Alexandersmap

    Tag: Daniel Kahneman

    • A Sense of Progress

      “One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress.” — Daniel Kahneman

      “My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there” — Charles Kettering

      This writer’s near-constant focus on improvement is simply a reminder to keep going towards the things that we can control. Sure; momento mori, but before that, we ought to have something to look forward to. A sense of progress is essential to our well-being. We’re all heading towards something, and we’d like to think it’s something better than everything that surrounds us now. Better health. Better relationships with others. Better options for how we spend a random Friday night. Focusing on one thing we may improve upon leads us to better in that thing. Expand that improvement to a few things, and maybe we can feel some positive momentum developing.

      The world may feel like a hot mess right now, and really, there are compelling reasons to feel that way. We cannot control most of what is happening, but we should raise our voice when we can influence the trajectory. How we treat others, and how we treat ourselves, matters more than we realize in any given moment. Ripples project from the center, but they also interact with other ripples. So we must always strive for that evasive personal excellence (arete), knowing that it’s not something that stays bottled up in our core, but is something that projects outward towards others, raising the standard for each of us.

      The thing is, we tend to become what we focus on. When we focus on the steady decline of society, we become fearful and mistrustful, which perpetuates, well, the decline of society. When we focus on developing new skills and our overall fitness, we realize incremental improvements that lead us to a higher level of performance. This in turn may transform our belief in the state of things from pessimistic to optimistic. Applying that positive force on building bridges and lighting beacons of hope may just transform others along the way.

      One twist in our belief for the future may just spritz a little joy into an otherwise methodically-dismal life designed by the doom cycle trolls. Indeed, we’re collectively heading towards the very thing we focus on the most. We ought to set the compass accordingly. Make some progress today—towards something better. It makes a world of difference.

    • What You See Is (Not) All There Is

      “A mind that follows WYSIATI will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions… the confidence that people have in their intuitions is not a reliable guide to their validity.”
      — Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

      Kahneman positioned What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI) as System 1 thinking. This means the quick thinking, intuitive decision-making we humans do all the time. By contrast, System 2 thinking is concentrated, deeper determination—like working out a problem in your head to find a solution.

      We need both of these systems to be fully-optimized and successful people, but surely we can think of examples of people in high places who seemingly wing it all the time and get away with it because of luck or strength of personality. I call these “bro’s figuring shit out as they go”. These characters are thought of as quick thinkers and tend to scrap and fight their way to positions of leadership in companies, in the military or in politics.

      The thing is, quick thinkers aren’t using strategy, they’re figuring shit out as they go. Mistakes are made with real consequences. So they need to either slow down and do some deep thinking themselves, or more likely, deploy a team of deep thinkers (advisors) behind the curtain who do the work to keep the train on the right track. We need both to be fully optimized as people or as part of a larger organization or society.

      I’m not going to say reading Kahneman’s book has been light summer reading for me, but it’s been revelatory. We all move through life thinking that we’re fully engaging our brains to work things out and come up with the right choices, one to the next, that move us towards successful outcomes. Learning to recognize that our first intuition is not all there is to see expands our options significantly. We all could benefit from a deeper level of thinking to optimize our own outcomes.

      It’s important to ask ourselves when considering any strategic move, is this all there is, or is there more to the story that we aren’t considering? This mitigates the rush to judgement that often leads us into even more trouble than we had before. Decisions compound, and the more good choices we can make the more likely it is that we’ll arrive at a better place in the end.

    • Optimistic Tendencies

      “Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders – not average people.” — Daniel Kahneman

      I’m generally optimistic by nature, so reading Kahneman’s observations on optimism was a brief boost to the ego. It’s nice to think that we’re not average people, but really, most of us are pretty average when measured against the billions of souls who are navigating the world at the same time as us. Yet each of us may be extraordinary to somebody.

      The world may be uglier and meaner now than it’s ever been in my living memory, but the pendulum will swing back one day. How far it swings back, who knows? But we may have a garden, we may write blog posts that focus on the climb to a better place, we may read poetry and support local artists. In short, we may engage in a campaign of civility and empathy all our own.

      Leadership is all of these things. We lead by example by working on ourselves first—building a foundation of emotional intelligence, awareness and self-actualization propelled forward by a keen sense of direction. Leaders show the way by consistently doing the things that need to be done. We don’t have to have a title to be a leader, just do what must be done and others will see.

      What will we take from this day? Perhaps the better question is, what will we give to this day? Begin within, and see what we may realize in our contribution to a path forward. Progress is made by those who focus on a better future with every action taken.

    • The Gift of One More

      “The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” ― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

      “The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.” ― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

      (Rest in Peace, Daniel Kahneman)

      Life is complicated and our best intentions don’t always lead to successful outcomes, but in general when we pick a direction for our lives and stick with the incremental steps necessary to stay on that path, we are more likely to become that which we aspire to be than we might have otherwise. We may accept the ambiguity of the future for what it is, even as we work to shape it into what we most want it to look like. For all my carrying on about habits and routines, I know I’m one bad day from having a series of streaks end. There are some days I want to just end a few streaks just to get it over with, until I remember why I established those habits at all.

      There’s a place for randomness in our lives. In fact, our very existence and progression to the present moment consist of one lucky break after another that led us here. It’s a miracle, or a series of miracles, that we rarely celebrate in our rush to get to what’s next. We ought to have enough awareness to celebrate our moment in the sun, even as we have the audacity to plot something greater for ourselves than we’ve already been given. We skate a fine line between proper acknowledgement of the gift at hand and the underlying expectation that there are more presents under the tree with our name on them simply because there’s always been that one more.

      So here we are: we have this one gift of today, with some measure of physical and mental fitness to do something with it. That’s an old theme on this blog, and forgive the repetition, for it’s a reminder to myself as much as anyone else. To build something consequential in this lifetime requires a measure of discipline and focus often missing in our days. If it were easy everyone would be doing it, right? Indeed. So it’s fair to ask ourselves if this is our contribution, or are we just spending the time forever preparing to leap?

      We may never produce that which we aspire to in our lifetime. We may produce it and have it ignored by the universe. That doesn’t make the journey less meaningful. Each day is one more gift delivered to us by who we grew to be yesterday. Knowing this, we ought to at least try to put a bow on the gift of tomorrow, that we might progress forever into the future until all the gifts have all been opened.