Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Thought Process

Get Good At Things By Being Bad First

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Your first attempts are going to be bad

A technique used by many a brilliant inventor:

  • Make something. Get it functional. Get it adequate. It’s okay if it’s subpar.
  • Then, stumble around. Iterate until it’s good.

Now, that’s a better creative process than making something good on the first go.

Start, even if you’re bad at it

Case in point: Write bad first drafts quickly. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. Let it all pour out. Let it romp all over the place. No one’s going to see it. You can shape it up later. You can gradually polish the thought flow and enrich the choice of words.

If you aren’t willing to be bad initially, you’ll never get started on anything new.

It’s vastly easier to revise your way into a cut above than drum up brilliance out of thin air.

The way you create something good is by launching into it and then iterating gradually rather than by going into your cave and trying to create that perfect masterpiece.

Essentially, this is agile development. The best programmers write functional code to prove some concept. Along the way, they’ll get a better understanding of the business need for the software and the workflow. Bit by bit, they rework snippets of code and improve continuously.

Idea for Impact: Just start. Do a bad first job.

The bad is the precursor to the good. Bad will get you started. It’ll move you forward. Pressing on, you’ll get illuminated, enlightened, and informed.

Momentum is everything. Don’t put off any contemplated task thinking, “This is hard. I don’t know how to do this well. I’m going to have to do it perfectly. Or I need to wait till I have enough time.” The instant you stop cold and put something off, momentum starts the other way.

Motivation is often the result of an action, not its cause. Taking action—even in small, sloppy ways—naturally produces momentum. It’s a better solution than trying to do it right the first time.

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It’s Not What You See; It’s How You See It

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Try to consider the sunny side of a situation rather than focusing on what’s wrong with it.

If it’s pouring rain, don’t upset yourself over plans hampered or stress about getting drenched. Instead, relish the splendor of landscape under the grey sky, delight in the pattering noise of the rain, and savor how the flowers have their heads as if to rest. Appreciate how rain is the great facilitator of life. And use this as a perfect excuse to curl up with a good book and chill out.

It’s not what you see; it’s how you see it.

Got a demanding new boss? Bring to mind all the things you can learn from her—including what not to do as a manager.

Reframing allows you an expanded view of your reality. You can move your experience from a negative frame to a more hopeful one, filled with opportunities.

How you frame something can change everything. When you change your point of view, the facts of the situation remain the same. But the shift in your emotional tone changes the meaning that you give to the situation.

Idea for Impact: Practice cognitive control. Learn how to put things in perspective.

When something or somebody annoys you, shift your attention. Ask, “What’s right about this? What’s to be appreciated about this?” Imagine the best possible outcomes.

Reframing an event or stimulus changes your emotional response to it—and it helps keep stress in check.

Changing the way you see the world is not a denial. It doesn’t imply naive optimism. Instead, it is the purging of mental pollutants such as dislike and anger—even aggression—that poison the mind and disable you from finding refuge in presence.

In Buddhism, the opposite of pleasure is not pain but delusion.

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No, Reason Doesn’t Guide Your Politics

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“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” observes the American political scientist Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012,) a captivating voyage of discovery of the social psychology of politics and ethics. Haidt makes a compelling case for why reason and logic aren’t what people use to contend with problems and steer through to the right answers.

Most people’s politics tend to be ill-informed. People don’t engage in deep causal thinking about the consequences of their favored political positions. Information and analyses tend to provoke—not calm—their preconceived judgments.

Reason is Motivationally Inert

As the Scottish philosopher David Hume noted in his masterful Treatise on Human Nature (1739,) “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Reason becomes subordinate to the passions that have come to life in people’s tribal allegiances and their confirmation bias. People are prone to making decisions derived from instinctive, emotional, and fast thinking of psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s “System 1,” not the slow, logical deliberations of “System 2.”

Most people feel good about sticking to their guns, even if they are wrong. They tend to read newspapers, periodicals, blogs, and social media feeds to settle ever more comfortably into their preexisting beliefs. They use their tribes’ “notice boards” not to reassess their established opinions but to have them validated, comforted, legitimized, and intensified.

On the rare occasion that they do converse with someone or read something they may disagree with, they don’t revaluate their judgments, let alone change their minds. They merely use reason as a weapon to discredit contrasting evidence, spot others’ flaws, and convince them that they are wrong. Consequently, reason doesn’t bind but drives differing people apart.

Idea for Impact: The Opinions You are Blind to Could Be Your Own

Be conscious of the internal conflicts brought on by your passions. Seek and assess the counterevidence. Incorporate these counterarguments and strengthen your positions.

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Imagine a Better Response

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In the Discourses of Epictetus (c.108 CE,) Arrian reports, “I must die: must I, then die groaning too? I must be fettered: and wailing too. I must go into exile? Does anyone, then, keep me from going a smile and cheerful and serene?”

You may not choose the circumstance, but you can choose your response to it.

Choose your response, and you can rise above what holds you down.

But how?

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1959) proposes, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

When circumstances pull for some particular reaction, choose to respond instead.

Don’t react without thinking. Don’t accept reflexive reactions. Instead, learn to become aware that there is a “space” before responding. Learn to recognize, increase, and make use of this “space.”

That awareness ushers a release from the dictates of both external and internal pressures.

Choose a better response. With that, you can find inner happiness.

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Many Creative People Think They Can Invent Best Working Solo

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Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak writes in his memoir, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It (2006):

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone—best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone.

Teams aren’t automatically better at creativity. In what’s termed “collaborative inhibition,” everyone needs to be happy, so team members talk and talk until they’ve reached a consensus on a decision which is usually the lowest common denominator—something tepid that everyone, worn out from the prolonged discussion, can endorse.

Idea for Impact: The best creative decisions often reflect a unique, opinionated perspective. Look for ways to increase organizational creativity by building better environments in which individual creativity can thrive.

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Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data

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Yesterday’s New York Times article highlights the complex tradeoff leaders must often make between indecision and acting on insufficient information:

The Omicron variant is pushing the CDC into issuing recommendations based on what once would have been considered insufficient evidence, amid growing public concern about how these guidelines affect the economy and education. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has been commended for short-circuiting a laborious process and taking a pragmatic approach to manage a national emergency, saying she was right to move ahead even when the data was unclear and agency researchers remained unsure. The challenge now for Dr. Walensky is figuring out how to convey this message to the public: “The science is incomplete, and this is our best advice for now.”

The smartest people I know are the ones who understand that they don’t know—can’t know—everything. Yet, they’re ready to act on imperfect information, especially when being slow will be costly.

Idea for Impact: Being able to analyze information is insufficient if you can’t reach decisions.

Knowing you’ll never know everything shouldn’t prevent you from acting. The ability to reason and reconsider your position on something is an integral part of rational thought.

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Why is Task-Planning so Time-Consuming?

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Planning, which saves time, itself can take quite a bit of time. It’s an interesting quasi-paradox that I’m sure you’ve run into.

That planning is long-drawn-out is one of the main criticisms of even the supposedly solid task-management systems out there. Take David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach, for example. Achieving the system’s potential fully is simply overwhelming. Allen’s method focuses more on the capturing, reviewing, and planning of tasks than it does on the actual doing them.

The key to time management is awareness. Think realistically about your time by recognizing it is a limited resource. Always ask yourself, even when you’re planning your time out, “Is this time-effective?”

Don’t over-organize your list. Don’t spend too much time making it look nice. Don’t feel like you need to do everything on your list. Don’t put anything on your list when you’d be wiser to just do the task now and save the time it takes to put it on your list and think about it again later.

Idea for Impact: Refine your planning approach further. Remember, the benefits of any tool must exceed its costs.

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Plan Your Week, Not Your Whole Life

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Don’t set unrealistic expectations for yourself. No matter how ambitious and eager you are, no matter how talented you are, there’s a limit to how much you can “produce” in a given time. Moreover, even if you get 24 hours to work, you’re restricted by the amount of energy you’ll have.

Much of long-term planning is guesswork or an expectation of the continuation of prevailing trends. The future can’t be predicted with absolute certainty. At the most, you can be somewhat confident about what might happen in the next few weeks or the upcoming months.

Idea for Impact: Plan Weekly, Review Daily

You can’t identify a precise point in the long-term future and then work yourself from here to there. You’ll be better off if you explore like the Italian navigator Columbus, and just head in a general westerly direction. In other words, have a long-term orientation but operate with medium-term plans. Restrict yourself to a few but significant quarterly goals.

Each week, develop weekly milestones that contribute to the quarterly goals. And each day, schedule 15 minutes to go over your progress and fractionate weekly objectives to daily working goals.

Life is unpredictable, and it is great to have some big things planned out, but not your whole life. A fine-grained approach to goals and planning can help you adapt quickly for survival and success.

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Reinvent Everyday

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General Electric supremo Jack Welch’s advice to Indian-American investor and businessman Vivek Paul:

Every time I land in New York after an international business trip, I imagine that I’ve just been appointed chairman and that this is my first day in the role, and the guy before me was a real dud. Every time I think, “What would I do that was different than the guy before? What big changes would I make?”

When you can think about expectations from a more detached point of view, rather than an immersed point of view, you aren’t overly invested in an entrenched pattern of thinking.

A period of rest, entertainment, or exposure to an alternative environment can dissipate fixation and help you gain a fresh perspective. It makes you think big. Subconsciously, you can push yourself harder and go after bigger, loftier, harder goals.

Idea for Impact: Don’t limit yourself by past expectations.

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Consensus is Dangerous

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Management books tout the importance of harmony, cohesion, and alignment with company values and practices. Comforting though they are, such goals often carry with them the assumption that unanimity is always helpful.

Indeed, like-mindedness has its benefits, viz. high morale, a sense of identity, and a vision’s execution. But an unchallenged majority can “bend reality.” Toeing the line can delude everyone into having faith in opinions that’re not true or beneficial.

I’ve talked previously about how humans have a tendency to create, maintain, and guard cliques. Life-minded groups recruit, socialize, and reward consensus while reproving dissent (consider Scientology.) People are recruited to fit with the organization, and they become even more socialized into the culture.

Influence-by-majority belief narrows the cognitive map

For the sake of consensus, people can overlook the confutation from their own senses and blindly follow the majority, whether right or wrong. In the bestselling Outliers: The Story of Success (2008,) pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell calls attention to the cultural predisposition to maintain silence and not rock the boat:

Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s. When we think of airline crashes, we think, Oh, they must have had old planes. They must have had badly trained pilots. No. What they were struggling with was a cultural legacy, that Korean culture is hierarchical. You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S.

Uniformity of thought and esprit de corps can act together to make people amenable and taciturn when they see a problem or a better option.

Idea for Impact: Making sure everyone’s on the same page can produce harmony—of the cult-like variety. Encourage dissent and counterevidence in decision-making.

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