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Critical Thinking

How to … Pop the Filter Bubble

January 23, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Pop the Filter Bubble You’re inclined to be drawn toward those who are similar and wary of those who differ. Similarity bias propels you to unwittingly filter out ideas and opinions that diverge from your own.

Expand your view by actively seeking opposing views. Break your routines. Fraternize with considerate, ‘unlike’-minded people. Remain open to alternative interpretations. Ask big “what if” questions and frame things with an exploratory conjecture: ‘what if we did it this way?,’ ‘do we understand the problem?’ or ‘why doesn’t this work better?’

Putting yourself in a learning and questioning mindset will inspire, stimulate, and challenge you to step out of what you know. Decision-making and creativity will soar.

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  1. Surrounded by Yes: Social Media and Elsewhere
  2. How to Stimulate Group Creativity // Book Summary of Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’
  3. Group Polarization: Like-Mindedness is Dangerous, Especially with Social Media
  4. Consensus is Dangerous
  5. Why Brainwriting is Better than Brainstorming for Rapid Idea Generation

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Conversations, Conviction, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Social Dynamics

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.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What Happens When You Talk About Too Many Goals
  2. Here’s a Tactic to Sell Change: As a Natural Progression
  3. Deliver The Punchline First
  4. How to … Prepare to Be Interviewed by The Media
  5. How You Make a Memorable Elevator Speech

Filed Under: Effective Communication, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Assertiveness, Communication, Critical Thinking, Meetings, Persuasion, Presentations, Thought Process

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:

  • Lessons on adversity from Charlie Munger
  • If you’re looking for bad luck, you’ll soon find it
  • The power of negative thinking
  • Fight ignorance, not each other
  • The Fermi Rule & Guesstimation
  • Don’t let small decisions destroy your productivity
  • How smart companies get smarter
  • How to manage smart, powerful leaders
  • Care less for what other people think
  • Expressive writing can help you heal
  • Accidents can happen when you least expect

We wish you all a healthy and prosperous 2023!

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  2. Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data
  3. Lessons from David Dao Incident: Watch Out for the Availability Bias!
  4. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head
  5. Rapoport’s Rules to Criticize Someone Constructively

Filed Under: Managing People, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Getting Along, Mindfulness, Thought Process

Be Smart by Not Being Stupid

December 12, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Be Smart by Not Being Stupid 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 required 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; rather, it’s taking on risk only when there’s a fine chance that you’ll be properly 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. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  2. Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data
  3. More Data Isn’t Always Better
  4. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head
  5. Smart Folks are Most Susceptible to Overanalyzing and Overthinking

Filed Under: MBA in a Nutshell, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Biases, Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Problem Solving, Risk, Thinking Tools, Thought Process, Wisdom

The Creativity of the Unfinished

December 8, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Bull's Head, 1942 by Pablo Picasso 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 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. You Can’t Develop Solutions Unless You Realize You Got Problems: Problem Finding is an Undervalued Skill
  3. Finding Potential Problems & Risk Analysis: A Case Study on ‘The Three Faces of Eve’
  4. Turning a Minus Into a Plus … Constraints are Catalysts for Innovation
  5. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Artists, Clutter, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Innovation, Mental Models, Thought Process

Lessons from the Japanese Decision-Making Process

November 10, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Ringi Seido - Decision-Making Process in Japanese Management Systems Japanese firms traditionally use the ringi seido (“request for approval system”) to make critical decisions. A proposal is circulated to appropriate people, advancing from lower to higher ranks. As the proposal works through the management layers before landing at the top, each participant puts their stamp (the hanko) on the document.

This collective consensus process allows for a greater number of reasonable alternatives to be considered and for the risk to be spread. Although it may be slow, the implementation is faster once the decision is made. (Since the early ’90s, Toyota has followed a “three-stamp movement,” restricting the number of people needing to approve a proposal to three.)

Unlike consensus management in the west, the ringi system is often used to appease factions in an institution. Given the Japanese norms (nemawashi) of social structure and intercultural communication, everybody tends to be very diplomatic when giving an opinion. A decision isn’t made if unanimity isn’t reached.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Serve the ‘Lazy Grapefruit’
  2. To Make an Effective Argument, Explain Your Opponent’s Perspective
  3. How to Argue like the Wright Brothers
  4. Deliver The Punchline First
  5. How You Make a Memorable Elevator Speech

Filed Under: Business Stories, Effective Communication, Leading Teams Tagged With: Conflict, Critical Thinking, Japan, Meetings, Persuasion, Presentations, Teams, Thought Process

Are You Ill-Prepared for Being Wrong?

October 31, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Are You Ill-Prepared for Being Wrong? 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. How to Embrace Uncertainty and Leave Room for Doubt
  4. A Bit of Insecurity Can Help You Be Your Best Self
  5. 3 Ways to … Avoid Overthinking

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Confidence, Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Mindfulness, Wisdom

3 Ways to … Manage for Creativity

October 21, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Manage for Creativity Managers can create the conditions for innovation by encouraging a culture of being creative—not just productive—and razing barriers that stifle individual expression.

  1. Get less formal. Foster a culture characterized by a tolerance for failure and a willingness to experiment. Involve everyone and welcome great ideas from everywhere. Make sure everyone feels free to speak out: people will own solutions if they’ve been involved in the decision-making.
  2. Simplify the workplace. Look at things with a fresh eye, as an outsider might—sometimes you’re too close to things to see the truth. Drop unnecessary work, and explore what routines can be phased out or improved. Work with coworkers to eliminate extraneous loops and redundancies if your organization has far too many rules, approvals, and forms. Streamline decision-making.
  3. Defy tradition. If no one can recall why your team does something a particular way, the task is likely more convoluted than it needs to be. Hold a ‘why do we do it that way?’ challenge. Invite colleagues from different teams to come in and look at things in a detached way. Figure out what’s relevant and necessary (and what’s not) and frequently reevaluate the priority list as new things are added.

Idea for Impact: Managing for creativity is a conscious effort in experimentation.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Overcoming Personal Constraints is a Key to Success
  2. Creativity—It Takes a Village: A Case Study of the 3M Post-it Note
  3. Many Creative People Think They Can Invent Best Working Solo
  4. Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas
  5. Evolution, Not Revolution

Filed Under: Mental Models, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Innovation, Problem Solving, Teams, Thought Process

3 Ways to … Avoid Overthinking

October 17, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Avoid Overthinking Overthinking and over-analyzing the causes and meaning of your thoughts can be tamed through greater self-awareness and mental disengagement.

  1. Set a time limit for your “thinking time,” then make yourself move on to something else or force your decision. Vent your worries to the world, but there’s a risk that you’ll end up even more confused if you keep asking everyone’s opinion. Most of the time, things aren’t as complicated as you perceive them.
  2. Pause and take a step back. Interrupt the thinking process or distract yourself by diverting your attention to something very different. Focused distraction can calm your mind and help you have a coherent view of the whole situation.
  3. Accept that uncertainty is part of this life, and you’ll never have all the facts or know what’s further down the road. Studies suggest we fear an unknown outcome more than a known bad one. Not everything you plan will work out, and that’s ok. It’s often better to set a clear course today and tackle problems that arise tomorrow.

Idea for Impact: Right-size your expectations. Overthinking comes from trying to control what you can’t control.

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. It’s Probably Not as Bad as You Think: The 20-40-60 Rule
  4. More Data Isn’t Always Better
  5. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Assertiveness, Confidence, Conviction, Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Thinking Tools, Wisdom

How You Make a Memorable Elevator Speech

September 29, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How You Make a Memorable Elevator Speech With an elevator speech, you not only have a short time to elicit someone’s interest but also the added challenge of standing out from the crowd.

Your only goal should be to say something intriguing, memorable, and unique, prompting the prospect to lean in and invite, “Wait … do tell me more.”

I’ve listened to hundreds of elevator languages, and the few that continued out are the ones that sparked a conversation. Sameness and clichés are boring—everything sounds more or less the same. If, on the proverbial elevator, one must decide between ‘different’ or ‘better,’ one would choose ‘different.’ People remember ‘different.’

So, presenting yourself in the best possible light involves saying something snappy and ditching the details. Be concise and coherent, but not vague. Appear mysterious and confident, but not arrogant.

Idea for Impact: With an elevator speech, you’ll be forgotten if you aren’t unique and memorable. Rehearse your message well and be ready to perform it flawlessly at a moment’s notice.

P.S. My elevator speech: “Hi, My name’s Nagesh. I’m an investor. I’m just like Warren Buffett, except that I deal with a lot fewer zeros than him.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Deliver The Punchline First
  2. Serve the ‘Lazy Grapefruit’
  3. Persuade Others to See Things Your Way: Use Aristotle’s Ethos, Logos, Pathos, and Timing
  4. Facts Alone Can’t Sell: Lessons from the Intel Pentium Integer Bug Disaster
  5. Here’s a Tactic to Sell Change: As a Natural Progression

Filed Under: Effective Communication, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Communication, Critical Thinking, Marketing, Meetings, Negotiation, Persuasion, Presentations, Skills for Success

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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Unless otherwise stated in the individual document, the works above are © Nagesh Belludi under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. You may quote, copy and share them freely, as long as you link back to RightAttitudes.com, don't make money with them, and don't modify the content. Enjoy!