Category Archives: Figure Stuff Out

Humans are lazy.  We don’t like to think hard.  Proven. In this smart guy’s book.

But sometimes people take brilliant decision science theories too far.

It’s true that very few decisions in this world can be made as black-and-white, but most of us find making a decision using black-and-white terms much easier than by “weighing all the pros and cons.”  This phenomenon is well studied and is called heuristics or attribute substitution – we make decisions by replacing a hard question with an easier one (subconsciously).

Case in point:  Continue reading →

“What’s your take?” is a question people sometimes ask when they want your opinions on a subject at hand.  Sometimes it also mean they are actually asking whether you agree with them.  If you were to agree, you get the opportunity to paraphrase their opinions.  If you were to disagree, the phrasing is such that you aren’t forced to start the response “No” as would be necessary with the question “do you agree?” (or risk not actually answering the simple yes-or-no question).

It’s an opportunity to create an engaging discussion without confrontation, a question worth pondering over for a few seconds before answering.

Throughout management training I was taught “More isn’t better; better is better.”

But there’s a problem with being better. To be better means to be compared against something.  Sometimes it’s competition against another person – do better than that rival.  Sometimes it’s competition against the self – do better than what you did yesterday.  Sometimes it’s competition against an ideal – as in “you can do better.” Being better implies optimizing on something, that somewhere above where we stand exists a higher level of achievement.  To be better means to take what we  already do and improve it based on the evaluatives of an existing rubric.

The problem with “better,” then, is that it only works when your customers – and here “customers” takes on a wide meaning: patients, buyers, parents, whatever – uses the same rubric that you do.

Being better is also very hard to do – to find the “Best” out of N choices, a computer makes N-1 comparisons, each comparison based on a rubric of many parameters. Humans take shortcuts by substituting this algorithm with a heuristic – a much easier question.  Most of the time, “who’s the best doctor/plumber/dogsitter” gets subconsciously substituted with “who comes up in your head first when I mention doctor/plumber/dogsitter?”

In other words, our customers very frequently end up thinking very differently about “better,”  and being better isn’t always better.

We end up with ourvery own type of better – how we uniquely contribute to the team, the organization, the customer.  How we communicate these qualities shapes how we differ from their choices. Different is how people remember us, walking away from that first meeting.  Different is what stops us from becoming a substitutable commodity.  Different is better than better.

We all know getting started is tough; that’s not news.  Writing the introduction of your paper, the first day on a new job, starting a company, all tough tasks.  Taking the first step requires a certain amount of know-how.

Taking the second step, though, is an entirely different matter.  It requires trusting that the first step you took was in the right direction, and that you are ready to commit and take things further.  With the first step, you are just experimenting.

The second step requires courage. It is what transforms a footprint into a path.

You leave the world with the relationships you’ve formed over the course of your time.  This is why people like having a drink with friends, watching movie with someone, or eat lunch with an associate, even though the acts of drinking, watching, and dining do not technically require an accomplice.

This is also why vowing to spend the rest of our lives together makes us so happy.

We’d like to think of ourselves as the sum of our prior experiences, learning and growing over time. As it turns out, we do not accurately remember our experiences. What we identify as our own “experiences” are not experiences at all but memories. What end up as memories tend to be the outliers of those experiences.

In the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, these are black swan events.  But black swan events do not just apply to large organizations or countries; they also occur in our everyday lives.  Our experiences compete for space in our limited memories, and we remember the black swans.  Since the events we forget do not simply reside in memory as gaping black holes – like the retinal blindspot, the brain simply does not perceive the forgotten events, it may then be suggested that black swan experiences shape who we are.

Thus, it follows that to live a fulfilling life, one should optimize on the quality and number of memory-worthy experiences.  It means to take frequent vacations, see new places, but it also means to attempt a wide array of extra-curricular activities, learn a few things about areas outside of our expertise.  It means surprising our lived ones with something special spontaneously so they too can share some of these memories with us.