Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Sharpening Your Skills

Is It Worth It to Quit Social Media?

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Yet another study on the benefits of deactivating Facebook:

  • Quitting Facebook could free up 60 minutes per day.
  • “Deactivating Facebook caused small but significant improvements in subjective well-being, and in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety.”
  • “As the [time-away-from-Facebook] experiment ended, participants reported planning to use Facebook much less in the future.”
  • “Deactivation significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues and a measure of exposure to polarizing news.”

I’ve written previously about the ills of social media: they’re time-sucks at work and home, they undermine flesh-and-blood social bonding, they influence your thinking through gate-keeping the newsfeeds you’re exposed to, and they unduly sway your buying decisions through advertisements. Mindlessly scrolling through the airbrushed pictures of others’ lives could remind you of the life you don’t have—potentially instigating feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and self-loathing.

Social media have become a necessity that people have become reluctant to do without. Facebook’s spectacular growth is testimony to the fact that social media offer a core human need that was always wanted. For the moment, we’ll have to rely on individual choices to use social media sparingly and intelligently. Balance is everything—not all or none.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Could Limiting Social Media Reduce Your Anxiety About Work?
  2. Group Polarization: Like-Mindedness is Dangerous, Especially with Social Media
  3. Buy Yourself Time
  4. Entitlement and Anger Go Together
  5. Surrounded by Yes

Be Smart by Not Being Stupid

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No superhuman ability is usually required to dodge the many foolish choices to which we’re prone. A few basic rules are all that’s needed to shield you, if not from all errors, from silly errors.

Charlie Munger often emphasizes that minimizing mistakes may be one of the least appreciated tricks in successful investing. He has reputedly credited much of Berkshire Hathaway’s success to consistently avoiding stupidity. “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage we have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent.” And, “I think part of the popularity of Berkshire Hathaway is that we look like people who have found a trick. It’s not brilliance. It’s just avoiding stupidity.” They’ve avoided investing in situations they don’t understand or summon experience.

As a policy, avoiding stupidity in investing shouldn’t mean avoiding risk wholly; instead, it’s taking on risk only when there’s a fair chance that you’ll be adequately rewarded for assuming that risk.

Idea for Impact: Tune out stupidity. Becoming successful in life isn’t always about what you do but what you don’t do. In other words, improving decision quality is often more about decreasing your chances of failure than increasing your chances of success.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The “Ashtray in the Sky” Mental Model: Idiot-Proofing by Design
  2. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  3. Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data
  4. Question the Now, Imagine the Next
  5. Protect the Downside with Pre-mortems

The Creativity of the Unfinished

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Don’t dot every I and cross every T. Leave a stone unturned.

Ignore a rule. Don’t tie up every loose end.

Leave some questions unanswered. Let something be out of place.

Violate the expectation and usher a realm of potentiality. As the American artist Julia Cameron noted in her seminal self-help book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (1992,) “Art needs time to incubate, to sprawl a little, to be ungainly and misshapen and finally emerge as itself. The ego hates this fact. The ego wants instant gratification and the addictive hit of an acknowledged win.”

A piece of art, a movie, a melodic line, or a production all tend to be more captivating when they leave you wondering—when they urge you to explore the possibilities your mind has to offer.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Overcoming Personal Constraints is a Key to Success
  2. Why You Get Great Ideas in the Shower
  3. You Can’t Develop Solutions Unless You Realize You Got Problems: Problem Finding is an Undervalued Skill
  4. Finding Potential Problems & Risk Analysis: A Case Study on ‘The Three Faces of Eve’
  5. Van Gogh Didn’t Just Copy—He Reinvented

‘Tis the Most Wonderful Time of the Year … to Job-Search

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The holidays are around the corner, and this is an excellent time to job-search, especially since most jobs come from networking and referrals.

As you spread the holiday cheer, use greetings as a pretext to catch up with friends, reach out to LinkedIn contacts, and network with people in your industry. Take the opportunity of Christmas and New Year parties to socialize with new people that can help you.

Some workplaces have use-it-or-lose-it money and headcount in the current year’s financial plan that they’d like to commit before year’s end. Other workplaces that have the upcoming year’s plans approved may be eager to jumpstart hiring.

The holiday spirit and the season of giving make hiring managers even more likely to treat you favorably. Moreover, with work winding down for the holiday season, decision-makers are less likely to be in long meetings and business trips, and, therefore, more likely to be at their desks to be contacted.

And you’ll face less competition since few people bother with job-searching at this time of the year.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Improve Your Career Prospects During the COVID-19 Crisis
  2. Could Limiting Social Media Reduce Your Anxiety About Work?
  3. The Hidden Influence of Association
  4. Being Underestimated Can Be a Great Thing
  5. Stop Trying to Prove Yourself to the World

Change Your Mindset by Taking Action

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While it is helpful to be motivated and get into the right mindset to, say, exercise, it’s far easier to just show up at the gym and get started on a small quest, even when you don’t really feel like doing it. You’re likely to habituate to new behaviors in a way that circumvents your innate resistance to change.

Minor adjustments can add up and make a big difference. As Harvard psychologist Susan David writes in Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (2016,)

Traditional self-help tends to see change in terms of lofty goals and total transformation, but research actually supports the opposite view—that small, deliberate tweaks infused with your values can make a huge difference in your life. This is especially true when we tweak the routine and habitual parts of life, which then afford tremendous leverage for change.

Idea for Impact: Waiting for the right mindset to “show up” can be a losing strategy. Taking action is often easier than controlling your mental state. Don’t overly focus on the very thing that’s harder to control. Take the next baby step forward.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Did School Turn You Into a Procrastinator?
  2. An Effective Question to Help Feel the Success Now
  3. Do Things Fast
  4. Big Shifts Start Small—One Change at a Time
  5. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes

Risk More, Risk Earlier

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Some of the best careers are crafted by those who use their initial working years to gain diversified on-the-job business education.

The compounding returns of vetting opportunities wisely and taking sensible risks are particularly valuable today. Business is more complex than ever, and competition for top positions is intense.

Idea for Impact: Take on as much risk as possible early in your career. You may have less to lose than you think—and a great deal to gain. Your older self will not have the energy, time, autonomy, or temperament that you contentedly have now. Plus, you’ll have more time to make up for mistakes.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to … Be More Confident at Work
  2. Get Started, Passion Comes Later: A Case Study of Chipotle’s Founder, Steve Ells
  3. The Myth of Passion
  4. The Career-Altering Question: Generalist or Specialist?
  5. “Follow Your Passion” Is Terrible Career Advice

Books in Brief: “Hell Yeah or No” Mental Model

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American entrepreneur and blogger Derek Sivers popularized the “Hell Yeah or No” mental model (YouTube Synopsis): unless you’re super excited about something, don’t commit to it.

If you’re ready to say ‘yes’ to the things that aren’t that great, you won’t have time, energy, and focus for the “hell yeah” stuff in your life. Sivers has summed up,

We tend to say yes to too many things. And because of this, we’re spread too thin. We’re so busy doing average things that we don’t have time for the occasional great thing.

So instead I propose raising the bar as high as you can, so that if you’re feeling anything less than, “oh, hell yeah, that would be amazing,” then just say, no.

By doing this, you will miss out on many good things, but that’s okay because your time will be quite empty. So then by saying no to the merely good things, you’ll have the time and the energy and the space in your life to throw yourself in entirely when that occasional great thing comes up.

Recommendation: Read this insight-dense book. The “Hell Yeah or No” mental model will reframe how you control impulses and consider life’s big decisions.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost
  2. What You’re Saying When You Say ‘Yes’
  3. When It’s Over, Leave
  4. Don’t Ruminate Endlessly
  5. Let a Dice Decide: Random Choices Might Be Smarter Than You Think

Public Speaking is Traumatizing Vulnerable Students

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For decades, universities have forced presentations and class participation to be integral to students’ grades. Sure, employers are interested not only in graduates’ subject knowledge but also in their ability to communicate, work in teams, problem-solve, build consensus, and so on.

However, public speaking anxiety is too common in college students, particularly those suffering from chronic social anxiety. Some even dread the sheer prospect of raising their hands in class for fear of being judged.

Sadly, our academic institutions aren’t doing enough to support such students. College is, after all, a place to practice in a supportive environment—it’s better for students to confront their fears in a relatively low-stakes classroom setting than in the real world. One lecturer I know of accommodated a nervous student by dismissing everyone else and making her present only to the professor.

Colleges must emphasize that anxiety and fear of public speaking are entirely normal—Mark Twain famously noted, “There are two types of speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars.” Colleges should assess individual students’ natural ability and teach public speaking as part of university learning, starting with systematic desensitization and conditioning confidence until the students feel they can tackle entire presentations.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Could Limiting Social Media Reduce Your Anxiety About Work?
  2. The Law of Petty Irritations
  3. The Nature of Worry
  4. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  5. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be

Don’t Over-Deliver

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Many tasks in the workplace could be done with total adequacy and barely more.

Don’t get fixated on ensuring that every task is entirely done, every email edited and re-edited to get the grammar right, or every spreadsheet is flawless. This is a pointless pursuit.

Sure, you don’t want to be a careless hammerhead. But don’t waste time sweating the little stuff. There comes the point where any changes you make to whatever it is you’re working on no longer makes it better but just different. Identifying the inflection point of diminishing returns is one of the hardest skills to learn and one of the most necessary.

Don’t agonize over tiny improvements in your work and thwart yourself from achieving the actual goal of doing the work.

Idea for Impact: Most acceptable outcomes correlate with “good enough,” not “perfection.” Being consistently excellent is essentially a matter of fierce discipline—doing the essential things well.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Book Summary of ‘Yeah, No. Not Happening’: Karen Karbo on Rejecting the Pursuit of Perfection’s Snare
  2. Why Settle?
  3. The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year
  4. Do Things Fast
  5. The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’

Are You Ill-Prepared for Being Wrong?

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We spend so much of our lives being right that, I wonder if, we’re ill-prepared for being wrong.

Since childhood, we’ve been inured that being right is more acceptable than being wrong. Being wrong feels so unpleasant—repulsive even—that we instill a series of strategies to salvage ourselves when we are exposed as being wrong. We learn to trip from our forked tongues explanations, justifications, excuses, and blames for our errors and oversights.

What’s worse, we develop a deep-seated impulse to shirk responsibility and accountability for our actions. We become loath to change our beliefs or behaviors because change takes effort. We envisage change as a challenge to our identity. In the words of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, “People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a lot. They wake up and re-analyze things and change their mind. If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot. People who are right a lot want to disconfirm their fundamental biases.”

Idea for Impact: What’s lost in all this is that being wrong is not only a central feature of being human. It’s one of the most potent ways of learning. Admitting we were wrong—and conceding we’ll be wrong again—can be so liberating and welcoming.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Smart Folks are Most Susceptible to Overanalyzing and Overthinking
  2. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  3. A Bit of Insecurity Can Help You Be Your Best Self
  4. How To … Be More Confident in Your Choices
  5. 3 Ways to … Avoid Overthinking