Advice

I’ve changed my mind, he said lying

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If there is one good thing about me, it is I am saintly about admitting when I’m wrong and truly Godly about changing my mind when you persuade me. Admittedly, I do it because you cannot believe how it throws people. Yes, I can look like a fool, but whoa, their faces. Love it.

However, I am unusual. Brainpickings.org looks at the issues of changing one’s mind and in particular how one book talks about it:

David McRaney explores [this] in You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself [UK edition, US edition] — a fascinating and pleasantly uncomfortable-making look at why “self-delusion is as much a part of the human condition as fingers and toes,” and the follow-up to McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, one of the best psychology books of 2011. McRaney writes of this cognitive bug:

“Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do this instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Over time, the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.”

But what makes this especially worrisome is that in the process of exerting effort on dealing with the cognitive dissonance produced by conflicting evidence, we actually end up building new memories and new neural connections that further strengthen our original convictions.

I fancy the book now but Brainpickings writer Maria Popova writes an interesting piece about this.

Spell Happiness with four Ps

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There’s an overwhelming amount of happiness research. Forget incorporating it all into your life — merely remembering it is daunting enough. I like to keep it simple: Remember the 4 P’s.

Purpose
Perspective
People
Play

Work those into every day and you’ll be smiling more.

The Way to Happiness: Remember the 4 Ps – Time

Ye-ess… I’m listening… tell me more.

Practice like an expert, not an amateur

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Creativity Post has an article about the methods successful people use for practicing whatever it is they do. The article is chiefly about sports success and what I don’t know about sport would fill every sports book, channel, magazine, blog and stadium. But the idea of having an aim, a purpose that requires practice to attain and to sustain, that applies to us all.

What do the fittest people do that I’m not? How are their workouts different? Are there key things they do while they’re working out that provide a bigger payoff than the things I do? In other words, are they extracting disproportionately greater results from their time in the weight room than I am?

The same can be said for our practice time. What do top performers do when practicing a skill? What do the less effective practicers do? Are there any differences?
Indeed, it appears that there are.

Two Things Experts Do Differently Than Non-Experts When Practicing – The Creativity Post (8 May 2014)

You’re wondering what the two expert things are. I feel if I told you both, it’d be stealing from them. Let me tell you the one that chimed with me: have specific goals. Now take a look at both the other thing and at more of the reasoning behind why they work.

 

Take that, email-as-To-Do-list people

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Previously on The Blank Screen… Cult of Mac writer Charlie Sorrell argued that you should stick to email (and a few other things) for your To Do list. I shook. I had to have tea. But in the same spirit of showing you Sorrell’s arguments when I don’t agree with them, I want to show you other people saying much the same as I do about how this is A TERRIBLE IDEA AND THEN SOME.

A to-do list contains only items you put on it. Your inbox, on the other hand, is like a spout with no spigot. You have no control over incoming items, except to consider them one by one and delete them—a highly ineffective way to cultivate a to-do list. Messages turn up at all hours of the day. They can come from anyone with no regard to the hierarchy that may determine your actual to-do list. And more likely than not, only a fraction of them will reflect what you need to get done.

Jill Duffy, PC Mag (12 March 2012)

and

If you’re conflating email and task management, then the job of simply communicating–reading and replying to your messages–gets bogged down by all the emails you leave sitting in your inbox simply so you won’t forget to address them. (And there are probably a few to-do reminders in there that you sent to yourself!) This approach also makes managing your to-do-list problematic: when you need to quickly identify the right task to take on next, nothing slows you down like diving into your inbox to scroll through old messages.

Alexandra Samuel, Harvard Business Review (7 March 2014)

There. I’ll shut up now. Probably.

Must do better

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If you had to criticise someone, you’d probably use what’s called the criticism sandwich. “That was an excellent idea, admittedly the execution was unbelievably amateur and I wish we’d hired someone else, anybody else, but you know, you typed it up beautifully.” That kind of thing. But when you’re criticising yourself, you don’t look for any bread to wrap it up in.

Sometimes you refuse to eat the baloney in the middle and sometimes you wish you’d started this with a more robust analogy that could stand any chance of lasting the distance.

So I could’ve chosen my analogy better but let me take that criticism and change it to how I’d address anyone else being as slack with their writing. “We got the point you were making, you made it clear and obvious, but you should really have got out of Dodge at the end of the first paragraph.”

Incidentally, usually I’d be saying to myself that: “I bollocksed-up that, didn’t I?”

You can see the difference, can’t you? It’s not that one is positive and one is negative, it’s that one is third- and one is first-person. From the Wall Street Journal:

When people think of themselves as another person, “it allows them to give themselves objective, helpful feedback,” says Ethan Kross, associate professor of psychology and director of the Self-Control and Emotion Laboratory at the University of Michigan.

‘Self Talk’: When Talking to Yourself, the Way You Do It Makes a Difference – Wall Street Journal (5 May 2014)

That’s from a piece that is laden with sports analogies that I can barely understand but it’s a persuasive point. And I thought it was persuasive or I wouldn’t be here telling you about the full feature, but telling you made a difference. I look at this and in particular I look at the way I usually criticise myself. I wanted to find an example of how I usually am compared to how this lot say I should be and that searching, that thinking, fixed it in my head more. It’s like you’ve told me to lighten up and I’m listening to you. So thanks.

David Sparks on using technology to help meetings

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The best use of technology for when you’ve got to go to a meeting is pulling the battery out of the back of your phone. Or ‘accidentally’ thumbing it into Airplane Mode. That’s not David Sparks’s advice, though I’ve read his books and he’s as up for avoiding unnecessary meetings as I am. Assuming that you want to go to them and you want to get things out of ’em too, he has recommendations.

There is a certain dance that goes on between people trying to set a meeting via email that makes me crazy:

David to Hans: “Let’s do lunch”
Hans to David: “Great. When is good?”
David to Hans: “I’m not sure. You go first.”
Hans to David: “I’ve got some time next week.”
David to Hans: “How about Tuesday at noon.”
Hans to David: “That doesn’t work. Give me another day.”

This just goes on and on. Instead, when I’m setting a meeting with a single person, I write and say, “Let’s have lunch together. How about next Wednesday at Cardiac’s House of Cheese at 11:45AM?” By putting not only the idea of lunch in the first email but also the details, I’m usually able to cut out a lot of later email traffic. The surprising thing is that most people accept my proposal in their very first reply.

Scheduling success: four tech tricks for planning meetings – David Sparks, Macworld, May 2014

Since the day I read that in a book or I heard the fella say it on the MacPowerUsers podcast, I have done exactly that and it has worked for me exactly like that.

Try his other three suggestions, though: they cover scheduling meetings, preparing time for them and also a very nifty TextExpander way of writing emails reminding people about the meeting and its agenda.

Annie Dillard: how we spend our days is how we spend our lives

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Jack London claimed to write twenty hours a day. Before he undertook to write, he obtained the University of California course list and all the syllabi; he spent a year reading the textbooks in philosophy and literature. In subsequent years, once he had a book of his own under way, he set his alarm to wake him after four hours’ sleep. Often he slept through the alarm, so, by his own account, he rigged it to drop a weight on his head. I cannot say I believe this, though a novel like The Sea-Wolf is strong evidence that some sort of weight fell on his head with some sort of frequency — but you wouldn’t think a man would claim credit for it. London maintained that every writer needed a technique, experience, and a philosophical position.

The Writing Life – Annie Dillard (UK edition, US edition)

Dillard examines the idea of order – “a scheduled defends from chaos and whim” – but I think she’s less recommending that we set a timetable than that we become aware of what we’re doing. I want to rush you every line from her book but instead I’m going to be honest first and say that I learnt of it from an absorbing article on Brainpickings.org. Read that for more of Dillard’s writing and writing style.

Pssst… how to make millions. Yeah. Right.

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SECRET! The TRUTH that Wall Street/Any Government/Somebody With Money DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW.

And yet here it is. Somehow you have been chosen to get this hot tip that nobody knows about and of course it’s yours for just $99.99 or something. Always and 99c.

You get these emails, I get these emails, I’m sure we’ve both thought phrases containing words similar to ‘bollocks’ yet still they come.

Trent Hamm has a good piece on The Simple Dollar about why we keep being drawn to these – and knowing something about that helps us avoid them.

 

 

Rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock

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This goes back a ways. Even in Yes, Minister from the 1980s, we were told that the way to win is to “play the man, not the ball”. Rather than try to actually win the game, instead make the other fella lose. Understand your opponent. There’s probable some Art of War element to it too. But every school kid knows that rock, paper, scissors is completely fair and cannot be beaten, that you cannot work out a strategy, you can’t guarantee to win.

But you can.

Probably.

Just as Sheldon Cooper invariably chooses Spock in the extended rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock version of the game in The Big Bang Theory, so researchers have demonstrated that we make similar choices in similar situations:

A group of researchers from Chinese universities have written a paper about the role of psychology in winning (or losing) at rock-paper-scissors. After studying how players change or keep their strategies during multiple-round sessions, they figured out a basic rule that people tend to play by that could potentially be exploited.

Scientists find a winning strategy for rock-paper-scissors – Ars Technica (May 2014)

The rule is just that if someone makes a choice that works, they stick with it next time. So in theory you can always figure out what will happen in the second round of rock, paper, scissors. No use to you if everything was decided on the first go.

I have a continuing problem with this being called science when it feels more like statistics but the argument is that it is psychology. And that therefore understanding the psychology helps you beat your opponent.

I have a continuing problem with beating your opponent. It’s not that often that I have opponents, it’s much more often that I am my own one. So I read this full feature and I think about how it means I can prevent myself being predictable. And I read this full feature and it puts me in mind of The Big Bang Theory like this: