A Sign You are Really Grown Up

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

CS Lewis

Carrying the Weight of Troubles

Smart people pawn their troubles – and then lose the ticket.

Signs of Growth

A sign that someone is growing is that they expose themselves to people and places that are better than they are, different than they are, and more successful than they are.

John Maxwell

Clocking In

Show up in your life everyday.

What Emotions Can Tell You

For most of human history, the emotions have been disparaged because they're so difficult to analyze-they don't come with reasons, justifications, or explanations. (As Nietzsche warned, we are often most ignorant of what is closest to us.) But now, thanks to the tools of modern neuroscience, we can see that emotions have a logic all their own. The jitters of dopamine help keep track of reality, alerting us to all those subtle patterns that we can't consciously detect. The emotional brain is especially useful at helping us make hard decisions. Its massive computational power-its ability to process millions of bits of data in parallel-ensures that you can analyze all the relevant information when assessing alternatives. Mysteries are broken down into manageable chunks, which are then translated into practical feelings.

The reason these emotions are so intelligent is that they've managed to turn mistakes into educational events. You are constantly benefiting from experience, even if you're not consciously aware of the benefits. It doesn't matter if your field of expertise is backgammon or Middle East politics, golf or computer programming: the brain always learns the same way, accumulating wisdom through error.

There are no shortcuts to this painstaking process; becoming an expert just takes time and practice. But once you've developed expertise in a particular area - once you've made the requisite mistakes - it's important to trust your emotions when making decisions in that domain. It is feelings, after all, and not the prefrontal cortex, that capture the wisdom of experience. Those subtle emotions saying shoot down the radar blip, or go all in with pocket kings, or pass to Troy Brown are the output of a brain that has learned how to read a situation. It can parse the world in practical terms, so that you know what needs to be done. When you overanalyze these expert decisions, you end up like the opera star who couldn't sing.

And yet, this doesn't mean the emotional brain should always be trusted. Sometimes it can be impulsive and short-sighted. Sometimes it can be a little too sensitive to patterns, which is why people lose so much money playing slot machines. However, the one thing you should always be doing is considering your emotions, thinking about why you're feeling what you're feeling. In other words, act like the television executive carefully analyzing the reactions of the focus group. Even when you choose to ignore your emotions, they are still a valuable source of input.

Jonah Lehrer
How We Decide

Pain in Relationships

Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly without crisis. There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

Carl Jung

Rejection

See rejection as feedback.

The Balance Sheet

Rich people buy assets not liabilities. Poor people buy liabilities. Buy assets not liabilities. People are either liabilities or assets as well.

Admiration

Respect people for who they are, not for what their titles are.

Herb Kelleher

Malice

Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

Carrie Fisher

Awakening

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

The Quaker Reader

Why Are Easy Decisions So Hard?

Why do I squander so much mental energy on the mundane purchases of everyday life? I think I’ve found a good answer. I recently stumbled upon a working paper, “Decision Quicksand: When Trivial Choices Suck Us In,” by Aner Sela (University of Florida) and Jonah Berger (Penn). Their hypothesis is that my wasted deliberation in the drug store is a metacognitive mistake. Instead of realizing that picking a floss is an easy decision, I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention. A cluttered store shelf leads us to automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t. (After all, why else would there be so many alternatives?).

The problem, of course, is that the modern marketplace is a conspiracy to confuse, to trick the mind into believing that our most banal choices are actually extremely significant. While all these products are designed to cater to particular consumer niches, they end up duping the brain into believing that picking a floss is a high-stakes game, since it’s so hard. And so we get mired in decision-making quicksand.

Jonah Lehrer
Wired

Why We Lie

The reason people lie is to avoid the pain of challenge and it’s consequences.

Embrace Uncertainty

Hard problems rarely have easy solutions. There is no single way to win a poker hand, and there is no guaranteed path to making money in the stock market. Pretending that the mystery has been erased results in the dangerous trap of certainty. You are so confident you're right that you neglect all the evidence that contradicts your conclusion. Of course, there's not always time to engage in a lengthy cognitive debate. When an Iraqi missile is zooming toward you or when you're about to get crushed by a blitzing linebacker, you need to act. But whenever possible, it's essential to extend the decision-making process and properly consider the argument unfolding inside your head. Bad decisions happen when that mental debate is cut short, when an artificial consensus is imposed on the neural quarrel.

There are two simple tricks to help ensure that you never let certainty interfere with your judgment. First, always entertain competing hypotheses. When you force yourself to interpret the facts through a different, perhaps uncomfortable lens, you often discover that your beliefs rest on a rather shaky foundation. For instance, when (poker player) Michael Binger is convinced that another player is bluffing, he tries to think about how the player would be acting if he wasn't bluffing. He is his own devil's advocate.

Second, continually remind yourself of what you don't know. Even the best models and theories can be undone by utterly unpredictable events. Poker players call these "bad beats," and every player has stories about the hands he lost because he got the one card he wasn't expecting. "One of the things I learned from counting cards in blackjack," Binger says, "is that even when you have an edge, and counting cards is definitely an edge, your margin is still really slim. You can't get too cocky."

When you forget that you have blind spots, that you have no idea what cards the other players are holding or how they'll behave, you're setting yourself up for a nasty surprise. Colin Powell made a number of mistakes in the run-up to the Iraq war, but his advice to his intelligence officers was psychologically astute: "Tell me what you know," he told his advisers. "Then tell me what you don't know, and only then can you tell me what you think. Always keep those three separated."

Jonah Lihrer
How We Decide

Achieving Goals

The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, learn about them, or even seriously consider them as believable or achievable.

Denis Waitley

Looking Down

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down you can't see something that's above you.

CS Lewis

Why We Get Cranky

Studies have shown that a slight drop in blood-sugar levels can inhibit self-control, since the frontal lobes require lots of energy in order to function. Look, for example, at this experiment led by Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University. The experiment began with a large group of undergraduates performing a mentally taxing activity that involved watching a video while ignoring the text of random words scrolling on the bottom of the screen. (It takes a conscious effort to not pay attention). The students were then offered some lemonade. Half of them got lemonade made with real sugar, and the other half got lemonade made with a sugar substitute.

After giving the glucose time to enter the bloodstream and perfuse the brain (about fifteen minutes), Baumeister had the students make decisions about apartments. It turned out that the students who were given the drink without real sugar were significantly more likely to rely on instinct and intuition when choosing a place to live, even if that led them to choose the wrong places. The reason, according to Baumeister, is that the rational brains of these students were simply to exhausted to think. They'd needed a restorative sugar fix, and all they'd gotten was Splenda.

This research can also help explain why we get cranky when we're hungry and tired: the brain is less able to suppress the negative emotions sparked by small annoyances. A bad mood is really just a rundown prefrontal cortex.

Jonah Lehrer
How We Decide