Mental Models

Racism and Identity: The Lie of Labeling

February 2, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

This video examines how categorical labeling and the us-versus-them mentality it fosters are at the heart of division and, subsequently, intolerance and non-acceptance.

From birth, the world force-feeds us these labels, and eventually, we all swallow them. We digest and accept the labels, never ever doubting them, but there’s one problem. Labels are not you, and labels are not me. Labels are just labels. Who we truly are is skin deep. Who we truly are is found inside.

Labels forever blind us from seeing a person for whom they are, but instead force us to see them through the judgmental, prejudicial, artificial filters of who we think they are.

Labels Aren’t Just Idle Placeholders

Labels determine what we see. As essayist James Baldwin cautions in The Price of the Ticket (1985,) “As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you. Because as long as you think you’re white, I’m forced to think I’m black.”

We’ve used the lie of labeling to define and separate people for millennia. We emotionally and intellectually enslave ourselves when we believe the lie of a label. Then we enslave others. Even forcing people to self-identify by labels reinforces separation, stereotyping, and divisiveness.

Rigid stereotypes of out-group norms follow. Such attitudes are harmful because they overlook the full humanity and uniqueness of all people. When our perceptions of different races are distorted and stereotypical, it’s demeaning, devaluing, limiting, and hurtful to others.

Idea for Impact: Let’s Stop Sidestepping the Human Behind the Labels

What we need now—more than ever—is an individual and collective shift from tolerance to acceptance (it’s possible to be tolerant without being accepting, but it isn’t possible to be accepting without first being tolerant.) In so doing, we can work to create a society in which everyone is valued, appreciated, and embraced.

How to … Make Work Less Boring

January 28, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to ... Make Work Less Boring Time passes faster when you divide a big chunk into lots of smaller chunks. So, if you’re on an inescapably boring path, break it into units. And, for each dreaded task, ask yourself “What’s the most fun way I could do this?” Work at a coffee shop? Listen to your favorite music? Reward yourself upon its completion?

As Mary Poppins asserted, “In every task that must be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.”

How to … Plan in a Time of Uncertainty

January 25, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Planning in a Time of Uncertainty In periods of much uncertainty and ambiguity, move away from annual plans and focus on the next three months. Reflect on the unpredictability of the future and stay on your toes by forging plans for unexpected scenarios so you won’t be caught flat-footed when that time comes.

Establish “trigger points” and “accelerate, maintain, or terminate criteria” in advance and keep an eye on key indicators to “wait and see” or “stay the course” should one of your planned-for scenarios materialize.

Idea for Impact: When the horizon is much shorter, operate with agility and allocate your resources in real-time.

Serve the ‘Lazy Grapefruit’

January 16, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Supreme Citrus Fruits I love grapefruits, but they’re messy. Not quite as messy as eating mangos, though. Peeling a grapefruit also leaves a filmy residue on the hands that doesn’t come off easily, even with soap or hand sanitizer.

A professional chef recently coached me on suprêming a grapefruit. This method is a little time-consuming, but the results—no rind, no pith, no skin, no mess—totally worth it! The chef calls it “Serving the Lazy Grapefruit.”

Now that’s an excellent metaphor.

When you give presentations, especially when you pitch to busy executives, you should serve them the ‘lazy grapefruit.’

Too many presentations are put together like a whole grapefruit—the audience is made to go through the trouble of picking the juiciest fare themselves.

Especially so when you’re presenting to busy executives—they tend to be incredibly impatient and often have little time to weigh options. To present the ‘lazy grapefruit’ is to remove the rind and peel in your presentation from the shell of unnecessary details and then serve the kernel to them in an appealing, easily consumable, least-messy form.

Your audience will relish the clarity provided by anyone who’s made an effort to make the message straightforward.

Boil your message down to the essentials and figure out precisely what they’ll need to know and why it’s important to them, and then lay it out in an orderly and logical manner.

Elevate your presentation. It’s more difficult to make your message simpler, but it’s worth the effort.

Idea for Impact: Do the thinking so your audience doesn’t have to.

Do You Really Need More Willpower?

January 5, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Do You Really Need More Willpower?

Sure, self-discipline is an asset. Plenty of successful people evidently benefit from having truckloads of it. However, strengthening willpower may not always be easy for the rest of us.

You can increase productivity and contentment simply by altering your environment. Make it easier for you (and others in your life) to confront temptation and adopt the habits you want.

Use stimulus control to shift your behavior:

Want to stop taking on more debt? Freeze your credit cards.
Can’t stop checking your phone for likes, comments, texts, tweets, and game requests? Disable the apps.
Want your household to be more organized? Establish routines and make things easy to put away with clearly labeled receptacles.
Want to switch to healthier snacking choices? Splurge on pre-washed, pre-cut, grab-and-go vegetables.

You’re more likely to start change when you put the stimulus for action into your environment.

Idea for Impact: Don’t get bogged down by thinking that lifestyle changes are entirely about willpower. In a world so heavily baited with pervasive cues and craving-inducing stimuli, the more you can tweak your environment to better condition yourself into your desired habits, the more likely you are to meet your goals.

Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year

January 2, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Developing Consistency When Creating New Habits

The best way to catalyze significant change is by relying on highly specific habits and routines and making time for them amid the busyness of life.

Habit formation relies on consistency. Here’s a simple trick to prevent good intentions from slipping.

Suppose that you want to start a daily walking habit. You set a target to go for a walk for at least an hour a day. But some days, this habit might not be doable.

Consistency & Small Habits = Big Results

To prevent slipping on your daily goal and beating yourself up about it, establish two targets: one for the “good” days and one for the “tough” days.

Set the bar very low for when it’s not possible to dedicate an hour to walking. On the tough days, when you’re exhausted, hungry, feeling lazy and unmotivated, or you’re simply not in the mood to walk, you can go for a quick walk. And on good days, when you have more time and energy, go for longer walks. Average out the tough days with the good days.

Habits Take a Long Time to Create Make it so easy that you can’t say no to maintaining your habit on the tough days. You’ll decrease your skipped days and sustain the habit’s consistency by lowering your expectations.

Another benefit of having easy-win targets for the tough days is that you nudge yourself into action. Let’s say you target reading an hour a day. On tough days, when you set out to read for just ten minutes, you’ll perhaps get engrossed in more of the task once you get started and find your way into the text. Action begets momentum, and you’ll find it easier to keep going at it.

Idea for Impact: Consistency is the Foundation of Building New Habits

Habits take a long time to create, but they develop faster when you do them more routinely and repeatedly. The more days you skip, the harder it is to get back into the habit. Set the bar low for the tough days and build deep-seated habits.

Our 10 Most Popular Articles of 2022

December 30, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Top Blog Articles of 2022 Here are our most popular exclusive features of 2022. Pass this on to your friends; if they like these, they can sign up to receive our RSS feeds.

Choose a better response. Don’t accept reflexive reactions. Instead, learn to know there is a “space” before responding.
To be more productive, try doing less. The best way to get lots of things done is to not do them at all.
The good of working for a micromanager: be aware of the details your manager cares about and expect to learn a lot.
A hack to resist temptation: commit to not giving in for 15 minutes. Even a simple distraction can break the trance.
Get good at things by being bad first. If you aren’t willing to be bad initially, you’ll never get started on anything new.
Get rid of relationship clutter. Make room for more supportive and nurturing relationships.
Don’t be a prisoner of the hurt done to you. While you are the victim of another who has caused you some suffering, she herself is also a victim of suffering.
Nothing like a word of encouragement to provide a lift. Everyone needs hope. Look for honest ways to offer even a little nudge of encouragement.
The secret to happiness in relationships is lowering your expectations. You’d be happier to accept other people’s difficult behaviors when you expect less from them.
Cancel culture has a condescension problem. If we can’t stand up for the right to speech that we dislike, why keep the right to the speech we do like?

And here are some articles of yesteryear that continue to be popular:

We wish you all a healthy and prosperous 2023!

“Fly the Aircraft First”

December 29, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Attention Prioritization: Lessons from Eastern Airlines Flight 401 Today is the 50th anniversary of the Flight 401 disaster. I’ve previously cited how the crew of the ill-fated Eastern Airlines Lockheed L-1011 got so single-mindedly preoccupied with tackling a nose landing gear indicator light malfunction that they didn’t pay attention to the fact that their airliner was descending gradually into the Florida Everglades.

In summary, the pilots were simply too distracted to fly the aircraft. Human factors, specifically cognitive impairments, can precipitate distractions away from vital tasks.

The incident led to a breakthrough called Crew Resource Management (CRM.) This “human nature innovation” actively orients pilots to prioritize tasks in order of operational safety. The adage “Aviate, Navigate, and Communicate (A-N-C)” reinforces the ‘fly the aircraft first’ behaviors until they’re internalized and become routine.

The top priority—always—is to aviate. That means fly the airplane by using the flight controls and flight instruments to direct the airplane’s attitude, airspeed, and altitude. Rounding out those top priorities are figuring out where you are and where you’re going (Navigate,) and, as appropriate, talking to ATC or someone outside the airplane (Communicate.) However, it doesn’t matter if we’re navigating and communicating perfectly if we lose control of the aircraft and crash. A-N-C seems simple to follow, but it’s easy to forget when you get busy or distracted in the cockpit.

Idea for Impact: “Fly the aircraft first.” Know when to set aside the seemingly important things to accomplish the more vital ones.

Books in Brief: The Power of Introverts

December 24, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Susan Cain’s bestselling Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (2012) investigates how our schools and offices have an intrinsic cultural bias towards extroverts—they’re more likely to be social and enjoy being in high-stimulus environments.

At a business meeting, for example, extroverts hog the conversation, while introverts are often quiet. Extroverts think by talking and arguing, whereas introverts think and process internally.

I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they’re good talkers, but they don’t have good ideas. It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those traits are rewarded. Well, why is that? They’re valuable traits, but we put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking.

Idea for Impact: Don’t miss out on introverted excellence.

Mental Models

Labels Aren’t Just Idle Placeholders

Idea for Impact: Let’s Stop Sidestepping the Human Behind the Labels

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Consistency & Small Habits = Big Results

Idea for Impact: Consistency is the Foundation of Building New Habits

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