did they get there?

• Want to learn a skill that someone else is good at? How did they learn what they know?

It's so important to understand their influences, beliefs, and underlying values. If you are looking at a leadership figure for advice, ask what they read. It can give you a lot of insight into how they think, what motivates them, and how they define success.

The Road to Character by David Brooks--via USAToday. The book draws upon historical figures like Dorothy Day, George Marshall, Augustine, George Eliot, and President Dwight Eisenhower to show how selfless qualities sometimes considered to be old-fashioned in today’s individualistic society can lead to a greater good. The common thread in each tale is a humbling triumph. In each path, however, there first comes rock bottom.

It has affected my language in almost everything I tell them about leadership and serving each other.

Grit by Angela Duckworth.--via The Next Big Idea Club This book is a great read for anyone interested in psychology and personal development. Grit describes what creates outstanding achievements, based on science, interviews with high achievers from various fields and the personal history of success of the author, Angela Duckworth, uncovering that achievement isn’t reserved for the talented only, but for those with passion and perseverance.

In terms of being resilient, we can find ways to instill resilience by training people to believe that they have abilities that allow them to maintain hope. The reason you bounce back is because you know you have a chance and you believe.

Coach Wooden's Pyramid of Successby John Wooden. via The News Tribune When it comes down to it, success is an equal opportunity player. Anyone can create it in his or her career, family, and beyond. Based on John Wooden's own method to victory, Coach Wooden's Pyramid of Success reveals that success is built block by block, where each block is a crucial principle contributing to lifelong achievement in every area of life. Each of these 32 daily readings takes an in-depth look at a single block of the pyramid, which when combined with the other blocks forms the structure of the pyramid of success. Join John Wooden and Jay Carty to discover the building blocks and key values--from confidence to faith--that have brought Coach to the pinnacle of success as a leader, a teacher, and a follower of God.

In the bottom-right corner as a foundation of his “Pyramid of Success” for leaders and coaches, Wooden wrote: “Enthusiasm: Brushes off upon those with whom you come in contact. You must truly enjoy what you are doing.”

The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey. via Sports IllustratedWith more than 800,000 copies sold since it was first published thirty years ago, this phenomenally successful guide has become a touchstone for hundreds of thousands of people. Not just for tennis players, or even just for athletes in general, this handbook works for anybody who wants to improve his or her performance in any activity, from playing music to getting ahead at work. W. Timothy Gallwey, a leading innovator in sports psychology, reveals how to

• focus your mind to overcome nervousness, self-doubt, and distractions

• find the state of “relaxed concentration” that allows you to play at your best

• build skills by smart practice, then put it all together in match play

Whether you're a beginner or a pro, Gallwey's engaging voice, clear examples, and illuminating anecdotes will give you the tools you need to succeed. "Habits are statements about the past, and the past is gone." (page 74)

The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday--via Sports IllustratedThe book draws its inspiration from stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience. Stoics focus on the things they can control, let go of everything else, and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, tougher. As Marcus Aurelius put it nearly 2000 years ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Ryan Holiday shows us how some of the most successful people in history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—have applied stoicism to overcome difficult or even impossible situations. Their embrace of these principles ultimately mattered more than their natural intelligence, talents, or luck.

Saying yes to say no

Steven Pressfield had called himself an author for years, but he’d never actually finished a book. I wonder if that made him feel smug because he thought of himself as an author.

But the psychological pain of not producing kept building until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He decided to finally beat that devil he calls “The Resistance”.

He created a situation with no escape. Rented a cabin with only a typewriter, and shut off all other options. In his book Turning Pro, he writes:

“I had a book in mind and I had decided I would finish it or kill myself. I could not run away again, or let people down again, or let myself down again. This was it, do or die.”

“I didn’t talk to anybody during that year. I didn’t hang out. I had no TV, no radio, no music. No sex, no sports. I didn’t read the newspaper. I just worked.”

After an incredibly difficult year of wrestling with those inner demons and avoiding all temptations, he did it. He finished his first book. It wasn’t a success, but it didn’t matter. He had finally beaten The Resistance. He went on to write many successful novels.

He told this story in the great book “Turning Pro”, the third in his series of little books about the creative struggle, including “The War of Art” and “Do the Work”. Read all three.

When I read it in 2015, my own psychological pain of not producing had built up to an unbearable level. I had announced my first book but never finished publishing it. I attempted it many times, but each time I completed a version, I was overwhelmed by the publishing costs (just to get seen). I didn’t want it to be a vanity book. I wanted it to matter.

To make it worse, I was on the heels of graduate school, with a lot of pressure to start making a more steady income and start paying down mounting student debt.

To get to a version I felt warranted an editor, I did shut off all other options. Time to finish what I started.

I looked for work, but I said no to all requests. It’s not the nicest mantra, saying no, no, no all day, but it strengthened my sense of mission. I made a decision to stop deciding. I made one decision, in advance, to answer to all future things is “no” until I finished what I had started. It’s saying yes to one thing, and no to absolutely everything else.