Category: Cognative Errors

Is It Ever Too Late?

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Have you ever heard someone say, “It’s too late to pursue that dream.”

When we are young, it seems like there is an abundance of time and energy to complete every goal set, finish every project started, and see the entirety of the world. Then as we grow older, time slips away and those youthful dreams feel unobtainable. And while some avenues may realistically close up as we age (like becoming an Olympic athlete in your fifties) is it really ever too late to chase most dreams?

According to Shola Richards, the answer is an solid “NO!” In a recent post on his website titled It’s Never Too Late, he explores why people give up on goals.

It’s never too late to do anything. So, why do we often think that it is? …

Sure, those dreams can be pushed aside, discouraged or ignored, but if you think that by saying “it’s too late” will succeed in killing those dreams, then I’ve got some really bad news for you.

Our dreams are persistent AF, and as long as you live, …

Shola clearly states that the only time your dreams die is when you do! In other words, so long as there is breath in the body there remains a path forward to obtain the goals that inspire and excite. He says:

Your dreams didn’t come to you so that you could throw your weakest excuses at them. They came to you so that you could literally do the damn thing.

If nothing else, remember this: persistent dreams only visit the souls who have the ability to transform them from imagined reality to actual reality.

With this clarity in mind, why not put this advice into practice.

Take a few minutes to consider the goals, projects, and dreams that have been shelved in your mind. Are you working under the misconception that they are no longer obtainable? Consider them one by one and ask two questions for each:

1/ Does this goal, project, dream, still excite me?

2/ Is there a very specific, undeniable, hard truth, no arguments about, scientifically valid reason this goal, project, dream is no longer obtainable?

If the answer is YES on question one and NO on question two, then I invite you to reengage. Write down exactly what success would look and feel like for this endevour. Then create ONE actionable item that can be done to move it forward in the next 24 hours.

Once that’s complete, decide on the next step and the next one after that. Before you know it, the dream will be realized.

Enjoy the journey!

Temptation Bundling – A Way to Get Things Done

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One of the biggest struggles in our lives is wanting to do things we enjoy versus the doing the things we resist but are good for us. Some days it feels like we have the proverbial angel on one shoulder and devil on the other. Is there any way to get past this struggle?

In a recent newsletter, Charles Duhigg pointed to a research study titled: “Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym.” Beneath the playful framing is a serious idea with powerful implications. The study explores a concept called temptation bundling. The study authors define it this way:

“Temptation bundling involves the coupling of instantly gratifying ‘want’ activities… with engagement in a ‘should’ behavior that provides long-term benefits but requires the exertion of willpower.”

The researchers tested this concept at a university gym. Study participants were given access to high quality audiobooks, but only while physically at the gym. If they wanted to hear the next chapter, they had to show up to the gym and exercise

The result? Gym attendance jumped dramatically compared to the control group. Even more telling was that when the experiment ended, a majority of participants were willing to pay to keep the restriction in place. The study points to an intriguing finding. We often frame productivity challenges as moral ones: “I need to be more focused.” “I need to stop procrastinating.” But temptation bundling suggests a different framing. Instead of trying to suppress the “want,” we can strategically attach it to the “should.” Packaging the reward and chore together will maximize results.

The key is exclusivity. The temptation has to be contingent on the productive behavior. If you can binge the audiobook anywhere, the gym loses its leverage. Temptation bundling isn’t about tricking yourself. It’s about acknowledging how motivation actually works and building systems that cooperate with human nature rather than fight it.

Although it is written in a scholarly style that doesn’t make for easy reading, I invite you to view the full article to learn more. Then go ahead and figure out how to use temptation bundling in your own life.

The Wednesday Rule

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How many times have you looked back on a recent decision and wished you had done something different?

Regret happens far too often. It would be helpful if there was a way to consider the wisdom of your future self before making a decision today without the need for a time machine. However, maybe we can bend time and space after all. Not with a time machine, but instead with the assistance of a little imagination.

The Minimalists have created a simple approach to decision making that anyone can use to avoid future regret. It is called the Wednesday Rule. They explained it in a post on their website.

Here’s how it works…

Before you make a decision, simply ask yourself one question:

Will I be delighted with this decision next Wednesday?

It’s that simple.

They claim this approach can be used for any type of decision. By imagining how your future self will look back on this choice is surprisingly easy to do. The answer you receive will be revealing.

If the answer is yes, then it’s probably a good decision.

However, if the answer is No, I will not be delighted by this decision, then the decision is already made for you:

When in doubt, opt out.

What decision are you facing right now? Consider the options and then think ahead to the future having selected each one in turn. The correct choice may reveal itself immediately.

Read the whole post on the Minimalists website.

The Power of Deep Reading

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We are a culture of shallow readers.

What does that mean? Nowadays, most people only read short sentences or paragraphs from social media or news stories. While this can keep people abreast of surface level information, it fails to provide a deeper understanding of the world. How bad is the problem? Worse than you think!

In a recent article on the Conversation website, JT Torres and Jeff Saerys-Foy argue that deep reading is important for our wellbeing. They start the article titled Deep reading can boost your critical thinking and help you resist misinformation – here’s how to build the skill, with a clear picture of the challenge.

The average American checks their phone over 140 times a day, clocking an average of 4.5 hours of daily use, with 57% of people admitting they’re “addicted” to their phone. Tech companies, influencers and other content creators compete for all that attention, which has incentivized the rise of misinformation.

Considering this challenging information landscape, strong critical reading skills are as relevant and necessary as they’ve ever been.

The authors go on to explain why they believe that deep reading is a vital skill to master.

As a cognitive scientist and a literacy expert, we research the ways people process information through reading. Based on our work, we believe that deep reading can be an effective way to counter misinformation as well as reduce stress and loneliness. It can be tough to go deeper than a speedy skim, but there are strategies you can use to strengthen important reading skills.

So how does one become a deep reader? The authors suggest a few strategies. One simple approach is to slow down.

Simply being aware of how digital reading practices shape your brain can encourage new attitudes and habits toward how you consume information. Just pausing can reduce susceptibility to misinformation. Taking a few extra seconds to consciously judge information can counteract illusory truth, indicating that intentionally slowing down even just a bit can be beneficial.

Reading deeply means being able to intentionally choose when to read at different speeds, slowing down as needed to wrestle with difficult passages, savor striking prose, critically evaluate information, and reflect on the meaning of a text. It involves entering into a dialogue with the text rather than gleaning information.

To learn more ways to build deep reading skills, please read the rest of their article.

Give Yourself a Gift – Take Time Off!

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With the holiday season fully upon us, no doubt you have made a gift list for the loved ones in your life. However, what do you plan to gift yourself? While new clothes and fancy toys are always fun, why not give yourself a gift that improves your health and leads to greater connection opportunities. It is the simple act of taking time off.

In an article for Psychology Today titled, The Importance of Taking a Break from Work, clinical psychologist Monica Vermani explores the reasons why taking time off of work is a health care prescription. She starts the article with the sad fact that most Americans fail to take their allotted vacation time.

According to a recent Pew Research survey, 46 percent of employees take less time off than their employer offers. In 2022, according to Qualtrics research, American workers left an average of 9.5 vacation days unused. Recent Canadian statistics paint an even bleaker picture, with just 29 percent of employees taking full advantage of paid time off.

That’s not all. In a 2023 ELVTR poll of 2,300 North American employees, most reported working while on vacation. Many also reported that weekends and nonworking hours are far from off-limits.

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This failure to disconnect from work can lead to burn-out and other health issues. Therefore, Vermani advocates for taking a true and complete break from work. She points out that doing this is vital to your mental health.

The value of taking that postponed vacation and setting reasonable boundaries around minimizing communication with work colleagues outside of working hours are many, including stress and burnout prevention, gaining new perspectives on workplace stressors, improving mental and physical health, and improved sleep. Furthermore, vacations can be especially effective at raising levels of happiness, making time to reconnect with family and friends, and exploring locations and activities that foster joy and inspiration. Vacation time is also known to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. Time away from the daily grind also expands our creative abilities.

She then shares why setting heathy boundaries is important to everyone.

Our time and energy are valuable—and finite—assets. At the end of the day, it is our responsibility to build healthy boundaries around our finite resources. Building healthy boundaries is all about prioritizing our mental and physical health, well-being, and needs, and building awareness of the causes and signs of workplace burnout, including trouble concentrating, exhaustion, irritability, a decrease in productivity, and physical symptoms, like headaches, muscle aches, gastrointestinal issues, and changes in sleep routines.

To learn more, including her six steps to creating a healthier work/life balance, please read the rest of the article. In the meantime, it is not too late to schedule that holiday vacation. Whether it is a trip out of town or staying home, either way make sure you enjoy some much-needed downtime.

How to be a Great Gift Giver

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It’s the holiday season once again!

While it is time to enjoy seasonal delicious food and the sparkling lights, there is one thing that many people dread: picking out the perfect gift. With a wide range of options, it is easy to get overwhelmed and default to boring gift cards. If you have experienced this problem, have you ever tried to figure out of there a way to become a great gift giver?

An article in Vox may resolve this yuletide tension. In a piece titled How to become a truly excellent gift giver, journalist Eliza Brooke shares insights from several gift giving experts. The first piece of advice is simple. Not every gift has to be life-changing, and a meaningful gift doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.

“We often give ourselves this challenge of being like, ‘What is the gift that only I could give them? What is the gift that proves I know them so well?’ And that’s kind of impossible,” says Erica Cerulo, who runs the recommendation-filled A Thing or Two podcast and newsletter with her business partner, Claire Mazur. (Cerulo and Mazur previously co-founded the retail destination Of A Kind, which shut down in 2019.) A great gift doesn’t have to change someone’s life, Cerulo says: It can just be something that’s fun and nice and comforting.

Photo by Karola G on Pexels.com

The experts Brooke speaks with also provide a simple three-point strategy on gift selection that helps narrow down options quickly.

Because creativity thrives with constraints, Cerulo offered the following three-point framework for thinking about gift-giving: “Can I introduce someone to something they might not otherwise know about? Can I get them a nicer version of something than they would buy for themselves? Or can I make them feel seen?” If you can check one of those three boxes, you’ve probably got a good present on your hands.

Also, Brooke points out that gift giving doesn’t have to be an end of year cram. Identifying potential gifts across the entire year rather than just in December is a useful stress reliever.

Almost universally, great gift-givers are doing legwork throughout the year, not just in the weeks leading up to a birthday or major holiday. Many keep lists of potential gifts for their friends and loved ones, which they update every time someone mentions an item they’d love or when their internet travels turn up a particularly great present idea. You can do this in any way that suits you: Cerulo has a single note in her phone dedicated to gift ideas, Mazur keeps individual notes for individual people, and Rosner uses friends’ contacts as a place to log food preferences, birthdays, and present ideas.

Learn more useful tips on how to be a great gift giver by reading the rest of the article on the Vox website.

The Winner’s Curse

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Can you win and yet still lose?

It is a common assumption that winning is a positive thing and most of the time that is true. However, are their situations when being the winner is actually a net negative experience? According to Nobel Prize winning Behavioral Economist Richard Thaler, this happens more often than you think.

In a recent Planet Money episode, host Greg Rosalsky, explores Thaler’s concept of “The Winner’s Curse.” This idea arose from Thaler’s pushback against traditional economics.

In column after column, Thaler shined a spotlight on anomalies that didn’t fit with the tidy, mathematical portrayal of humans in popular economic models (“Anomalies” was actually the title of the column.)

One anomaly Thaler highlighted was what he called “The Winner’s Curse.” The winner’s curse refers to the winners of auctions. That includes the classic auction with auctioneers speaking really fast, selling antiques or paintings or whatever. But it also applies to markets where people competitively bid against each other to buy something, which includes things like bidding wars over buying a house, companies competing to acquire other companies, and sports teams fighting to sign star rookies in a draft.

Richard Thaler

What Thaler challenged was the idea that winning is everything. In his view, sometimes it was better not to win because the economic benefit of the item in question is outweighed by the cost of acquiring it in the auction.

In the standard economic way of seeing auctions, the winner is someone who values it the most after a careful cost-benefit analysis of what they’re bidding on, using the best available information. Presumably, the winner is, well, the winner. But what if the winner is, more often than not, actually the loser? What if winners, systematically, are the ones who pay too much for what they’re buying?

In one of his columns, Thaler suggested exactly that. That, actually, in competitive auctions, the winner is often the one who makes a mistake and overpays. That is, the winner is someone who — perhaps irrationally — buys something for more than it’s worth. Hence the curse.

The Winner’s Curse is not limited to auctions. Think about the number of times you have rushed to buy the last item on sale and later discovered it wasn’t worth the money. Or consider the game show contest who wins a prize yet is now required to pay high taxes afterwards in order to claim it. We see it in professional sports teams who trade away too many players and draft picks in order to claim on supposed superstar who then flops.

So how does one avoid The Winner’s Curse? Thaler has a simple answer.

Thaler told us: “The way you have to think about bidding in an auction is: if I win the auction, will I be happy?”

To read more about The Winner’s Curse and how to avoid it, please read the rest of the Planet Money article.

Boundary Intelligence: The New Smart

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Have you ever misplaced an important document and felt less smart because of it?

Whether it is a computer file or a piece of paper, items that we have to invest time searching for limit our ability to make effective use of that information. Contrast this to files that are readily available at our fingertips or through an easy computer search. That information can be retrieved at a moment’s notice and is therefore much more useful. This distinction forms the basis of a new approach to understanding how we process information, known as boundary intelligence.

In a recent article on his website called Boundary Intelligence: Why What You Can Access Matters More Than What You Know, Tiago explores why boundary intelligence is a vital concept to understand, especially in the age of AI. He starts by referencing another writer, Venkatesh Rao.

Rao proposes a new definition of intelligence in the age of AI: intelligence is defined by what information can be accessed under constraints of cost, availability, and time.

The reality is that storage is now cheap. Computation is even cheaper. What’s expensive is short-term memory access – the ability to keep the relevant details “in mind” for a given problem.

You might think that the amazing computational power of AI would render this a meaningless problem. However, Tiago believes even the fastest computers run into trouble with deciding what information is important to keep close at hand.

Thus, a computer’s “intelligence” is now constrained not by the power of its processor, but by its ability to keep the right fragments of the past (and the imagined future) close enough to inform the present. In other words, the bottleneck of a system’s intelligence is how cheaply it can remember.

If you look at how modern computers perform, you can see this principle at work. A CPU can perform billions of operations per second, but is often stuck waiting for the right information to arrive from memory. Storage is cheap and computing is abundant, but what remains tremendously expensive is getting the right data to the right place at the right time.

It’s not the price of knowing that limits intelligence now, but the price of remembering.

This brings Tiago to the definition of boundary intelligence.

Rao calls this “boundary intelligence” – the ability to make good decisions at the boundary about what information becomes “knowable” at any given time.

How does this end up working practice, whether it is a person or AI model? In the end, it often comes down to practicality.

They are not retrieving the ideal memory; they’re retrieving the affordable one. Intelligence in this view isn’t about optimizing across all known information, but optimizing for accessible information under constraints.

A deeper study of boundary intelligence leads Tiago to an interesting understanding. He believes intelligence is no longer about what one single person or computers knows or has in storage. Instead, it is about knowing where to get the information at in the right time, no matter if you are a person or an AI model.

This means that boundary intelligence is fundamentally social. It isn’t just about what to retrieve, but from where and from whom. You have to know who to trust, what information or resources they possess, on what terms you can acquire it, and what is expected of you in return.

How can one use the power of social intelligence to improve their boundary intelligence? Read the full article at the Forte Labs website to learn more.

Don’t Get Fooled or Conned Again

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Have you ever been fooled?

For example, being tricked into a purchase you didn’t need, or falling for an online scam. It seems like we are exposed to more and more cons every day. Therefore, how can we better defend ourselves from in person and online tricksters?

A few years ago, Daryl Chen posted an article on the TED Ideas website titled, Don’t Get Fooled or Conned Again: Here are the 5 Tactics to Look Out For. Chen began by examining the problem. The challenge he finds is that being fooled happens internally.

What’s fascinating about examples like these is that while they’re perpetrated by other people or entities, the real work of persuasion largely takes place in our heads, according to UK-based presenter and broadcaster Alexis Conran. “Magic and sales and scams and political beliefs all happen in the mind of the spectator,” Conran points out in a TEDxBerlin talk.

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Chen proceeds to discuss the first way that we are often fooled. It is through the simple use of misdirection.

Misdirection is an age-old tactic used by thieves of all kinds. It’s why pickpockets snatch wallets when they know we’re occupied by an outdoors concert or fireworks display or by reading our phones or books while we commute.

Misdirection can occur on a more subtle level, too. It’s why companies and governments often release bad news on Fridays or before major holidays — they’re obliged to announce a weak earnings report or the so-so unemployment rate but they’re hoping that the weekend or holiday distracts us from fixating on it.

To learn the other four ways we get fooled, please read the rest of the article.