It’s fascinating to explore the effects of cognitive biases on our behavior. Here’s a short video that explains the self-serving bias.
The Fruits of a Lesser Discontent
I don’t mean to imply that all great ideas or outcomes—or at least all of my ideas or outcomes—arise from states of discontent. Some have been the result of a logical progression of thought or activity. Others have come from Aha! moments when my unconscious connected some previously unconnected or unrecognized dots.
But just as a moment of deep existential discontent started me on the path of creating Farther to Go!, a moment of lesser discontent led to the creation of the What Do You Want? course. And weather played a role that time, too.
One overcast and unusually cool early fall day, I rebelled against immersing myself in the tasks I needed to complete. Imagine me mentally stamping my foot and scowling. This isn’t a particularly common occurrence, but it’s definitely more likely to happen on gray days than on sunny ones. In this instance, I decided to make myself a cup of coffee to generate some motivation or at least a small burst of energy.
While I was waiting for the water to boil, I asked myself, out of the blue, what I wanted to do instead of all the boring and tedious stuff. What did I really want to do? If I could do anything. And then it happened! I found myself answering a different question instead, an easier one: What do I want to do that’s practical?
By then I was familiar with the brain’s tendency to substitute an easier question for a hard one and to answer the easier question. But I had never before been aware of it as it happened, and I was kind of stunned. Why couldn’t I answer the original question? What made it too hard to answer? I should know what I want, right?
Well, maybe. Later that day, I decided to try to find out. I set myself the task of asking and answering the question “What do I really want?” every day for 30 days. Not just once, but multiple times, using 5×8 index cards. I ended up with nearly 500 answers, including several surprises. Obviously I hadn’t known everything I wanted.
Afterward, I put the individual items into general categories. That was even more illuminating. But the final step was what made the process priceless. I realized that all the items on my list fit under the umbrella of one or more of what I came to call Big Picture Wants. As I wrote out the words and phrases—in my case 12—of my own Big Picture Wants I knew I was on to something huge. I had been able to identify everything I wanted to have in my life.
Now that I’ve done this, I can’t imagine not being clear about what those things are. How can I set goals, make decisions or choices, or work on habits and intentions without knowing how they fit into the bigger picture? How can anyone?
When discontent strikes, we can try to make it go away quickly, or we can use it as motivation to dig deeper and examine our assumptions. If I were given a choice between being discontent and being complacent, I’d choose being discontent every time.
The Danger of a Single Story
This TED talk is very important and very moving. It made me think about and ask myself who are the people and what are the places I have a single story about?
So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
Stories matter. MANY stories matter.
Novelist Chimamanda Adichie
Challenging Conventional Wisdom
Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to part with them. —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan
Many of our ideas are based on what could be called common sense or conventional wisdom. They just seem so obvious we never consider questioning them. Because they make sense to us, we operate as if they are factual. We don’t need to know if there’s any evidence to support them. But those kinds of ideas are actually beliefs: things we accept or trust to be true. And when it comes to beliefs, trust generally trumps the need for evidence.
Here are two recent examples where evidence doesn’t support the conventional wisdom. Both involve children and child-rearing attitudes.
The conventional wisdom is that parents’ involvement with their children’s schooling is advantageous to their children’s education. That just seems like common sense. But this belief had never actually been tested or measured until recently. And it turns out that the conventional wisdom is not all that wise.
Don’t Help Your Kids with their Homework and other insights from a ground-breaking study of how parents impact children’s academic achievement: Parents can impact their kids academic success, but not by helping them with their homework, especially when the kids get to middle school.
Other conventional wisdom in regard to kids is that the world is a more dangerous place than it used to be, and the primary job of adults is to keep kids safe. This also seems obvious. But it’s also a belief that isn’t often examined. It turns out that the world may not be that much more dangerous than it used to be, and the zealous overprotection of kids may be doing them more harm than good.
The Overprotected Kid: A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer: Kids need to have time away from the watchful eyes of their parents or other adults, and they need to experience a feeling of being in danger in order to develop into competent adults.
There are many more examples of evidence not supporting the conventional wisdom in other areas, especially aging and behavior. In the two instances cited above, I think it’s interesting to consider how these beliefs may have been formed and how they became so widely accepted. It’s generally harder to find a middle ground when beliefs are involved because beliefs have such a strong emotional component.
And that’s another area in which common sense or conventional wisdom fails us. We think the level of confidence we have in a belief has some positive correlation with the accuracy of the belief. But it doesn’t. In fact, there’s probably little evidence to support many of our beliefs.
Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
The bottom line is that our brain craves certainty, and beliefs provide us with a feeling of certainty. If we want to use our brain, however, we need to challenge some of our own deeply-held beliefs instead of doing everything we can to shore them up. That’s easier said than done, of course.
Mindfulness vs. Habits: Game On?
According to the respective press they receive, habits are bad, and mindfulness is good. We ought to be as mindful as we can, as much of the time as we can, and do what we do as thoughtfully and mindfully as possible. This is a nice idea, but it doesn’t actually jibe with the way the brain works—or with the world in which most of us live.
Mindfulness, the conscious direction of attention or awareness, is a generally a positive thing. Certainly, most of us could use more mindfulness in our lives. Mindfulness training helps us pay attention to our own thoughts, feelings, and experience without judgment. It helps us focus on the present moment, on what we are taking in through our senses.
A few of the benefits claimed for mindfulness are:
- Decreased stress levels
- Decreased ruminative thinking
- Decreased cell damage
- Bolstering of the immune system
- Increased longevity
- Improved concentration
This is unquestionably great stuff.
However, when it comes to habits, mindfulness both helps and harms. It is beneficial in terms of helping us focus our attention on our behavior, specifically on those habits we want to start or change. Since habitual behavior, by its nature, is unconscious, in order to change it, we have to become conscious of it.
On the other hand, being too mindful—yes, apparently there are scientific measures for this—can get in the way of forming new habits, both bad and good. The formation of habits involves implicit learning, learning that is not consciously acquired. We have to let the unconscious part of our brain do its thing if we want to create and strengthen good habits. Too much mindfulness can impede that process.
In two studies of adult participants presented at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, people who scored high on a gauge of mindfulness (and were less distracted) performed poorly on sequenced learning tasks, which involve implicit learning—in this case, pattern detection. People who scored low on the gauge of mindfulness (and were more distracted) had quicker reaction times and performed much better on the same tests.
The very fact of paying too much attention or being too aware of stimuli coming up in these tests might actually inhibit implicit learning. That suggests that mindfulness may help prevent formation of automatic habits—which is done through implicit learning—because a mindful person is aware of what they are doing. –Chelsea Stillman
This sounds like good news for dealing with bad habits. The problem is that when we think of habits, those are the only ones we tend to think of: the ones we wish we didn’t have. But habits are a device the brain uses to conserve precious energy. In general, habits are not only useful, they’re essential. In fact, the more good habits we create, the more conscious attention we have available for other mental activity, such as mindfulness.
So, no, habits are not always bad. And yes, you can have too much of a good thing, in this case mindfulness.
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