Mental Models

What the Duck!

December 28, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

There’s a popular technique among programmers called “rubber duck debugging:” put a rubber duck (or a cardboard cutout of a dog) next to your computer, and whenever you get stuck, you talk to the duck.

Yes, you talk your problem and walk your code with that inanimate object. And you perpetuate the stereotype that we geeks are a socially awkward bunch.

“Showing It to Someone Else” isn’t just a way of telling the other what you think; it’s a way of telling yourself what you think. Just the act of slowing down and explaining your problem and its context can bring about a moment of illumination.

Rubber duck debugging is related to what psychologists call “incubation.” The best solutions can strike suddenly and unexpectedly when you aren’t actively working on your problem. Think of Archimedes and his Eureka moment.

Idea for Impact: Talking is often a part of thought. After many failed attempts, switching your brain from problem-solving to problem-explaining—even to a cat, parent, sympathetic coworker, or somebody who may not know much about whatever it is that’s bothering you—can break you free from fixation and trigger creative breakthroughs.

Hat tip to reader Nick Ashcroft.

You’ll Never Get a ‘Yes’ If You Never Ask

December 17, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

It never does any harm to ask for what you want

During a Q&A at Vanderbilt University in 2013, lifelong Billy Joel fan and piano player Michael Pollack plucked up the courage and stood up to ask his childhood idol a question.

Pollack, an 18-year-old freshman at Vanderbilt, asked to accompany Joel in a performance of “New York State of Mind,” Pollack’s favorite song: “I was very fortunate to play with Richie Cannata [Joel’s saxophone player] many times in New York City, and I was wondering if I could play it with you.”

With just a hint of hesitation, Joel said, “Okay.”

Joel gave a remarkable vocal performance to accompany Pollack’s piano skills. The crowd applauded.

“Remember that name,” Joel told the excited audience. “Guy’s got chops.”

An online video of the performance quickly went viral.

Stop Overthinking Every Simple (and Not so Simple) Request

Pollack took a risk and traded the possibility of embarrassment and rejection for a lifetime of memories and a huge payoff.

Before long, Pollack signed publishing deals and began collaborating with other musicians. After graduating from Vanderbilt, he wrote dozens of songs for celebrity musicians. This year, he achieved his first U.S. Top 40 radio #1 with Maroon 5’s “Memories.”

Idea for Impact: All it Takes is a Simple Ask

Most folks know that the key to getting what they want is merely asking for it. But they’re too wimpish to speak up.

Take a chance. A little bit of courage can open doors for you. Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Ask for what you want. You sometimes won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well.

Try something today that has a small risk and a huge payoff.

Couldn’t We Use a Little More Civility and Respect in Our Conversations?

December 9, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The New York Times recently had an article about a Smith College-class that addresses America’s burgeoning addiction to contempt.

The power of mindful conversation to change minds

The lecturer, reproductive justice-activist Loretta J. Ross, is highlighting the ills of call-out culture. Her class challenges the proclivity to persecute every presumed infringement against morality and represent the victim as somebody intolerable to decent society.

Ross doesn’t believe people should be publicly shamed for accidentally misgendering a classmate, for sending a stupid tweet they now regret; or for, say, admitting they once liked a piece of pop culture now viewed in a different light, such as “The Cosby Show.”

What I’m really impatient with is calling people out for something they said when they were a teenager when they’re now 55. I mean, we all at some point did some unbelievably stupid stuff as teenagers, right?

Call-out culture has taken conversations that could have once been learning opportunities and turned them into mud wrestling. “It really does alienate people, and makes them fearful of speaking up.”

The antidote to that outrage cycle, Professor Ross believes, is “calling in.” Calling in is like calling out, but done privately and with respect. “It’s a call out done with love,” she said. That may mean simply sending someone a private message, or even ringing them on the telephone to discuss the matter, or simply taking a breath before commenting, screen-shotting or demanding one “do better” without explaining how.

Calling out assumes the worst. Calling in involves conversation, compassion and context. It doesn’t mean a person should ignore harm, slight or damage, but nor should she, he or they exaggerate it. “Every time somebody disagrees with me it’s not ‘verbal violence.'”

Debate the issues, Avoid gratuitous name-calling

The recent election has underscored that we continue to be a deeply divided nation. Americans are ever more passionate about their beliefs and committed to their causes. Ideological affiliation is increasingly a matter of tribal identity. Presenting facts can sometimes backfire. In the narrow-minded pursuit of “goodness,” our society has manifested a disgraceful habit of dismissing people with differing attitudes as less than human, “deplorable,” and not worth consideration.

Differences of opinion are natural and healthy facets of any community. The various issues that we face are complicated, affecting different people in different ways. We must be able to express and accept our differences with civility.

Listen to the other in interpersonal confrontations. Put yourself in the other’s shoes and mull over a perspective you hadn’t considered previously. There may be a well-founded concern that you weren’t aware of, and you could soften your position and, perhaps, lead you to different conclusions.
Don’t approach debates as “take no prisoners” battles. Build bridges with your ideological opponents. If you never earnestly consider others’ opinions, your mind will shrink and become its own little echo chamber.

Idea for Impact: You can’t change minds by damning your opponents

Be civil and respectful of others’ views. As President Obama has reminded, the world is “messy” and full of “ambiguities,” and “if all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.”

Before trying to change others’ minds, consider how difficult it is to change your own.

A Bit of Insecurity Can Help You Be Your Best Self

December 3, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Self-confidence, so often peddled by the self-help genre as the panacea for low achievement, can indeed cause it. Beyond a moderate amount, self-confidence is destined to encourage complacency—even conceit. You’ll never reach anything better with that attitude.

Paradoxically, conceding your insecurities—and having a certain amount of humility about your capabilities—-is usually to your advantage.

Deep down, some of history’s greatest icons—from Abraham Lincoln to Mahatma Gandhi—regularly worried that they weren’t good enough. That’s what kept them striving harder.

A Bit of Insecurity Can Help You Be Your Best Self Face up to your self-judgment. Low self-esteem is present only when your self-appraisal is more acute than reality.

Channel that nagging voice in your head that keeps saying negative things about you. Don’t be self-defeatingly vulnerable. Don’t worry yourself into perfection, anxiety, or despair.

Engage that little “sweet spot” of insecurity to motivate yourself to exert the additional effort required to seek a better self. For example, ignore anyone who tries to calm your nerves by telling you to “just be yourself” or “who else could be better suited” before a job interview.

Idea for Impact: Satisfaction can be deadly. Lasting self-confidence derives from your ongoing effort, not by virtue.

Saying is Believing: Why People Are Reluctant to Change an Expressed Opinion

November 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Politicians shift their views shamelessly with the winds of opportunism. To their defense, they must choose to stand up for what they believe or risk political capital.

Most politicians believe in one thing—winning elections and latching on to power. Seems they’ll say anything that can get them in the office and stay there. Like when, during the 2004 presidential elections, Democratic nominee John Kerry famously proclaimed, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against” funding to rebuild Iraq.

Politicians Will Often Flip-flop to Maximize Their Popularity

Well, that’s the nature of the beast. Politicians enter politics for ideological reasons but must readily sell their souls to prolong their political careers. Politicians never seem to be willing to say, “I was wrong” or “Upon mature reflection, I’ve changed my mind on such and such.”

But what about the rest of us? It seems that, unlike the politicians, we’re shamed relatively easily when we change our mind and adjust our approach. Admitting we’ve made a mistake is too threatening to our sense of self. We end up over-compensating by denying fault and refusing ownership of our own mistakes, thereby protecting our self-image.

There’s evidence that suggests that saying is believing. Making a known pronouncement strengthens our commitment to that point of view. By committing ourselves openly to our present opinions, we may be hardening ourselves to future information that would otherwise change our minds.

The ‘Saying-Is-Believing’ Effect

According to Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (2006,) social psychologists have shown that openly committing to an opinion makes you less willing to change your mind.

Cialdini cites an experiment by social psychologists in which three sets of students were shown a group of lines. One set of students was asked to write down estimates of the lines’ length and turn their estimates to the experimenter. The second set was asked to write down their estimates on a Magic Pad and then wipe out their estimates before anyone else could see them. The third set of students didn’t write down their estimates at all. After the students were shown new evidence that suggested that their initial estimates were wrong,

The students who had never written down their first choices were least loyal to those choices. … By far, it was the students who had publicly recorded their initial positions who most resolutely refused to shift from those positions later. Public commitment had hardened them into the most stubborn of all.

Publicly committing to an answer makes people less receptive to information suggesting they were wrong

Yup, the act of publicly documenting your opinion enforces the feeling of others knowing what your opinion was. This produces fear of being judged.

The hard part about admitting you’re wrong is, well, admitting you’re wrong. This may induce you to refuse to accept new ideas.

The American economist Paul Krugman has remarked on the “epidemic of infallibility,”

Just to be clear, everyone makes mistakes. Nobody is perfect. When you’re committed to a fundamentally false narrative, facing up to facts becomes an act of political disloyalty. What’s going on with Mr. Trump and his inner circle seems to have less to do with ideology than with fragile egos. To admit having been wrong about anything, they seem to imagine, would brand them as losers and make them look small. In reality, of course, the inability to engage in reflection and self-criticism is the mark of a tiny, shriveled soul.

Idea for Impact: Changing Your Mind is Actually a Good Thing

Changing your mind based on new information isn’t bad. It’s something to be encouraged. As the Transcendentalist essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

In our vigilant, hypercritical, and judgmental society, the problem isn’t with people voicing and documenting their opinions (particularly on social media) but with people not being OK with someone changing theirs.

A professed commitment shouldn’t cause reluctance to change your opinion.

Do it Now // Summary of ‘The 5 Second Rule’ by Mel Robbins

November 23, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Mel Robbins’s The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage (2017) argues that much of what holds you back in life has roots in those few precious moments between when you have an idea and when your brain gets in the way of acting on that idea.

The 5-second rule is simple. If you have an instinct to act on a goal, you must physically move within 5 seconds or your brain will kill it. …. Hesitation is the kiss of death. You might hesitate for a just nanosecond, but that’s all it takes. That one small hesitation triggers a mental system that’s designed to stop you. And it happens in less than—you guessed it—five seconds.

Robbins asserts that you have five seconds to act on your ideas before you run the risk of subconsciously convincing yourself not to. Stay alert for those decisive moments. Each time, consider the benefits and liabilities of doing versus deferring.

When you internalize a do-it-now mindset, you’ll be dragging your feet less: “There’s one thing that is guaranteed to increase your feelings of control over your life: a bias toward action.”

There’s some wisdom here: don’t wait for motivation, high energy, or a sense of focus before taking action. Create motivation by taking action. Once initiated, action tends to gather momentum—tasks become increasingly easy to sustain.

Recommendation: Skip Mel Robbins’s The 5 Second Rule. You don’t need 240 pages of testimonials and cheery page-fillers on not thinking your way out of problems. Watch her TED talk instead.

Idea for Impact: When you catch yourself thinking you’ll do something later, take it as a nudge to do it now. Take action before procrastination sets in. Action motivates.

Fail Cheaply

November 19, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

One way to accelerate innovation is to undertake low-risk experiments.

Failures in the innovation process can be costly and time-consuming. It’s often wiser to try low-risk, low-cost, high-payoff experiments than ruminating endlessly.

Make your experiments cheaper. You don’t need to create a full-scale concept to test it. Find low-cost ways to test your assumptions. It may take time and iteration to find what works for you.

Engineers often use surrogate modeling techniques that use simple prototypes and mock-ups that are as representative as possible.
Counter to the phrase “it takes money to make money,” shrewd entrepreneurs know how to experiment multiple ways for minimal cost. Next, they scale up one or two experiments that have given them favorable results. The losses are small, and the potential gains much larger.

Idea for Impact: The worst way to fail is slow and big. Don’t eliminate failure. Only reduce the cost of failure.

Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”

November 2, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In the mid-1950s, Gillis Lundgren (1929–2016) was a draftsman living in a remote Swedish village of Älmhult. He was the fourth employee of a fledging entrepreneur named Ingvar Kamprad.

Kamprad’s business was called IKEA, an acronym combining his initials and those of his family’s farm and a nearby village. He had founded IKEA in 1943 and got his start selling stationery and stockings at age 17. In the 1950s, Kamprad had launched a low-cost mail-order furniture retailer to cater to farmers.

Constraints have played a role in many of the most revolutionary products

In 1956, Lundgren designed a veneered, low coffee table. He built the table at home but realized that the table was too big to fit into the back of his Volvo 445 Duett station wagon. Lundgren cut off the legs, packed them in a flat box with the tabletop, and rushed to a photoshoot for the IKEA furniture catalog.

And in so doing, Lundgren unintentionally birthed the flatpack furniture industry. He modified his simple design and drew up plans for a disassembled version of the table. Lundgren’s Lövet table (now called Lövbacken) became IKEA’s first successful mass-produced product.

IKEA and Its Flatpacking Took Over the World

IKEA’s trademark, easy-to-follow assembly instructions are a central ingredient to the company’s success. Manufacturing and distributing prefabricated furniture via flatpacking has proved enormously successful. It has dramatically facilitated the shipment and storage of pieces that otherwise took up much more space.

According to Bertil Torekull’s Leading by Design—The IKEA Story (1998,) the concept of ready-to-assemble furniture is much earlier than that. But IKEA was the first to systematically develop and sell the idea commercially.

Flatpacking contributed to many of IKEA’s products’ enduring popularity—they’re affordable, sleek, functional, and brilliantly efficient. In 1978, Lundgren designed the iconic Billy bookcase, the archetypical IKEA product that currently sells one in three seconds.

IKEA’s aesthetic of simplicity and efficiency reflects in its exclusive design and marketing approach. IKEA constantly questions its design, manufacturing, and distribution to create low-cost and acceptably good products.

The method has been adopted by numerous other business enterprises, transforming how products are made and sold globally.

Out of Limitations Comes Creativity

One problem with creativity is that sometimes people face an open field of creative possibilities and become paralyzed. Constraints can be the anchors of creativity [see more examples here, here, and here.]

Constraints fuel rather than limit creativity. Use constraints to break through habitual thinking and promote spontaneity. The mere experience of playing around with different constraints can stretch your imagination and open your mind’s eye for ingenuity.

Idea for Impact: Use constraints to help stimulate creativity. As the British writer and art critic G. K. Chesterton once declared, “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

The Waterline Principle: How Much Risk Can You Tolerate?

October 15, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

American engineer and entrepreneur Wilbert L. “Bill” Gore (1912–86) was the founder (with wife Genevieve (Vieve)) of W. L. Gore & Associates, the maker of such innovative products as Gore-Tex fabrics, Elixir guitar strings, and a variety of medical products.

Gore’s open and creative workplace emphasized autonomy, fairness, commitment, and experimentation. He instituted a mental model for risk-tolerance called the “Waterline Principle.”

Gore compared the level of allowable risk to the waterline on a boat.

Sanction risks above the waterline since they wouldn’t sink the boat—you have ample autonomy above the waterline. If a decision goes bad and produces a hole in the side of the boat above the waterline, you can fix the hole, learn from the experience, and carry on.
Risks that fell below the waterline, in contrast, can blow a hole that can sink the boat. Below-the-waterline risks need prior approval from the “captain.” Your team can be prepared for such risks, investigate potential solutions, or buy appropriate insurance coverage.

Commenting about Bill Gore and his Waterline Principle, business consultant Jim Collins noted in his How the Mighty Fall (2009,)

When making risky bets and decisions in the face of ambiguous or conflicting data, ask three questions:

What’s the upside, if events turn out well?

What’s the downside, if events go very badly?

Can you live with the downside? Truly?

The Waterline Principle encourages prudent experimentation and conscientious risk-taking by lowering the risk waterline.

Idea for Impact: Risk analysis and risk reduction should be one of the primary goals of any intellectual process. Invite your team to identify risks that can sink the boat and those that can cause survivable damages.

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Mental Models

Wondering what to read next?

It never does any harm to ask for what you want

Stop Overthinking Every Simple (and Not so Simple) Request

Idea for Impact: All it Takes is a Simple Ask

Wondering what to read next?

The power of mindful conversation to change minds

Debate the issues, Avoid gratuitous name-calling

Idea for Impact: You can’t change minds by damning your opponents

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Politicians Will Often Flip-flop to Maximize Their Popularity

The ‘Saying-Is-Believing’ Effect

Publicly committing to an answer makes people less receptive to information suggesting they were wrong

Idea for Impact: Changing Your Mind is Actually a Good Thing

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Constraints have played a role in many of the most revolutionary products

IKEA and Its Flatpacking Took Over the World

Out of Limitations Comes Creativity

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?