Category: Science

10 Cognitive Biases and How To Fight Them Cover

10 Cognitive Biases and How To Fight Them

Nik

Irrationality rules the world. Quite literally, these days.

Global leaders behaving like little boys, threatening each other with their oversized toys. Fake news spreading like wildfire. Needless technology receiving millions in funding.

It’s a great time to be alive, but sometimes I wish Plato were still around to remind us of one of his big ideas: Think more.

Frustrated by the tendency of his fellow Greeks to act mostly on impulse, he always prompted them to examine their own lives. The goal was to think for yourself and be less trapped by doxa — the Greek word for common sense or popular opinion.

This is why we love Elon Musk so much. We see someone, who can objectively look at the world, build their reasoning from the ground up and then make decisions grounded in reality — and we think they’re a genius.

Actually, he’s just doing what we were supposed to all along: think for ourselves. It’s that we do so little of it. As Tim Urban notes on Wait But Why:

“We spent this whole time trying to figure out the mysterious workings of the mind of a madman genius only to realize that Musk’s secret sauce is that he’s the only one being normal. And in isolation, Musk would be a pretty boring subject — it’s the backdrop of us that makes him interesting.”

So how do we get back to rational? How can we think more and more clearly?

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The Most Important Rules to Break Are Your Own Cover

The Most Important Rules to Break Are Your Own

Nik

When I first began learning how to live a better life, I decided to watch a video every day. After 67 days, I branched into more specific habits. With every individual habit, I took the same approach: do it every day.

  • When I stopped drinking, I didn’t drink for two years.
  • When I started writing down my priorities, I did it every day for a year.
  • When I quit coffee, I didn’t have any for 100 days.

Once I started coaching people and helping them with their habits, I found a tool called The Habit Tendency Quiz. I’m an Upholder. The creator of the quiz, Gretchen Rubin, says Upholders are great at picking up and letting go of habits for one reason: they play really well by the rules.

Whether I set them for myself or am handed a guidebook, once I know what the expectations are, I’ll work my ass off to live up to them. But this is also the dark side, Gretchen says:

“Upholders are too driven by getting the Goldstar. They look for the rules beyond the rules. It’s too important for them to know what the rules are. They’re almost boxed in by the rules. They don’t know what to do when there aren’t any.”

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Pareto’s Law Is the Antithesis of Excellence Cover

Pareto’s Law Is the Antithesis of Excellence

Nik

It’s a sunny day in 1896 in Lausanne. After his morning coffee, Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto takes the usual stroll through his well-tended garden.

An engineer at heart, the new chair of political economy of the University of Lausanne meticulously tracks the performance of his vegetables. Today the peas are up. He grabs a few sample pods from the nearest row of plants and goes back inside.

At the kitchen table, he starts counting. One pod, two pod, three pod, four. Five peas, ten peas, twelve peas, more. As he lines up each pair 45 peas emerge from 15 pods.

Just as Vilfredo is about to pin down today’s observation in his tracking sheet, he pauses. Hm. Those first few pods lie next to an awfully large number of peas…

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The One Life Hack I Think Everyone Should Know

Nik

Keep your phone out of sight. I’ll say that again, very slowly, because it might not make sense at first.

Keep. Your phone. Out. Of. Sight.

The difference between this…

…and this…

…is an increase in your productivity with a magnitude of at least 5x-10x.

A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that “the typical office worker is interrupted or switches tasks, on average, every three minutes and five seconds.”

3 minutes and 5 seconds. That’s 185 seconds in total between one interruption and the next.

What’s more, “it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.”

23 minutes! That’s over 7 times as long as it takes for you to be interrupted again.

Hm. How does that work? Oh, right, it doesn’t.

What does that tell us? The average worker never even gets close to the zone of deep work, where complex tasks are accomplished with good results.

As if that wasn’t enough — your phone is only one of many sources of distractions, after all — we keep our biggest nemesis right in front of us.

Not only will we look at it every time it vibrates or makes a noise, when our phone is within arm’s reach, we’ll naturally pick it up every couple minutes, just because we can.

You know “just in case.” Don’t give me that look. I know you do it too. We’re all weak.

Well, Justin, you can stay in your case from now on (pun alert), because we won’t be playing your game any more.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Put your phone…

  • into your desk drawer,
  • behind your laptop,
  • slip it under a couch cushion,
  • leave it in your bag,
  • store it in your locker

…or keep it in another room altogether.

The level of peace, relaxation and productivity you’ll face will be unprecedented.

Stop being “the typical office worker.” Start being an awesome office worker.

Sometimes, all it takes is something as small as moving your phone a few centimeters. That’s the life hack I’d like everyone to know.

Which Skills Have the Highest Hourly Pay? Cover

Which Skills Have the Highest Hourly Pay?

Nik

Meet Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

Charles was a German-born, American mathematician, electrical engineer, who spent most of his life in Schenectady, New York, as a professor at Union College.

You can thank him for the thing we all most depend on in life: Electricity.

Charles helped shape the development of alternating current (AC), and is the reason you can plug your toaster, blender, TV or lamps into the sockets on your wall.

As soon as General Electric got word of this little (he was indeed just 4 feet tall) genius’s work in New York, they bought out the company he worked for in 1892, and with it, the man’s expertise.

In 1965, a Life magazine reader, Jack B. Scott, wrote in to tell the story of an encounter his father had made with the so-called “Wizard of Schenectady” at Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan.

Ford’s engineers had a problem they couldn’t fix, and so Steinmetz went down there on behalf of GE. Here’s the excerpt from Smithsonian Magazine:

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Alan Turing: The Man Who Changed History Twice in a Single Moment Cover

Alan Turing: The Man Who Changed History Twice in a Single Moment

Nik

The first time I heard Alan Turing’s name was in a computer science class where we studied different kinds of basic machines and how they work. One of them was called a Turing machine. Alan invented it.

In modern academia, the focus lies on the theoretical model behind the machine, but this is what his implementation looked like:

The Bombe.

It looks big and clunky and mysterious, but on the inside, you can imagine it a bit like this:

The idea of a Turing machine.

A Turing machine really only does a few things:

  • It moves a tape back and forward. The tape has symbols on it, each written down in a single cell.
  • The machine reads these symbols, one at a time.
  • Then, it decides what outputs to generate based on the inputs it receives.
  • Finally, it writes the output on the tape and moves on to the next cell.

Despite its seeming simplicity, the Turing machine changed the course of history unlike any other invention ever made. The moment Alan Turing got his theoretical model to work inside a real-world machine is one of the greatest moments in the history of mankind.

Here’s why.

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How To Make Sure You Never Find Your Passion In Life Cover

How To Make Sure You Never Find Your Passion In Life

Nik

Has anyone ever asked you for directions and you were too embarrassed to admit you don’t know? So much in fact, that you tried to tell them where to go regardless? Just to save your face?

“Uhhh, I think it’s that way.”

That’s what most career advice feels like these days. Nobody has a clue, so everyone goes with their best guess — which is everybody else’s best guess also.

Hence, we live in a world of depressed millennials, which is permeated by two ideas:

  1. Only once you find your passion can you become really good at what you do.
  2. This passion will magically carry you through years of hard work, because suddenly, every day will be fun.

If you’re fine with putting your life into the hands of chance, then you can stop reading right now.

Or, you can flip both of these ideas on their head.

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