I like to make chit-chat now and then. One of my go-to conversation topics — most people’s go-to conversation topic — is TV. I might open with, “are you watching anything good at the moment?” This often opens a half-decent, mostly entertaining discussion. But sometimes, my opening salvo falls flat. The other person says something like, “Oh, I’ve not got the time to watch TV.”

It’s an answer that bothers me. For one, it’s laced with not a small whiff of condescension: If you’re watching TV, you must be lazy. But mostly, it bothers me because it’s not strictly true. What people mean is, “I’ve prioritized other things in my day.” And that’s fine. We each have our own personal values, concerns, and preferences.

“I’ve not got time to watch TV” means “TV doesn’t interest me as much as this or that.”

The fact is that we all have the same number of hours in the day, and it’s up to us to decide how we spend them. Some people will most certainly have more “free hours” than others, but for most of us, we have at least a few hours to spend as we want. And according to “the 5-hour rule,” how we choose to spend those hours might mean the difference between success and mediocrity.

The anatomy of a day

There are 24 hours in a day (or 1,440 minutes, if you really like to count your life away). The average person sleeps around eight hours (with the Dutch sleeping the most and the Singaporeans the least). That leaves 16 waking hours left to spend (I’m afraid those “learn while you’re sleeping” tapes aren’t likely to work). We need to subtract the seven to eight hours a day during which most people work, though those sleepy Dutch work a bit less. So, we’re down to nine remaining hours.

Much of those nine hours are taken up by life administration: shopping, housework, unpaid labor (e.g. care work), and eating and drinking. Of course, there are massive cultural differences lurking in that category. For instance, Our World in Data reveals that people “in France, Greece, Italy and Spain report spending more time eating than people in most other European countries. The country where people spend the least time eating and drinking is the USA (63 minutes).”

Unsurprisingly, there’s a huge disparity in how care work or unpaid labor is divided across genders. According to the OECD, “Around the world, women spend two to ten times more time on unpaid care work than men.” This has a knock-on effect in how many leisure hours the genders have to spend. For instance, in Norway and New Zealand the difference is almost negligible. In Portgual and India, however, men have 50 percent more leisure time than women.

The 5-hour rule

Most people have at least a few hours to do with what they want. For more than half of the population, those hours are wasted away on non-work-related phone worship. But these are not the people who will become the entrepreneurs, innovators, and success stories of tomorrow.

Over the last few decades, a cottage industry has sprung up that examines and dissects the habits and values of “self-made” millionaires. One of the key findings that comes up again and again is known as the “5-hour rule.” In short, this is the rule where we spend one hour a day learning, reflecting, and thinking. We do this five times a week (which makes up the “5-hour” rule). The rule dates to Benjamin Franklin, who would devote (at least) an hour each day specifically to learning something new. Franklin would rise early to read and write. He even set up his own club of artisans and experimenters. Today, Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates all employ some version of the 5-hour rule.

The idea is that devoting an hour of your day to education exercises the mind, improves your skills, and rehearses great discipline. In education-speak, the 5-hour rule gives us both knowledge and skills.

How to spend your hour

Even accepting the wisdom in the 5-hour rule, it can still come over as daunting. After a long day, with tired eyes and a throbbing headache, most of us will reach for the TV remote, not Tolstoy. But here are three “first steps” to the 5-hour rule.

Learn…however you can. Reading print on a book is one way of learning, but it’s not the only way. In fact, if you don’t enjoy reading that much, it’s likely you’ll learn less from it anyway. Today, podcasts, audiobooks, and spoken radio are all great ways to spend your hour. What’s more, the internet is full of educational, entertaining, and enlightening long-form articles, which are much more digestible than huge, hand-aching tomes.

Experiment. Bettering yourself does not always mean cramming your head with facts. The most successful people in life were not those who stumbled on some magic treasure in the woods, but who tried and failed, tried, and failed again. In his book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford says success means we “first, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.” Try something new. Try something differently. When we experiment, we both have fun and learn a great deal

Reflect. Failure is only valuable insofar as it improves the future. In the words of Samuel Beckett, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Each failure is different, and each defeat is closer to victory than the last. There are many ways to reflect. For some, it might mean a diary, journal, or ten minutes spent simply ruminating. For others, it could mean talking things over and unpacking what happened. When we reflect on our days and our mistakes, we turn failures into learning experiences.

So, why not give the 5-hour rule a go? At worst, it will make you a bit more interesting at the next family gathering. At best, it might make you a few million dollars.

This article The 5-hour rule: How to turn a wasted day into a successful one is featured on Big Think.

We can sometimes approach household finances as a cold math problem. You start with a fixed income. You pay your bills and utilities, maybe save a small percentage, and finally spread out the remainder to see you through to next month. Plug in the numbers, do the operations, and you’re done. Budget budgeted!

But this approach has a major flaw: It puts math before mindfulness. That’s a problem because finances are math problems complicated by the variables of human psychology.

Every day, we face a seemingly infinite number of ways to spend our finite incomes on our many — always competing and often contradictory — needs and wants. Do you splurge this weekend on a meal out or cook at home? Is your closet looking too dated or ratty for the office? Do you service the car today or set aside that money for your next doctor’s visit (just in case)? And those don’t even consider the challenge of saving for retirement, a house, and the kids’ college fund. There’s just not enough to go around, and the perceived importance of those needs and wants can shift at any given moment.

Overwhelmed by this cognitive load, many people find themselves gravitating to the extremes. Either they save themselves the stress and make purchases mindlessly, or they micromanage their finances to the point that they are living for the ledger. Far better is to find the balance between the extremes, and one method for doing that is the Japanese budgeting technique of Kakeibo.

Kakeibo helps people to see past the extraneous to reveal the essence of what their finances are and how to use them. It does this by showing users not only what they are doing with their money, but how they can use that money to spend well, save well, and, ultimately, live well.

Before the math, mindfulness

Kakeibo (pronounced “kah-keh-boh”) was developed in 1904 by Hani Motoko, Japan’s first female journalist and later a publisher of a woman’s monthly magazine. Motoko wanted to help the women of her day, who often lived on a limited budget, meet their life and savings goals. To that end, she created a budgeting system that combines utility, simplicity, and mindfulness. 

Even Motoko’s chosen name betrays this intent: Kakeibo means simply “household account” in its native Japanese.

Kakeibo starts with a mindfulness exercise. Before you even crack the spine on your first ledger, the technique asks you to consider four self-reflective questions. They are:

1. How much income do you make a month?
2. How much would you like to save?
3. How much are you currently spending?
4. Where would you like to improve?

These questions not only create financial goals but also point to what financial advisor Paula Pant calls “first-principles thinking.” In terms of budgeting, first-principles thinking means considering the values you want in your life and how you might cultivate them. It’s the realization that money is a means to facilitate a satisfying life — not a series of tactics and strategies aimed at controlling it.

According to Pant, this requires us to accept a basic truth. That being: You can afford most things if you plan and save, but you can’t afford everything. As she told us in an interview:

“You can’t have an endless series of ands. You might not be able to have that thing and something else and something else and something else. And that doesn’t just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention – any limited resource. And life is the ultimate limited resource. So when you practice being better at managing your money, you practice being better at managing your life.”

Finance advisor and Kakeibo proponent Harumi Maruyama expresses a similar perspective, albeit a little more forcefully. As she told the BBC: “Money is not limitless. It has limits. It’s totally up to you whether you save it or lose it.”

The four categories of Kakeibo

After accepting that truth and getting clearer on your first principles, it’s finally time for math.

At the beginning of the month, calculate your projected income and subtract your fixed costs (things like rent, utilities, and other bills). Anything that remains is how much money you have to spend or save that month. Then every time you spend money, write it down in your ledger and label it as one of four categories:

• Essentials (gas, toiletries, and groceries).
• Non-essentials (movies, restaurants, and spa days).
• Culture (books, museum visits, education, and charity).
• Unexpected (doctor visits, car repairs, and a gift for that friend’s birthday you totally forgot).

Why do this? A potential trap of some budgeting systems is to create many fine-grained categories believing they will increase accuracy. There’s a category for groceries, one for restaurants, one for repairs, one for gas, one for clothes, one for books, and so on. However, the end result of this approach is unnecessary confusion that obscures your spending mindset.

By bucketing your spending into these four categories, you simplify your budget so you can see the big picture. If your new shoes are for fun, they go in the non-essentials category. If they are a job requirement, they go under essentials. This way, you can be as mindful of how you’re spending your money as what you’re spending your money on.

Most Kakeibo proponents also recommend using a handwritten ledger to track your expenses throughout the month. They point to research suggesting that when we write something by hand we retain the information better and create a stronger connection with the content. Others use a spreadsheet app for its ability to search for specific entries, group categories, and make graphs of their spending quickly and easily. 

Whether you go with a handwritten ledger or a digital one — I won’t tell if you don’t — just ensure it’s a method you will use. You want your ledger to contain all of your monthly expenses, and you want to be in the habit of entering your spending regularly (for example, nightly or at the end of the week).

At the end of the month, you’ll review your spending. Calculate how much you spent in each category as well as how much you saved. Then compare the results to the goals you set for yourself. 

• Did you save as much as you thought?
• Did certain essentials slip your mind in your original assessment? 
• Did some of your non-essential purchases seem unnecessary in hindsight? 
• Did any unexpected purchases come with unexpectedly high price tags, too?

If you reached your savings goals, great! If you didn’t, that’s also fine. There’s no reason to feel shame. You can’t win or lose your at finances, nor are they a social competition like a video game-style leaderboard. Rather, you should view your ledger as data and your mistakes as lessons to inform better decisions next month. Maybe you need to cut back on some non-essential purchases to save more. Conversely, maybe your savings goals were too aggressive, and you need a few more non-essentials to destress on the weekend.

Whatever your ledger reveals to you, you can return to the four questions and answer them in light of your new knowledge. As a bonus, research shows that tracking your expenses promotes confidence and relaxation, which in turn motivates us to achieve our goals.

Find your financial balance

Underlining Kakeibo is a Japanese philosophy of life called nagomi. While it doesn’t have a direct translation, it’s centered on the concepts of balance, harmony, and sustainability and how to bring those qualities into life’s endeavors.

In his book on the philosophy, Ken Mogi writes that “[nagomi] is not about finding shortcuts to happiness, success, or wealth; it is about understanding and enhancing the good and positive aspects of our lives to balance the difficulties that inevitably befall everyone one of us.”

Kakeibo asks you to do the same with your finances. This is why it includes a special category for culture. The method recognizes that your life shouldn’t be chained to your finances. Rather, your finances represent a resource — one of many — that cultivates growth, learning, and meaningful life activities.

And while I’ve written about Kakeibo as an individual technique; in fact, it has had many different iterations since Motoko first devised it a century ago. It’s also highly adaptable. Maybe you find that you need to add a fifth category, or that you need to create your own savings categories, or that you spend so much on books it’s best to consider them separate from other expenses. That’s fine as long as those changes support your first principles.

However, by taking the time to shed the extraneous and focus on the essence of your finances, you avoid the over-optimization trap while also making your budget feel manageable and motivating. This will help you spend in a way that allows for a mindful, meaningful life in the here and now while saving in a way that ensures the same for your future.

Learn more on Big Think+

With a diverse library of lessons from the world’s biggest thinkers, Big Think+ helps businesses get smarter, faster. To access Paula Pant’s full class for your organization, request a demo.

This article Kakeibo: The Japanese way to manage money through mindfulness is featured on Big Think.

Although most of us are familiar with the concept of DNA — the nucleic acids that determine so much of who we are — few of us have tried to manipulate these tiny naturally occurring chemicals to enhance their application in lifesaving therapeutics or game-changing nanotechnologies. That is what Dr. Jennifer Heemstra, working with the other members of her thriving research laboratory at Emory University, does for a living. 

On the frontier in any scientific field, a thoughtful hypothesis not supported by data is the right kind of wrong. Scientists don’t last long in their fields if they can’t stand to fail. They intuit the value intelligent failure brings. It would be a lie to claim these failures aren’t disappointing. They are. Like Olympic bronze medalists, however, scientists and inventors learn healthy ways to think about failure. 

And Dr. Heemstra is a scientist who not only practices this healthy thinking, she also preaches it — to the students in her lab and in tweets, articles, and videos. 

I met with Jen on Zoom on a summer day in 2021. Scientists are among the most resilient and thoughtful practitioners of intelligent failure, and I wanted to learn more from Jen about how an intelligent failure might play out. 

Behind her, on the shelves behind her desk, are various models and action figures she’s collected. She points to one and says it’s named Steve, after a PhD student, Steve Knutson, who used a chemical reagent called glyoxal (an organic compound often used to link other chemicals in scientific experiments) to react with nucleotides in single-stranded RNA. When I ask why this might be important (revealing my relative ignorance about chemistry), Jen says, “Aha!” and explains that the lab had been ecstatic because of how many avenues of research and development glyoxal opened up. In addition to applications for controlled or time-release therapeutic drugs, they’d invented a kind of scientific tool for other chemists working in synthetic biology or research to control different gene circuits. 

What about failure? Apparently, even someone as comfortable with failure as Jennifer Heemstra naturally begins a failure story with the ending — the successful outcome. Which only reinforces how difficult it is to talk about failure. 

Jen takes a step back. Speaking rapidly, she explains that in trying to develop a method for isolating certain RNAs, they realized that it wouldn’t happen when the RNA was folded, or double stranded. So the first problem was to unravel the RNA, a necessary step in getting a protein to bind. Steve began to experiment. Would adding a new reagent (an ingredient used to cause a chemical reaction) already in the lab work? 

It didn’t work. 

Salt helps RNA fold. What if he experimented with depriving the RNA of salt? This didn’t work either. Steve was disappointed. But not devastated, as he might have been had Jen not worked so hard to create an environment in the lab where the focus is on learning and discovery. As she explains, “High-performing individuals aren’t used to making mistakes. It’s important to learn to laugh at ourselves or we’ll err on the side of being too afraid to try.” 

Her passion for the central role embracing failure plays in science research has led Heemstra to write about how students, and especially women, can easily be discouraged from pursuing careers in science, stating in a tweet, “The only people who never make mistakes and never experience failure are those who never try.” But really, Steve’s failures were not mistakes. 

Mistakes are deviations from known practices. Mistakes happen when knowledge about how to achieve a certain result already exists but isn’t used. Such as the time when Jen was a graduate student and collected weird data simply because she was using the pipette incorrectly. Proper pipette usage promptly produced data that made sense. She laughs at this story, too, explaining that she tries to create a lab culture where people can “laugh at and normalize silly mistakes.” 

That the protein failed to bind on double-stranded DNA when it had succeeded in binding on single-stranded RNA was not, however, a “silly mistake.” It was the undesired result of a hypothesis-driven experiment. A failure, yes, but an intelligent failure — and an inevitable part of the fascinating work of science. Most important, that failure would inform the next experiment. 

Clearly, there was more to learn about how to unfold RNA. Steve went back to the literature and found a paper written by Japanese biochemists in the 1960s, published in a German scientific journal, detailing the use of glyoxal in other, not unrelated, applications. He started to wonder about using glyoxal and set up an experiment with it. 

Eureka! With some tweaking, the glyoxal allowed him to cage and re-cage the nucleic acids and restore total function. While not an announcement to flash electronically in 20-foot letters on a Times Square billboard, for Jen and Steve as research scientists it was cause for celebration, and better yet, it led to new research questions. Their story shows how success in new territory depends on a willingness to endure the right kind of wrong — the intelligent kind.

This article We must learn from science that “intelligent failure” is the key to success is featured on Big Think.

There is nothing so mind-expanding as staying with a different family for a while. It’s only when you spend a decent amount of time around different people, who are doing things differently, that you realize that your way isn’t the only way.

For example, I grew up in a household where eating was largely utilitarian. Our family would gather, we would d have our dinner, and then we would d go back to whatever it was we were doing. We ate to live. It’s not that meal times were held in funereal silence, but my family just saw the dinner table as a place for dinner. But then, I stayed at Clare’s house.

Clare’s family treated meal times very differently. For them, the food was just an excuse to have a very long, relaxed chat. The dinner was, if anything, an irrelevant and movable component. When we finished our food there was no, “Right, who’s washing up?” or “Let’s go watch TV!” Instead, everyone sat back and reclined. Clare’s family was all about the after-dinner. They were there for a good natter and the contented sighs of the full-bellied.

Only now do I realize this has a word: sobremesa.

Table talk

Sobremesa is a Spanish word that represents a Spanish tradition. On the one hand, it’s simply the physical act of staying at the table after your dinner and talking. But, more than that, it’s about committing to those friends and family who are there, making space for those people in your busy day. Sobremesa is a mindset that pushes aside all the other things you “have” to or “need” to do and instead relaxing with those around you.

Those who grew up in a sobremesa tradition will likely find it comical to have it analyzed so much, but sobremesa represents a value system others do not share. Sobremesa signifies the importance of bonding, laughter, and personal connections. It sees “down time” as an essential time, and the dinner table is a great place for this down time to occur.

Sobremesa is a hugely important part of forming a deep and lasting connection with someone. And the bonding that results from it doesn’t strictly have to happen at the dinner table. At school, you see the same faces every day, and life-long friends are forged in the mutual ordeal of chemistry, math, and gym class. At work, you grumble in companionable solidarity with a colleague who is just as tired and jaded as you. Over time, this results in a deep bonding that is characteristic of sobremesa.

Create your own sobremesa

So, if we know that quality down time is important for relationships, how can we make time for it in our ultra-busy world? Here are three practical suggestions.

The road trip. Don’t believe the movies; most road trips are boring. In between the singing and gawping at attractions, there is a lot of nothing. For hours and hours, you will see only tarmac, punctuated by the occasionally interesting car. And that’s a good thing because the reason road trips are fun is that you get to — you have to — talk to the person next to you. A friend of mine will only drive with her family to some distant holiday spot because she says it’s the best bonding opportunity they all get.

Roll your sleeves up. Do a job with someone that cannot be done in an hour — something like painting the rooms in your house or building a deck outside. It could be as mundane as raking leaves or as exciting as digging a fire pit, but when you do something for long enough with someone, you will find that you end up talking a great deal. It might be small talk aimed mostly at distraction, but that’s exactly what we want.

Take a course or a class. When you sign up to learn how to paint or how to speak Japanese, it’s not just you and the teacher; it’s you and a lot of others who are all there in mutual incompetence. If you sign up to take a class with a friend or acquaintance, then you will find that this class deepens your friendship. When you are both fumbling your way around a camera’s settings or staggering through the steps of a salsa, you will find a connection that will last much longer.

This article Sobremesa: To live a better life, we should eat dinner like the Spanish is featured on Big Think.

You are a half-hour into your day when your phone chimes with a text from your boss: “Please call me asap.”

What’s the first thought that comes to mind? It’s probably not, I’ve been nominated for an award or She loved the report I sent. Suddenly, your mood has plummeted, your palms are sweaty, and you want to do just about anything other than make that call.

Then, two minutes later, you get another text: “I’ve got an idea for today’s meeting that I want to run by you.”

We’ve all starred in this movie at some point—because we’re human. In the last thirty days, you probably created a mental story in response to something that happened. Maybe it was a confusing email from your biggest client or a non-response from the person you’ve been dating for six months. You spent time and emotional energy worrying about it, creating stress and anxiety in your day. And then it turned out to be fine, or better than fine. You were relieved, but you also felt emotionally or mentally exhausted.

Even though most of what happens to most of us in any given day is neutral or positive, our assumptions or predictions tend to be negative. We add significance and drama to situations and circumstances, often when there’s no proof of either.

If you’re telling yourself positive stories, like “I did so well in that presentation” or “I’ve never looked better,” great! Keep going. What we want to help you tackle are the negative, disempowering stories that create unnecessary suffering, stress, and anxiety.

Some stories can be short-lived, like the examples above, but the more costly stories are those that we have been telling ourselves and reinforcing for months, years, even decades—like “My boss doesn’t appreciate me”, “That team doesn’t care”, or “Nothing I do is good enough for my parents.” These stories convince us that some things simply cannot be changed, cannot be any better than they are right now. They have a big impact on our happiness, confidence, resilience, relationships, and well-being.

For all these reasons, our disempowering stories keep us from creating the life we want and keep us from achieving our visions. They’re often interwoven with our limiting beliefs. They influence how we behave in the present, so they influence what’s possible in the future. They self-perpetuate. 

You have zero control over other people and many circumstances, but you have 100 percent choice in your perspective.

We’ve known this for thousands of years. The Stoic philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius, writing about how to respond to the things that happen to us, said, “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been . . . It doesn’t hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to.”

When you choose a more empowering perspective, the ripple effects of positive change can be profound. It helps to start by understanding the source of your stories and their impact in your life. As you may have noticed in the last two sentences, we use the words “story” and “perspective” interchangeably.

The brain is a meaning-making machine. It collects bits of information and uses them to interpret the world—to create a story. The brain does this so that it can quickly interpret what’s happening now and predict what will happen next—to keep us alive. Our stories become the lens through which we see the world. They influence how we perceive people and situations and what we expect about our future. Here’s the problem: They are based on our perception and the brain’s interpretation. They are not reality or fact.

Facts are indisputable data points, without much emotion or drama. Your perspective is a story your brain makes up about those facts. “I’m in a meeting speaking to eight people” is a fact. “I’m doing a great job of sharing my ideas with my team” is a story or perspective (a good one!). “I am forty-eight” is a fact. “I’m getting old” is a perspective. “He’s been my manager for three years” is a fact. “He’s never going to put me up for promotion” is a perspective.

We relate to our perspective like it’s the only perspective, like it’s the truth—but it usually is not.

If something is the truth, there can’t be any other possibilities, which means the story can’t change, and the future can’t look different than the past. We’ll be stuck in that story until we choose to change it. While we may not be able to control the facts, we can control the story we tell ourselves and other people. When we do, it’s like we’ve chosen to put on a different pair of glasses. We see the world differently.

This article Unlock success by taking control of “disempowering narratives” is featured on Big Think.

We’ve been conditioned, from an early age, to believe that one day we’ll reach a moment of “arrival.” Get good grades, go to a good school, get a good job, make good money, and we’ll be fulfilled. Even as we get older, and realize that life isn’t quite so simple, we still manage to convince ourselves that if we can just get that next sale, next client, next promotion, next deal—then we’ll finally be happy. 

Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar at Harvard University calls this the “arrival fallacy.” Every time you hit a target that’s supposed to bring you lasting joy, the goalpost moves again. And when the chase is never-ending, when we are constantly in pursuit of a feeling we can’t quite obtain, our tank inevitably runs out of gas. We become exhausted, we burn out. And we quietly start to question the point of it all. 

Because if outer success (wealth, status, achievement) isn’t leading us to a feeling of inner success (joy, well-being, fulfillment), then what’s the point? What’s the purpose of hard work and ambition if getting what we want only leads us back to the emotional place we were in before? 

A few years ago, I began to realize that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Nearly everywhere I looked, people seemed lost and angry. Lost because if there is no point of arrival, then where the hell are we on the map? Angry because we paid the money, went to college, took out loans, got jobs, showed up every day, and did all the things we were supposed to do—only to find that we were no closer to the sense of joy that we had been chasing all these years. 

So a lot of us checked out. We disengaged. We quit quietly or left our jobs. When this happened en masse, they called it the “Great Resignation.” Experts went on television to argue that it was a flash in the pan, a ripple effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. What they didn’t understand is that this sense of dissatisfaction had been building long before this virus disrupted our lives. 

In 2015, a joint working paper from Stanford and Harvard reported that health problems arising from workplace anxiety accounted for more deaths each year than diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease. And in 2019, the World Health Organization included “burnout” in its International Classification of Diseases, naming it an “occupational phenomenon.” 

For too long, we have fixated on the future of work and ignored the future of worth. For too long, we’ve dismissed “joy” as being too flimsy to fit into a place of business. And for too long, we’ve assumed that outer success will lead to inner success, despite history proving again and again that this has never been the case. 

The Bhagavad Gita — the Hindu book of living — says that each of us has a dharma, or a “sacred duty.” Duty to whom, exactly? To the fire burning inside of you. Some call this purpose, others call it your gift. My grandfather, my “Bauji”, called it your essence. 

Bauji believed that we all have an essence, something inside of us that was uniquely assigned by the universe. This goes deeper than talent or skill. It’s a calling. An inner necessity. 

Your essence doesn’t care about power, promotions, or possessions. It only cares about one thing: expression. 

If essence is who you really are, then expression is how you show up in the world. Your essence is always calling for you — expression is how you take that call. 

There’s a saying in the Gospel of Thomas: If you bring forth what is within you, that thing will save you. If you don’t, it will destroy you. That’s the thing about your essence. It is an inner flame that either lights up the world around you or burns a hole inside of you. 

Each of us gets to choose between expression or emptiness. But no one escapes that choice. 

It’s pretty simple, really. When you’re expressing your essence, you’re in your dharma. You come alive in a brand-new way. You feel confident, creative, and caring. You are no longer asking for permission to do what you love. You are serving others with energy and kindness. 

And you are experiencing true joy—not just from the goals you hit, but from the actions you take.

This article How “dharma” can beat team burnout and unloop the “arrival fallacy” is featured on Big Think.

Manifestation coaches are reinventing the law of attraction — the belief that you attract what you focus on — for a new generation. They spread the philosophy that self-worth is the law of attraction and that we can manifest anything that’s in alignment with “our current state of subconscious worthiness.” 

Dressed like fashion bloggers, these new leaders speak of “calling in” unseen powers to materialize new homes, jobs, or maybe just that perfect pair of jeans. On the To Be Magnetic website, one happy customer detailed manifesting a discounted white Le Creuset tea kettle. Other leaders skew more ambitious, selling $2,000 money workshops that reportedly draw in tenfold the class fee, thereby offering their own spin on the prosperity gospel.

Manifestation holds that there’s a tangible connection between the mind and cosmic workings. Spiritual influencers’ messages of overcoming personal struggles hold that you need a belief in yourself since “the universe has your back.” That and with talk of modern-day issues — body image pressures, noncommittal boyfriends, sexist bosses — they’re instantly relatable. 

Today, Jessie De Lowe, a manifestation coach and co-founder of the lifestyle site How You Glow, likens manifestation to life coaching. The majority of De Lowe’s clients are young, female, and college-educated. Though they possess countless advantages, she describes an unsatisfied group gripped by peer competitiveness and unrealistic expectations fueled by social media. They aren’t comparing themselves to the millennial next door. They’re comparing themselves to start-up founders and the globe-trotting friends clogging their Instagram feed. “They feel inadequate, like they’re never where they should be [already],” says De Lowe.

Add an unpredictable job market, rampant employee disengagement, and tales of male-dominated workplaces, and it’s no wonder young women find themselves searching for ways to hack the universe. It’s an appealing concept for those raised to believe that if they follow certain steps, they could get what they want. They were led to trust in a meritocracy, that good hard work always wins. And that, of course, they were special, as told to them 1,001 times by their parents and kindergarten teachers. 

Millennials had a hyperstructured upbringing that gave them a false sense of control, says the clinical psychologist Goali Saedi Bocci, author of The Millennial Mental Health Toolbox. Raised on happy Disney endings and American exceptionalism, they struggle with the anxiety of not getting what they were promised. “They grew up with the idea that if you want to get the best grades, you do the extra credit,” she told me. Apple-polishing millennials got straight As, went to college, then graduated into a recession and found themselves saddled with student debt. Those who secured good jobs later felt stifled by what they considered meaningless positions or weren’t adequately prepared for the mundanity of corporate life. 

Workplace stress is particularly painful for a percentage of millennials who define themselves through their employment. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” they were told (much to their grandparents’ confusion, who warned that work was to pay the bills). They were naively brought up to “follow your passion,” and they just did that. If Americans once clocked in and out at the office, today you’ll hear them speak of their life’s “calling” and their job as a “mission.” In that sense, their job becomes far more than a job — their heart and soul are poured into it. Work-life balance becomes impossible because the self and work are intertwined. 

For those who are not living their calling, it’s a different sort of pressure — one in which you’re forced to endure hearing about cool start-up jobs while you draft legal documents. And if you failed to succeed, the American creed of meritocracy insinuates that you simply didn’t try hard enough — you weren’t passionate enough — despite a flawed and at times unfair employment market (or the loss of nearly 9 million jobs during the 2007–2009 recession). You believe you have only yourself to blame. 

The San Francisco–based psychotherapist Tess Brigham sees mid-career patients trying to make sense as to why they can’t afford a down payment or why they’re still stuck in middle management. Manifestation dangles the promise of speeding up their career — tangible tactics to improve their chances — but also comfort in that it will all work out. “If you say the universe has a path for me, there’s something to hold on to,” Brigham told me. 

Or, as Joseph Baker, an associate professor of sociology at East Tennessee State University and the editor of the academic journal Sociology of Religion, explains, there is a natural human tendency to impute purpose to our experiences, to interpret a larger plan in place. If we can’t find that framework of agency, we’ll create it ourselves: “What we do find pretty consistently is that when organized religion recedes the paranormal often fills that gap,” says Baker. 

Manifesters essentially adopt a spiritual version of the “growth mindset,” the Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck’s theory that one’s abilities can be cultivated through effort, dedication, and perseverance. Dweck’s research stresses that brains and talent are not the be-all and end-all, rather that optimistically putting in time and diligence leads to higher achievement. On the flip side, a “fixed mindset” is a belief that you lack the right traits, leading you to adopt a defeatist attitude that holds you can’t influence your future. 

From this perspective, manifestation makes sense. Followers simply take a resilient can-do outlook on life — that how you view yourself can determine success. Most psychologists will tell you that you’re better off keeping your chin up and taking actionable steps to build the life you want. As one manifester told me, it’s about expelling negativity “to get shit done.” 

Positivity is beneficial, but some manifestation leaders teach their flock to block out the negativity that hampers their pursuit of unrealistic dreams. Simplified versions of manifestation propel the idea that we can all reach our potential to draw in success or riches. But that shouldn’t disregard structural, social, and irrefutable challenges. As Steve Salerno argues in his book SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, all of us can’t prosper in the free market. “In any competitive closed system, there must be a loser for every winner. By definition then, self-help cannot work for everyone, and the more competitive the realm, the more this is so. Two wonderfully optimistic women who both desire the same man or the same job cannot both succeed… [it] could conceivably help some of us achieve our goals. But not all of us.”

The issue of how much we can truly control becomes even more readily apparent as manifesters attempt to conjure up larger gains: a rent-controlled apartment, a bigger bonus, or a romantic partner. In Facebook groups, some are downright frustrated and confused, lamenting unemployment or broken relationships. Some try to manifest better health or to heal diseases. 

There’s no harm in a growth mindset. It’s important to believe you can accomplish new tasks. But when that optimism is taken too far — when a growth mindset blinds you to obstacles (including very real medical ones) — problems arise. These new modes of spirituality can at times, if left unchecked, devolve into delusional thinking on steroids.

This article Manifestation coaches are preaching a phony “prosperity gospel” is featured on Big Think.

Early in my career, I was the youngest investment professional at the Sprout Group—then one of the oldest and largest venture capital firms in the world. I loved being exposed to different executive teams, industries, and companies at the leading edge of innovation, and I had the exciting opportunity to serve on boards of directors alongside much more experienced and knowledgeable investors and operators.

But when I think back on those days, what I remember most vividly is the incredible pressure I felt to perform. We regularly sat in meetings listening to startup teams pitch their ventures. The entrepreneurs would describe their solutions for problems in an industry’s supply chain, or pitch a new drug discovery process or an innovation in an enterprise software system. When the entrepreneurs stepped out of the room, we’d take turns voicing our impression of the opportunity. As a very junior professional just starting my career, I didn’t know enough to have a strong conviction about whether an investment was attractive, but I pretended to.

As my colleagues shared their impressions, I would try to decide what to advocate for. I might have liked a startup’s large market opportunity but worried about how undifferentiated the technology seemed—was this value proposition really that different from the other pitches we’d heard that year? Or I might have had mixed feelings about the competitive dynamics or the management team’s experience. When my turn came, I left my conflicting thoughts and uncertainties unspoken to make it appear that all of my thinking pointed in one direction and that I had high confidence in my recommendation. I would pick a side—to engage in due diligence or turn down the opportunity, or to invest or not—and advocate for it with certainty. 

I realized that by not sharing some of my thoughts, I was withholding information that could have increased our capacity to make good decisions. This caused me anxiety because I wanted to help our team, but I was handcuffed by my belief that I needed to appear knowledgeable, decisive, and confident of my opinions. 

After years of this, I got very good at looking like I knew what I was doing, and I consistently received great performance reviews and bonuses. But inside I felt disingenuous and inauthentic. I was constantly pretending. 

Eventually, the chronic stress of these feelings affected my body physically. Under constant pressure, I kept my muscles contracted, so much that, eventually, they lost their ability to relax. It turns out that muscles are malleable, for better or for worse! Mine became shorter and harder, preventing blood from penetrating them and delivering the nutrients needed for proper functioning and healing. 

It became painful for me to use my hands—to type, use the computer mouse, drive a car, open doors, even brush my teeth. After seeing many specialists, I was finally diagnosed with a repetitive strain injury called myofascial pain syndrome. 

As time went on, my condition grew worse. I met people with the same affliction who could no longer use their hands for more than ten minutes a day, and it terrified me. I was determined to do all I could to heal. But I suspected that what I needed to change was more than just my posture. 

Are you always racing to check tasks off a list? Do you spend most of your time trying to minimize mistakes? Do you suppress your uncertainties, impressions, or questions to try to appear like you always know what you’re doing?

Would you rather walk over hot coals than get feedback? These are all signs of chronic performance. While it may seem like minimizing mistakes is a reasonable use of our time or that appearing decisive is a wise career strategy, these habits can have a devastating impact on our skills, confidence, jobs, and personal lives. 

Chronic performance could be the reason you might be feeling stagnant in some area of your life. You might be working more hours or putting more effort into tasks, yet you never seem to get ahead. Life feels like a never-ending game of catch-up. That’s chronic performance—throwing more energy at tasks and problems yet staying at the same level of effectiveness. 

Most of us go about our days assuming that in order to succeed, we simply need to work hard to get things done. That’s what we’ve been told all our lives. So what’s the problem? Doesn’t hard work lead to better performance? The answer is a paradox—one I call the performance paradox. 

Maybe you’re a busy professional trying to learn a difficult new skill, like giving masterful presentations, motivating colleagues, or resolving conflict, yet no matter how much you work at it, you don’t seem to be getting better. 

You could be a leader whose team achieves the same results month after month even though you are certain everyone is working hard. Or perhaps you’d like to deepen your relationships with your family, friends, or colleagues, but conversations stay superficial. 

The performance paradox is the counterintuitive phenomenon that if we want to improve our performance, we have to do something other than just perform. No matter how hard we work, if we only do things as best as we know how, trying to minimize mistakes, we get stuck at our current levels of understanding, skills, and capabilities. 

Too often, the performance paradox tricks us into chronic performance, which leads to stagnation. We get stuck in a hamster wheel in our work, as well as in our relationships, health, hobbies, and any aspect of life. It can feel like we’re doing our best, when in fact we’re missing out on discovering better ways to create, connect, lead, and live. 

Why does the paradox ensnare so many of us? It’s a seemingly logical response to feeling pressured, overwhelmed, and underwater. We think the answer is to just work harder and faster, but the way to improve our performance is not to spend more time performing. It is to do something else that is a lot more rewarding and, ultimately, productive.

This article Recognize the “performance paradox” and break free from stagnation at work is featured on Big Think.

Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system. A system that told you exactly where to put every piece of information in your digital life — every document, file, note, agenda, outline, and bit of research — and exactly where to find it when you needed it. Such a system would need to be incredibly easy to set up, and even easier to maintain. After all, only the simplest, most frictionless habits endure long term.

It would need to be both flexible, adapting to your needs in different seasons of your life, and comprehensive, so you can use it in every one of the many places where you store information. For example, the Documents folder on your computer, a cloud storage platform, or a digital note-taking app.

But most of all, the ideal organizational system would be one that leads directly to tangible benefits in your career and life. It would dramatically accelerate you toward completing the projects and achieving the goals that are most important to you.

In other words, the ultimate system for organizing your life is one that is actionable.

Instead of putting more obstacles in your path, postponing the actions that will make a difference, it would pull those actions closer and make them easier to start and finish.

After more than a decade of personal experimentation, teaching thousands of students, and coaching world-class professionals, I’ve developed such a system. It’s being used today by elementary schoolchildren all the way to multinational corporations, and everyone in between.

It’s called PARA — a simple, comprehensive, yet flexible system for organizing any type of information across any digital platform.

Whether you want to save excerpts from a book you’re reading, a voice memo about an interesting new idea, inspiring quotes from a podcast interview, web bookmarks with useful online resources, notes from important meetings or phone calls at work, photos that remind you of cherished memories, or your own personal journal entries, this system will equip you with a set of tools for preserving any information far into the future. And not only preserving it, but skillfully using it to achieve anything you set your mind to.

PARA is based on a simple observation: there are only four categories that encompass all the information in your life: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.

You have projects you’re actively working on — short-term efforts (whether in your work or personal life) that you take on with a certain goal in mind. For example: complete webpage design; buy a new computer; write research report; renovate the bathroom; finish Spanish-language course; set up new living room furniture.

You have areas of responsibility — important parts of your work and life that require ongoing attention more broadly. These might include: Work responsibilities, such as marketing, human resources, product management, research and development, direct reports, or software development. Personal responsibilities such as health, finances, kids, writing, car, or home.

Then you have resources on a range of topics you’re interested in and learning about, such as: graphic design; organic gardening; web design; Japanese cuisine; photography; marketing assets.

Finally, you have archives, which include anything from the previous three categories that is no longer active but you might want to save for future reference: projects you’ve completed or put on hold; areas that are no longer active or relevant; resources that you’re no longer interested in.

And that’s it! Four top-level folders — Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives — each containing subfolders dedicated to each specific project, area of responsibility, resource, and archive in your life.

It may be difficult to believe that a complex, modern human life like yours can be reduced to just four categories. It may feel like you have far more to deal with than can fit into such a simple system. But that is exactly the point: if your organizational system is as complex as your life, then the demands of maintaining it will end up robbing you of the time and energy you need to live that life.

Most of us first learned how to organize information in school. We were taught to categorize our class notes, handouts, and study material by academic subject, such as math, history, or chemistry. Without realizing it, we took that same approach into adulthood. We continued to categorize our documents and files according to incredibly broad subjects like “Marketing,” “Psychology,” “Business,” or “Ideas.”

This makes zero sense in your post-academic career. In the workplace, there are no classes, no tests, no grades, and no diplomas. There is no teacher to tell you what to write down for the final exam, because there isn’t one.

What you do have, both at work and in life, are outcomes you are trying to achieve. You are trying to launch a new product, come to a crucial decision, or reach a quarterly sales number. You are doing your best to plan a fun family vacation, publish a new piece of personal writing, or find affordable day care in your neighborhood.

In the midst of your busy day, as you are trying to make these things happen, you absolutely do not have time to go rummaging through a vast category like “Psychology” to find the article you saved six months ago.

Instead of organizing information according to broad subjects like in school, I advise you to organize it according to the projects and goals you are committed to right now.

When you sit down to work on a graphic design project, for example, you will need all the notes, documents, assets, and other material related to that project all in one place and ready to go.

That might seem obvious, yet I’ve found it is exactly the opposite of what most people do. Most people tend to spread out all the relevant material they need to make progress in a dozen different places, which means they have to spend half an hour to locate them before they can even get started.

How do you make sure that all the material related to each project or goal is all in one place? You organize it that way in the first place. That way you know exactly where to put everything and exactly where to find it.

Your goals are that much closer to being achieved when all the information you need to execute your vision is right at hand. Let’s find out what you’re capable of achieving when the obstacles to that vision disappear.

This article The “PARA method” says we can organize our digital lives into 4 simple categories is featured on Big Think.

Imagine trying to invent something as earth-shaking as the atomic bomb. That massive, ambitious project took place during World War II under Robert Oppenheimer’s leadership, an event at the center of Christopher Nolan’s new film “Oppenheimer.” For Astro Teller — the grandson of Edward Teller, who was on Oppenheimer’s team and later helped create the even more powerful hydrogen bomb — this era contains a valuable lesson about the difficulty of steering innovation to socially beneficial ends.

Astro, who now leads Alphabet’s pioneering moonshot division known as X, believes that if we’d focused more on using nuclear energy for good, we might not be facing one of today’s greatest global crises.

“Ironically,” Teller says, “if we hadn’t let ourselves be clouded by the power of nuclear bombs, it would have allowed us to avoid what is now actually the problem, which is climate change” — an issue foreseen by his grandfather, whom he recalls being invested later in life in the ability of atoms to power cities, not destroy them.

Today, Teller is attempting to reclaim the magic of the midcentury, when the seemingly impossible projects that give “moonshots” their name made history. With some notable triumphs — like Waymo and Google Brain — and a few public missteps — Google Glass, anyone? — Teller knows better than perhaps any scientist alive what it’s like to work across disparate fields to try to capture that rarefied energy that changes not just one discipline, but the world.

In a conversation with Freethink, Teller spoke about what it takes to innovate, how to balance profit and purpose, and how we can guide innovation to benefit everyone. He also reflected on the power of stories — like the ones about Oppenheimer and his team — to shape how we see and understand the world of innovation, for better and worse.

Freethink: The term “moonshot” has been around since the late 1940s — the word originally described how hard, and perhaps impossible, it seemed to put humans on the moon. How do you define moonshots? And how do you and your colleagues at X decide if a moonshot is worth pursuing?

Astro Teller: For something to be a moonshot at X, it has to have three basic things:

One, there has to be a huge problem with the world. 

Two, there has to be some radical proposed solution, some science-fiction-sounding product or service that — independent of whether we can make it — would make that huge problem go away, or at least take it down a couple notches. 

And three, then there has to be some kind of technology core that makes this feel like a testable hypothesis. It doesn’t guarantee that we’re right, but at least allows us to get started. It gives us some hope that the skills that we have here at X will be particularly applicable to making this product or service that would solve this huge problem. So the aspiration is really big.

Here’s the difference [between our work and moonshots of the past] — when Kennedy said we [are going to the moon], there was something powerful about the determination to do it, long before it was clear whether it could be done. [But] that is not necessarily efficient. 

During wartime — Manhattan Project, Bletchley Park — or during pseudo-wartime, like the Cold War, the space program, efficiency is not the goal. But for a place like X, efficiency is absolutely the goal. It wouldn’t be rational for the world or for investors to continue to lean into something like X if we weren’t as serious about efficiency as we were about radical innovation. 

Radical innovation, despite how it is usually put forward in the public, is not some lone genius who’s just like, “I thought of this thing, and it turns out I’m right. I’m the smartest person ever.” Like, that’s usually how it looks. That’s just not how it happens. This is lots of hard work across broad, transdisciplinary teams with lots of mess in the process. That’s how it actually happens. 

And so we start on lots of things that have the aspiration of a moonshot, but we start really small then aggressively filter afterwards on the basis of evidence. The ethos of X is one of pressure testing. Pressure testing the tech and, you know, a little bit later, pressure testing, like, “Who wants this? What would they do with this? Do they really get from it the benefits that we were hoping for?”

All those things are opportunities for us to discover we are wrong. A lot of the time, that can’t be fixed, but we can find out we were wrong much less expensively than we might have otherwise done.

“Radical innovation, despite how it is usually put forward in the public, is not some lone genius who’s just like, ‘I thought of this thing, and it turns out I’m right. I’m the smartest person ever.’ Like, that’s usually how it looks. That’s just not how it happens. This is lots of hard work across broad, transdisciplinary teams with lots of mess in the process. That’s how it actually happens.”

Freethink: At this point, you’ve been involved in multiple moonshots that have entered the public consciousness, with a variety of results, from Google Glass to Google Brain to Waymo. You’ve also doubtless been involved in many, many more moonshots that never made it out of the idea phase. What have you learned about what drives innovation? 

Teller: What I’ve learned, number one, is that this is way harder than you think it’s gonna be. There is an extreme flexibility that is required in order to get people to not only be creative — you know, color outside the lines a little bit — but also to encourage them to break the right assumptions in the right ways. 

You have to have the right kind of disregard for how things are normally done, but it’s easy to get people who are like, “I don’t care about the rules.” If you want radical innovation [and] you don’t care about efficiency, just find really egotistical people who are pretty smart, give them lots of money, and look away. You’ll get some radical innovation, but it won’t be efficient. 

It’s that shaping while giving them flexibility that’s hard. If you shape too hard, the flexibility goes away. You [can] give them a checklist they can follow, but the bad news is they will follow it, and then all they’re doing is going inside a lane you’ve made for them. But if you create too much space, often they’ll churn on the ambiguity.

I mean, I happened to just be wearing today a t-shirt that says, “Chaos pilot.” It’s another term that we use internally to try to help people understand: we’re not just causing chaos. That’s not our job. It’s to go into unknown places, but then to metabolize it with some purpose. I would not say we’re done. [laughs]

Freethink: How do you assess if you’re heading in the right direction with a project? I imagine that if you’re piloting through a chaotic space, you can’t necessarily look outward for guidance to figure out where you should be heading. Maybe you can, depending on what data you’re collecting, but how do you assess yourselves?

Teller: Our goal is to build the foundations for enduring businesses that are really valuable and really good for the world.

Given that that’s our job, if you work at X, you need to have — from a pretty early day — what you could think of as a moonshot story-hypothesis, what might be called on the outside an “investment thesis.”

We believe deeply at X that purpose and profit are aligned. If you make something that could be really good for the world, but it loses money, it’s not really gonna be good for the world. If you could make a profitable company, but we can’t be proud of what it does in the world, like, let’s not do that. And so let’s fish at the intersection of those things, where the profit the company makes is aligned with the goodness it’s doing in the world. Then we can feel really good about it.

And so you’re always testing that hypothesis. Let’s take our Free Space Optics efforts — so this is to connect the unconnected and the underconnected around the world using light. Wireless optical communications. 

So far it’s looking really good, but one of the things we’re looking for in all of our projects is, “How is this being experienced?” and “Where might there be unintended consequences that we have to be on the lookout for?”

“We believe deeply at X that purpose and profit are aligned. If you make something that could be really good for the world, but it loses money, it’s not really gonna be good for the world. If you could make a profitable company, but we can’t be proud of what it does in the world, like, let’s not do that. And so let’s fish at the intersection of those things, where the profit the company makes is aligned with the goodness it’s doing in the world.”

So if you worked at X, that would be the back-and-forth that we would have, that constant pressure testing relative to your hypothesis. 

I guarantee you your hypothesis is wrong and will need to evolve — that’s what we’re paying for over time. Not for you to be right, but for you to make your hypothesis better. 

Freethink: Most Americans today are pessimistic about the economy — the costs of education, housing, and healthcare have all outpaced inflation over the past few decades. In difficult economic times, how do you justify investing in moonshots? Obviously, you’re using capital from a private source, not a public one, but how do you and your colleagues at X evaluate the tradeoff inherent in making risky bets, where costs are significant, but payoffs can be profound? 

Teller: Let’s try a thought experiment for a second. I’m gonna offer you a lottery ticket. It costs $1 to buy the lottery ticket. You have a one in 1,000 chance of having the lottery ticket pay off in your favor. If it pays off, you won’t even find out for 10 years. And it pays off for a million dollars. $1 to buy in. 1,000 to one to win a $1,000,000 prize, 10 years to wait. So that has $1,000 expected utility, but you have to wait 10 years to get it. Would you buy that lottery ticket?

Freethink: Well, absolutely, these are great odds — one in 1,000 for the lottery!

Teller: Right. Now let’s play a more complicated game. I don’t know exactly how good this lottery ticket is. It could be one in 1,000, it could be one in a million. I don’t really know. I don’t know what the prize is. It could be $1,000, it could be $1,000,000, but it’s only going to cost you $1 to find out and to start to tighten those bounds.

If you thought even some of the lottery tickets you were looking at were gonna be as good as that first lottery ticket I described to you, do you think you might pay $1 to see if you can learn more about that lottery ticket?

Freethink: I think so — from what you’re saying, is the majority of your time just spending that $1 to find out if there’s even any expected value to a project?

Teller: We’re shooting for radical innovation, but trying to get it efficiently. And I believe that what I’ve just described to you is something that’s actually available to everybody in the world. 

I think the world is littered with opportunities like this, and because we don’t train people to go looking for those kinds of opportunities, we leave a lot of value and a lot of goodness for the world on the table.

I hate failing. I don’t wanna fail myself. I don’t wanna fail Alphabet. I don’t wanna fail the world. I don’t think anybody here wants to fail. 

But the issue is, failure is so stigmatized in our society [but] learning is driven almost exclusively through moments where what we thought was going to happen doesn’t happen. That’s what drives learning. You learn nothing when you’re right. 

Freethink: A number of commentators, including economist Tyler Cowen and entrepreneur Patrick Collison, have argued that we should be worried about the pace of progress — namely, that it’s slowing down. If you agree, what do you think has led us to this moment, when by some measures productivity is falling, despite universities investing more in research and producing more STEM PhDs than ever before? Do we need a moonshot for progress itself? 

Teller: Let me make a distinction between the rate at which productivity is increasing and the rate at which the world is changing. 

They are right that productivity growth has slowed almost to 0. So productivity isn’t getting worse, but it isn’t getting better very fast, and there are lots of parts of the modern world that are essentially depending on productivity to go up. You know, the national debt is going to be hard to service if we don’t can’t grow our way out of it through productivity. So I understand that concern and I think that deserves attention. 

But I’m not sure that that problem is at root an innovation or technology problem, because the rate at which the world is changing is speeding up, and the rate at which you can metabolize those changes is not speeding up as fast, which means that there’s a growing gap between the rate of change of technology and our ability to metabolize that change as a society. And that is very central to all of the angst that you feel out in the modern world.

“Failure is so stigmatized in our society [but] learning is driven almost exclusively through moments where what we thought was going to happen doesn’t happen. That’s what drives learning. You learn nothing when you’re right.”ASTRO TELLER

So it is both simultaneously true that we have a not-changing-fast-enough problem and a changing-so-fast-it’s-causing-us-heartburn problem. And so I would argue that leaving at the doorstep of technology or innovation the idea that productivity isn’t going up fast enough is probably wrong. I would suggest that there are probably some public policy and social issues which need to be addressed so that productivity can hitch its wagon more effectively to the rate of change that the world has already experienced.

Freethink: Moonshots like the Apollo space program and the Manhattan Project occupy a huge space in the public consciousness. What do you see as the Manhattan Projects of today? Would something like Operation Warp Speed, which developed vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, qualify? And are there any scientific endeavors that you feel we should regard similarly but that have been overlooked?

Teller: I think the all-in-poker-chips, the equivalent of the Apollo space mission won’t happen again. The world’s moved on from a sort of government-centric solution for the world. That doesn’t mean governments can’t be involved or shouldn’t be involved. It means I don’t think they can solve problems by themselves. 

It is also definitely not the case [for us]  — there is no problem that X is going to solve by itself. That’s also not a thing. I think part of what’s happened is that the world is now complex enough that these moonshots have to be more distributed. 

What happened during COVID? I don’t know if you could exactly call it a moonshot but the whole scientific community of the world — helped along by things like the mRNA vaccine, which had been brewing for a long time — started working together at literally 10 times the rate. 

That was really inspiring. It makes me very sad that we seem to have gone back to normal, but it was a proof that it can be done, and it happened kind of bottom-up. There were things like Operation Warp Speed, but those were nuggets within a much bigger system that was fairly organic. So I take a lot of inspiration from that, that it can happen and I think that’s probably not a bad analogy.

“There’s a growing gap between the rate of change of technology and our ability to metabolize that change as a society. And that is very central to all of the angst that you feel out in the modern world.”

Let me give you one or two other ones. The electric grid is the largest, most complex machine humans have ever made. It’s having a hard time right now in this country and all over the world, and it is central to our ability to support humanity, to lift up humanity, and if we don’t fix how it works, it’s going to be central to destroying humanity just because of the climate change effects that sort of come along through the grid. But it’s also our opportunity to take a big bite out of the problem of climate change, so that is an opportunity for a moonshot.

Now at X we are working on a moonshot for the electric grid, but we can’t just be tinkering in a closet somewhere, like, “Aha, here’s the solution!” because we have to work with system operators, the transmission folks. So we’re trying to do our part, but I see that as another example of something that we need to be on as a society and no one of us could just solve it.

Freethink: Right. That’s very interesting to hear about the electrical grid moonshot. Is that something that you’ve spoken about publicly?

Teller: We’ve mentioned it, but the short of it, I would put this way. The electric grid was built at a time when the demand — I mean, sometimes Bob turned on the lights and sometimes Suzie turned on the lights, but it was stochastic enough that there were very predictable needs at different times of the day. And so it was this sort of system where you produce the energy, you turn it up and down — and it wasn’t simple. It was hard for the time. 

But the world is getting complex very fast. Every time an EV is plugged in, you don’t even know whether it could give electrons back to the grid, or it’s going to try to pull them down. And, you know, the sun is shining. Hey, here’s some more electrons, a lot more electrons. Whoops, the clouds showed up. All those electrons just stopped. You know the wind blowing — same thing. So you’re getting these huge fluctuations in the grid and the grid wasn’t set up for that.

But the grid is so complex that there is no grid operator in the world that has a detailed enough map of their own machine that they can plan for how to fix it. So if you make a solar field and then you want to plug it into the grid, you will end up waiting, on average, in the United States, in about a seven-year line. And that’s not because the system operators are bad people or dumb people.

They have to, by hand, run all of these what-if simulations. Like, “OK, let’s say we plug this new solar field onto the grid and then the heat was really high and it was June and the sun was doing this.” And they have to plan out this very specific scenario. And then they kind of roll it forward and try to see, does anything really bad happen? That was one scenario. It took them weeks maybe. They have to do a bunch of those before they can have any confidence that you plugging your solar field onto the grid won’t be a disaster.

And they don’t have a simulator that would allow them to do that in a second instead of in a month. So, we have bigger aspirations, but we think that the sort of first really foundational piece is how do we help the system operators of the world have a virtualization of their grid that allows for them to deeply understand what they have, what they need to fix, and what would happen to it if they did various things, so that they can upgrade it much faster.

Freethink: Obviously, it’s not always easy to predict how new technologies will be used. When the written word came along, Socrates complained that books would make it too easy to remember things—I can only imagine what he would say about cell phones. But I’m curious about what you see as the pitfalls of innovation—how do you evaluate the risks of your work at X?

Teller: Anyone who is doing any incremental innovation — and even more so, I suppose, for radical innovation — has an obligation to try to see what those problems might be and to deal with them as thoughtfully as possible. 

Mostly our experience is that you can’t predict the stuff ahead of time. It means you have to get out into the world soon, and you have to do it in a sandboxed kind of way that doesn’t endanger anybody, but still allows you to learn in the process — the equivalent of having Waymo cars out in the world very early on, but with safety drivers with their hands right by the wheel. 

We did that for a decade, and that was a way for us to be learning in the real world — because we couldn’t learn on a fake driveway — but to still keep everybody safe in the process.

“Technology can be misused. It’s the responsibility of the technologists,  the inventors, as a group, to avoid that where they can. But as a society, we also need to make sure that we don’t let those fears cause us to miss out on all the benefits of the technology.”

We do that with a lot of the things that we do. Let me put it into three categories. I think there are things that are clearly the responsibility of the innovators as a group. Your drone for package delivery shouldn’t hit a person or hit the house. Your thing has to not do damage — direct bad stuff. 

There’s a bit of a gray area where you still have a responsibility as the innovation team. So that might be more like the noise from a drone. You know, nothing really horrible is gonna happen, but that’s just rude and we’re part of a society. 

And then there’s things which are not solvable by the innovation unit itself. So for example, most innovation causes some new jobs to come up and some jobs to go away. It’s almost impossible to do a new technology that doesn’t cause that to happen to some extent, but the ability to move people from one domain to another and the sort of job reskilling, that’s a public policy issue.

That’s not something that the tech innovation group can solve by themselves, but they still have a responsibility to go to the public-policy sphere and say, here’s what’s coming, here’s the shifts we imagine will happen, here’s the details of how this technology works, so you, the public policy makers, can make the best choices possible.

Freethink: Your grandfather, Edward Teller, who’s portrayed by Benny Safdie in Oppenheimer, helped invent the atomic bomb — perhaps the most famous example of an innovation that brought great risks and promise all at once. What did you learn from him about innovation? 

Teller: His main interest for his whole life — certainly the part of his life where I knew him — was nuclear power. I don’t mean nuclear bombs. I mean nuclear power, like stations that could create electricity for us. And he was actually part of this, because back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he saw climate change coming. 

That’s why he was so worked up about nuclear power plants. And because the destructive power of nuclear bombs was so disturbing to society — for understandable reasons — it created this sort of really destructive, confused panic in society. And this broken narrative about nuclear power being bad for us, which, ironically, if we hadn’t let ourselves be clouded by this, this issue about the power of nuclear bombs, it would have allowed us to avoid what is now actually the problem, which is climate change. 

And I think that there’s a metaphor in there for lots of other technologies. Technology can be misused. It’s the responsibility of the technologists,  the inventors, as a group, to avoid that where they can. But as a society, we also need to make sure that we don’t let those fears cause us to miss out on all the benefits of the technology.

Freethink: Given the way nuclear weapons seem to have sullied the promise of nuclear power, how important is storytelling to technological innovation? 

Teller: I think it’s critical. They hear a lot about it from me here at X. I mean, part of the moonshot hypothesis I described — I called it before a moonshot story-hypothesis — it’s an architecture. A story isn’t marketing. A story is an intellectual architecture and an argument that helps you understand something. That’s really what a story is.

And I think we could do a much better job on lots of pieces of technology in understanding what it really is, in a sanguine way, explaining it to each other, building up sophistication about it in public. That we as a society have strong reactions to a thing without really understanding the thing makes it almost impossible for us as a society to get our arms around what we really should best do with that thing. 

So I do think that storytelling is important and when wise, organized versions of it don’t happen, that doesn’t mean no storytelling happens. It just means that the shrillest voices on both the positive and negative side overwhelm what could be the thoughtful story in the middle — for any technology.

This article Innovation chief says “pressure test” your pet hypothesis. It’s guaranteed to be wrong. is featured on Big Think.

Metaphorically speaking, there are parallels to how a decision arc moves and how the stone in the sport of curling moves. In this sweet and beautiful sport, one of those events that reminds us every four years during the Olympics of how Canadians and Norwegians spend their idle time, a thrower gracefully slides across the ice in a low lunge similar to the yoga pose Anjaneyasana. Toward the end of this slide, the player gently nudges a curling stone along its path. The stone looks somewhat like Grandma’s teapot made of granite with a handle mounted on top. It glides toward a bull’s-eye painted below the icy surface. The objective is to get closest to the centermost circle of the bull’s-eye — or, if it is already occupied, to knock out an opponent’s favorably resting stone. The sport is at once elegant and nasty.

To my inexpert mind, the game of curling is won or lost based on the aggregate effect of two offensive actions. The first action is, of course, setting the stone on its initial course across the ice with the right amount of force supplied by the first player on the three-person team. The second action comes from the team’s other two members, who race out in front of the gliding stone, rubbing furiously at the ice in front of it. Collectively, the players yell to one another staccato commands with such force and volume that it brings back the adolescent trauma of my father yelling profanities as I backed a gooseneck trailer up to a crooked gate in the dark. 

The secret to the game seems to lie in creating enough heat on the surface of the ice to create a wet surface, reducing friction during the glide while affecting the force and rotation of the stone to bend its trajectory to a more ideal landing spot. The theoretical precepts of these physics, however, are hotly debated by those same Canadians and Norwegians. 

Decision arcs work the same way, at least metaphorically. There is a natural trajectory that has already been put into motion. We inherit this first dimension of the decision arc. This inertia is extremely powerful. 

Then we go to work trying to influence the continuation of the trajectory. The goal is to increase the probability of our success by shaping the arc taken by the stone. We rub vigorously at the ice. Profanity is permitted.

This article How curling — that weird Winter Olympics sport — can help you make better decisions is featured on Big Think.

Outrage is not inherently bad. The moral emotions we feel when we observe something is wrong in the world are critically important to a functioning society: They are the force that helps us mobilize and solve problems when things are broken. Channeled into the right vehicle, outrages can change the world for the better. Many of the most effective social movements in history — the U.S. civil rights movement, Gandhi’s campaign for an independent India, the women’s suffrage movement, the gay rights movement — were catalyzed by outrage channeled into focused, systemic action.

Outrage is a problem when it manifests into toxic outrage — when it shuts down debate, the ability to discuss an issue constructively with the opposite side, and cascades into violence. When the system of discourse itself is threatened by our moral anger, that’s when it needs to be addressed. That’s when it becomes far more dangerous to society.

Similarly, social media is not intrinsically harmful. It has tremendous power to do good, as when it brings to light previously hidden harms and gives voice to previously powerless communities. Every new communication technology brings a range of constructive and destructive effects, and over time, ways are found to improve the balance.

As individuals, we can help. There are a handful of things we can do as humans to detoxify our relationship with online outrage, and our interactions with it online. Each of these are specific solutions that can help us reclaim portions of emotional agency that we have lost in recent years. Remember that this isn’t just for us: by reducing our participation in the broken system of outrage profiteering and manipulation, we are actually helping reduce the overall levels of toxicity that exist in the world today — the stuff that our friends, family, and neighbors all feel.

And better, by selectively participating in the issues that speak to the best parts of us, we are increasing the effectiveness of our actions by staying focused on what really matters — opportunities for healthy outrage and mobilization in the future.

Today there are infinite channels through which to source overwhelming outrage-inducing stimulus. Online is where we usually find ourselves emotionally triggered the most. If you find yourself emotionally triggered by what you consume online, there’s a straightforward solution: Limit the amount of time you spend with it.

As you’re scrolling, ask yourself these questions:

• Is what I’m looking at something I can use to actionably improve my life or the lives of the people around me?
• Is this something that affects people I know personally?
• Is this a real problem, or might it actually be disproportionately covered?
• Look for regret. Do I find myself feeling better about my life and how I’m spending my time after using these tools?

If the answer to any of these questions after regular use is a clear no, try a simple experiment: Delete the app for a week. Use a content blocker on your phone and computer to keep you from automatically returning to the website. Chances are you’ll feel better, and find yourself with significantly more free time. The world will go on.

If you can’t limit that specific time (because you use social media at work, for example), then make a concerted effort to reduce your exposure to the worst stimulus within these feeds. Train your algorithms by aggressively unfollowing and blocking specific accounts that share/evoke the kinds of outrageous content that regularly cause you to regret your time. Most algorithms allow for you to select “I’d like to see less of this” or “not interested” options beneath content you don’t like. Your brain and body will thank you later, allowing you to focus your energy where it matters most.

In the wake of the 2016 election, Americans experienced the Great Unfriending: One in six Americans lost a friend due to opinions expressed online during that period. These weren’t just shallow friendships — they were largely real human connections. COVID-19 has only made this worse.

One of the most insidious things about the way social media has infiltrated our lives is how it has made our external narratives about people more important than personal narratives. A personal narrative is based on an independent relationship you have developed over time with someone in your life. An external narrative is one that has been superimposed upon your relationship through media you both consume. While these can be difficult to thread apart, it’s far from impossible. If the relationship is really important to you and still seems ideologically charged, consider taking a breath and steering conversations away from politics entirely. This can be done simply by acknowledging their concerns, and changing the subject to something you both care about.

The version of your friends you see online is not necessarily an accurate reflection of who they are. If you feel the emotional distance from them expanding, or feel yourself pulling away, try to speak with them in person, or send them a small note of kindness. Leading with this type of action can spark a positive feedback loop that can heal these divisions and help overcome the most personal casualties of the outrage machine.

This article Ask yourself these 4 essential questions to break the “outrage machine” is featured on Big Think.

Forty years ago, Donald Homa, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University specializing in memory and the visual perception of linguistic stimuli, was contacted by officials at the American Speed Reading Academy with an extraordinary tale. Two of their pupils had achieved a reading rate in excess of 100,000 words per minute, more than ten times the speed of their average students and more than 300 times what college-educated adults can muster (between 200 and 400 words per minute). Would he be willing to assess their prodigious skills in a laboratory setting?

Curious, Homa happily obliged. In the lab, he tasked the two men with speed reading an entire college level textbook then taking a multiple-choice test to gauge their comprehension. After finishing the text in mere minutes, they took the test and absolutely bombed. They didn’t seem to have learned much of anything.

“The only noteworthy skill exhibited by the two speed readers was a remarkable dexterity in page-turning,” Homa concluded.

While this episode is admittedly anecdotal, it does exemplify what scientists have broadly learned about speed reading: It doesn’t work.

Two major reasons speed reading doesn’t work

For well over a half-century, speed reading courses all promise to drastically accelerate one’s reading ability with no detriment to comprehension. Proponents claim people can become speed readers by learning to take in more words with less eye movement and by silencing their inner speech that accompanies reading.

Summarizing decades of research in an article published in 2016, an all-star team of cognitive scientists and linguists specializing in reading ability and visual perception debunked both of these speed reading tenets.

First, how human vision works, including the very structure of the eye, simply doesn’t allow us to see words on the periphery of our visual field with enough clarity to fully take in their meaning. Thus, the notion that whole blocks of words can be understood at a glance is nonsensical. Moreover, experiments have repeatedly shown that speed readers’ peripheral vision is no better than normal readers’. It can’t be trained.

Second, silencing one’s inner reading voice can permit one to intake text more quickly, but it seems to come at the expense of comprehension. Sounds are key to language, so translating visual information into phonological (sound) form, even just in one’s head, is necessary for complete understanding of written words.

Reading, fast and slow

Still, those behind speed reading programs point to data showing that their students’ reading speed improves while maintaining comprehension. Pupils are given a pre-test and a post-test and generally experience sizable improvement. The authors of the 2016 report countered that these are generally bogus.

“Sometimes the pre-test is harder than the post-test, and other times trainees are tested repeatedly on the same material. In both cases, it is inevitable that their performance will be better on the post-test merely because of the relative difficulty of the tests or because of repeated exposure.”

When scientists have rigorously scrutinized speed reading courses, they have repeatedly found that students do indeed boost their reading rate, measured in words per minute, but this acceleration comes at the expense of comprehension. The faster people read, the less they remember what they have read.

Nowadays, there are apps that purportedly make speed reading easy. Most of these present a text’s words one at a time in the same spot, allowing the user to adjust the presentation speed. This method, termed rapid serial visual presentation, permits the reader’s gaze to remain fixed — eliminating the supposedly wasteful need to scan from word to word. Alas, these apps don’t work either. As users adjust the text presentation speed up, their comprehension falls.

Take a look, it’s in a book

So if speed reading is bogus, is there any way to read more quickly? Yes, the authors of the blockbuster 2016 report say. The answer is to read more, in conjunction with expanding one’s vocabulary. Such practice is admittedly time-consuming, but like so many other skills that require hours and hours of repetition to perfect, reading ability must be honed through effort. Like a pianist playing every day for years, a basketball player taking endless shots, or a pilot spending thousands of hours in the air, expertise takes time. It cannot be taught via a 12-week training program.

This article Neuroscience shows that speed reading is bullshit is featured on Big Think.

Professional jargon has a technical function. You can’t be a doctor if you don’t know the names of the parts of the body, or of the processes and diseases it undergoes. But learning the jargon is not only a way to master knowledge. It is also a way to show off — both to people inside the group (fellow doctors) and to those outside it (patients). 

Take hyperemesis gravidarum, a serious condition suffered by some pregnant women. An obstetrician will explain that it involves serious nausea and uncontrolled vomiting. And the label of the disease gives the doctor’s diagnosis an air of learning. But a classicist might scoff: “hyper” merely means “super” or “a lot,” in Greek. And “emesis” means nothing more than “vomit.” Finally “gravidarum” is Latin for “of pregnancy.” If you tell your doctor, “I’m pregnant and throwing up all the time,” and your doctor replies “You have what is technically known as ‘pregnancy supervomit,'” you will not be impressed. 

Such terminology puts a distance between doctor and patient, and may make the patient feel alienated from her condition and treatment. A good doctor will explain conditions like hyperemesis well. But in the main, doctors are trained to treat those conditions, and not to translate all that Greek for the patient. Your job as a writer, on the other hand, is precisely that: translation, or explanation. 

Translation is even more important when politicians or businesses try to bury bad news, put a shine on mediocre ideas, or generally try to sound impressive by using terms beloved of insiders yet never once heard in casual conversation. Avoid the following pitfalls: 

1. Pomposity. Meetings or conferences are dressed up as summits. Granular is edging out detailed. Brainstorming has become ideation, and at one of those ideation sessions it was decided that learnings were more valuable than lessons and optics classier than appearances. None of these improves on the older, more common word; nothing has been added except novelty. 

2. Verbing. There is nothing inherently wrong with verbs formed from nouns. English is full them. Shakespeare was a master verber (“Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”). Some verbed nouns settle into the language over time: Contact and host were considered horrible as verbs not long ago. But unless you are Shakespeare you are more likely to annoy than entertain with novel verbings. It may be only a matter of time before no one is bothered by to impact or to access, but they still annoy enough readers that you should write to have an impact on or to gain access to. Similarly, find alternatives for to showcase, to source, to segue, and to target. Newer verbings are even more noxious to readers: the likes of to action, to gift, to interface, and to whiteboard should never escape the office meeting-room. 

3. Misdirection. Many jargon words seem designed to obscure. When companies merge, they inevitably promise synergy — that the two partners can do more together than apart. Scratch the surface and this usually means that they can do more with fewer workers. 

But then matters take their course. The company detects issues (never “problems”). These might entail a cyclical downturn (a recession, so nobody is buying their product at the moment) or a secular downturn (which means that their industry is shrinking, and people won’t buy the product tomorrow, either). Soon begins the talk of reallocation of resources, refocusing, downsizing (even rightsizing) and so on. Call these things what they are. 

Most writers, especially in business, finance, economics, and science, will need to use specialized words on occasion. You should first identify those terms you will re-use often enough in your writing that they are worth keeping. They are best, in effect, taught to your reader. Explaining an unfamiliar concept in terms of a familiar one (a metaphor) is an effective way to do this. 

The terms you need to define may be fewer than you think. Some examples from grammar show how you can phrase a term of art in words that everyone knows. Syntax, for example, is how words are combined into bigger units like phrases, clauses, and sentences. If you don’t plan to linger on syntax, you don’t need to use it at all: You can simply talk about how words are combined. An even rarer term for a common thing is morphology: putting words and bits of words together to make longer words, like the three pieces of “un-lady-like.” 

Linguists love morphology, but when talking to wider audiences they’re better served by talking about building words out of smaller pieces. When you will not be re-using terms frequently, rephrasing is your best strategy. 

Acronyms and initialisms are common in technical writing, but they are wearying to a reader who is not familiar with them, and deadening even to one who is. You may think that, having defined “hyperemesis gravidarum” once, you can simply go on to refer to HG throughout your writing. But this forces the reader to recall the unfamiliar phrase behind the initials; it saves you a few keystrokes at the expense of the reader’s ease. 

Instead, consider short forms and simple synonyms. Hyperemesis gravidarum can be the condition on later mentions, or something general like nausea where precision is not crucial. A bit of work to vary your vocabulary, rather than monotonously repeating strings of capital letters, will do wonders for keeping your reader’s attention.

This article Good communicators don’t use jargon or pompous words is featured on Big Think.

In the aftermath of the healthcare.gov disaster in 2013, armchair quarterbacks from all corners offered their reasons for the failure. Some thought the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had spent its budget too slowly. Others said the problem was that CMS had tried to be its own “systems integrator” and should have charged CGI Federal — the lead company on healthcare.gov, the website that administered the health insurance exchanges mandated by the Affordable Care Act — with pulling all the pieces together. Still others thought that CGI and the dozens of other vendors involved were the real problem. (Indeed, the absence of truly basic functionality like site monitoring software suggests some serious deficiencies on their part.) 

A report by the Office of Inspector General offers ten key reasons for the disaster, spanning everything from lack of clear leadership and an overly bureaucratic culture to failures of integration, communication, execution, and oversight. The report is thorough, but that’s a broad diagnosis. If I had to pick just one thing that maybe, just maybe, would have made a difference, it would be this: the site had a lot of project managers but no product manager. 

With all the dysfunction cataloged by the inspector general swirling around, what could a product manager have done for healthcare.gov? In a word, less. 

Healthcare.gov was a truly massive undertaking. It didn’t just let people shop for and choose insurance plans. It had to communicate with dozens of other government databases to verify the person’s income, Social Security number, citizenship status, and whether the person was enrolled in any other health care programs; it had to make sure the enrollee was charged the right amount for coverage; and it had to transmit enrollee data to hundreds of different insurers. Not only did the site need to scale to handle enormous traffic but dozens of connections had to work just right for any given transaction to go through.

In any service like this, you will find a core of users whose circumstances are the most common and a long tail of increasingly rare “edge cases.” For instance, the Affordable Care Act generally extends coverage only to applicants who are U.S. citizens. But there are 17 unique immigration statuses that are exceptions to that rule, and the people those exceptions cover represent a tiny fraction of users. Programming in the logic and database connections to automatically verify all 17 exceptions makes the software orders of magnitude more complex than what would be required to support the most common type of user. The people with edge cases could have initially been helped through other channels, including call centers and various agents and assisters who could meet clients in person. Mike Byrne, the guy who built the broadband map for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), estimates that most government tech projects could cost 10% of what they do and still provide 85% of the functionality. I hereby dub this “Byrne’s Law.” 

It’s not that that final 15% of the functionality shouldn’t ever be built — the software can and should eventually support edge cases. It’s just that trying to have it all done by launch, before you’ve had the chance to work out the kinks with the core workings of the project, will often tank the operation of the other 85%. Mike’s modern-day estimate resonates with a 1975 observation known as Gall’s Law, named for pediatrician and systems design theorist John Gall. “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked,” Gall wrote. “A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” Because CMS tried to build something very complex that worked for everyone right from launch, healthcare.gov worked for no one. Everyone swamped the call center and the in-person assisters. Those high-touch channels should have been reserved primarily for the people with unusual cases, those without internet access, and others who needed extra help, but instead they were jammed up with the cases that software could have easily handled.

Theoretically, CMS could have heeded Gall’s Law: limited the functionality of the site for launch, planned for call-center support for people whose circumstances the site couldn’t handle, and, as resources allowed, incrementally added online support for the edge cases after launch. In practice, however, Congress had ordered a fully functioning website, so a fully functioning website was what CMS had to deliver. Project managers had all their requirements to check off. The idea that some choices could be made, and in fact would very much need to be made, was unspeakable, perhaps unthinkable. Many considered anything but the whole nine yards illegal. Clay Shirky describes being at the Harvard Kennedy School, one of the country’s top public policy institutions, a month after healthcare.gov launched and being told that the site simply could not have been built and tested iteratively over time because that’s not how government works. “It is hard for policy people to imagine that HealthCare.gov could have had a phased rollout, even while it is having one,” he wrote at the time. Incremental fixes is exactly what the agency got, just in the worst possible way.

This article If you have a complex project, follow “Gall’s law” — or it will fail is featured on Big Think.

Know this: no one else is watching the movie of your life. Maybe you knew this already, or perhaps this feels radical to you — but just think about it. How many movies do you watch of other people’s lives? How many people are you truly scrutinizing in the way that you sometimes fear others are scrutinizing you? I’m willing to bet that although you are interested in other people, that you care for them and you try to help, you’re not watching in all that much detail. 

Take someone close to you: maybe a child, a partner or a parent. Their movie runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week for roughly 80 years. That is 700,000 hours. How many of those hours do you feature in the film? Even if you are married for 50 years and sleep in the same bed, you might make it up to 200,000 hours. If you do not live with them, then maybe 2,000 hours over 80 years. How many hours, when you are not with that person, are you thinking about them, imagining what they are doing and thinking? Maybe double the 2,000 hours to 4,000 hours? 

Yes, others care about us, but in a global way, not the detail of what we do with our lives. The truth is, in the nicest possible sense, no one else gives a s***. We become too caught up thinking about what others would think. We worry about what we should do. We hold on tight to a version of ourselves that we think is expected. What others really want is to know that we are happy if they are fond of us or that we are sad if we are their enemy. 

Even parents or lovers have more than enough in front of them, trying to figure their own way through life without worrying endlessly about you. And this is when we are talking about people who know you and love you. What about people who have spent zero hours in your film? Or those tangential characters — the followers on Instagram, for example, who have spent mere seconds in a hyper-edited semi- fictional account of your life movie. Do they count? 

This truth, if you let it, can be deeply liberating. Think how much time we all spend worrying about our audience, or trying to please a parent, or bending ourselves to the wills of society. Once we accept that we are on our own, far from creating loneliness, it can free us up to take our “maverick path,” to really figure out what makes us tick. In doing so, we end up making a far more interesting and ‘successful’ movie anyway, even if there were people watching — which there aren’t. 

So who are you making your movie for? An abstract sense of society at large — what should I do, what is expected of me, how do I fit in? 

Then there are people in our lives who exert a strong influence over what we choose to do. I work with clients who are often second-guessing what key people in their lives would wish them to do. Rarely do they check in with these people; if they did, the answers might be surprising. The most obvious example I see is around living up to perceived paternal expectations. Our parents, and particularly our fathers, seem to have an almost gravitational influence on key decisions and the direction we take. We worry about their judgements, but these say more about the weaknesses they have than the problems they think we may be facing. 

James came to me in the middle of his career, successful in the “non-maverick” sense, but totally stuck and trapped. In the second session he began to talk about a career he wished he had in architecture. Then he lit up as he told me about some clay he had recently bought to start ceramics again after a 30-year gap. I asked him what had led him into his current career and he started to talk about his father, grandfather and other ancestors. He felt an enormous pressure to conform and to succeed on their metrics, which were very financial and profile-based. The irony of course is that in borrowing someone else’s definition of success James hadn’t really smashed it and fulfilled his own potential. He wasn’t passionate about what he was doing; he wasn’t uniquely talented in it. We talked about how he was working with one hand tied behind his back. He had worked very hard to do well and to please his ancestors, but such efforts came at a great cost to himself. 

We rehearsed a difficult and overdue conversation with his father, where James let his dad know that he was OK, grateful for his input and that over the next few months and years he was going to transition into work that was more creative and architecture-led. In the end he gave his dad a big hug, thanked him and with that, he was free. 

Of course, it’s not just worrying about what others might see. The idea of scrutiny is compounded by the dangers of comparison — even if you’re not concerned about what people might think of you, perhaps you are silently worrying about how you look or perform or achieve up against someone you admire. But it’s the same trap, in a different guise — comparison does not help you live a free life. As the mother of a client used to say to her, ‘Stop comparing your insides to someone else’s outsides.’ 

Social media has turbocharged this insidious game of comparison and instead of liberating us, it ties us to these misperceptions of what ‘good’ looks like. Money, medals and mentions become the driver of our thoughts and behaviours, but for many these are the wrong measures and are likely to be at best inflated and at worst made up. 

We compound this by creating hybrid super people, where we take the best aspect of several others and combine them into some hyper-being that we then compare ourselves to. If only I could have A’s brains with B’s body, C’s hair and, oh yes please, D’s job and E’s comic timing. Maybe throw in F’s memory and G’s house by the sea. How about H’s well-behaved dog and I’s bank account? And so on. 

But no one is this super being and no one is as calm or successful on the inside as they might project on the outside. Much like a swan, they may appear to be gliding across the surface but underneath their legs are paddling like crazy. Outwardly successful, inwardly miserable. 

We can also do the opposite. Comparing ourselves to those that we perceive to be below us, doing less well. This creates a false sense of smugness and again is rarely based on the truth.

This article Nobody is watching the movie of your life — and that’s truly liberating is featured on Big Think.

Imagine your alarm sounds on an early January morning. You wake and look outside. It’s cold and raining. Even though you’ve been diligent to your internal commitment and have every intention to get healthy, you decide not to go out for a run. You think, tomorrow will be drier. You go back to your cozy bed and snooze for an extra 30 minutes. Finally you get up, and you feel guilty, which depletes your drive and derails your hopes for a healthier start to the year. Feeling slightly ashamed, you decide to have a big breakfast to cheer yourself up. You then realize that the same thing happened yesterday and the day before that. You think, maybe I’ll try again in February. This is the Choice Point: To run or not to run? That is the question.

Truth is, we ask ourselves “to-do” or “not-to-do” questions every day, then make key decisions that influence our behavior moving forward. Choice Points usually happen when we face a challenge. They pop up during (or right before not doing) an infinite variety of activities: office work, writing a thesis, preparing for an exam, running up a hill, swimming the last mile, or working through a challenging dynamic in a relationship. For each of us, a Choice Point decision has the power to define who we are: a runner/nonrunner, an academic/nonacademic, healthy/not healthy.

By the time you get to a Choice Point, usually you have already invested a great deal of energy, emotion, and attention and made many personal sacrifices that have you in a state of feeling depleted or a loss of motivation. When you feel drained, negative thoughts rush forward in open rebellion, and the challenges can seem insurmountable. This is the moment you need to make a critical decision that will reveal aspects of your character — your mental toughness and grit. We experience about 6,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. To understand that you are free to choose which of these thoughts you act on can change your life and has the potential to shape your destiny. Yet our decisions often default to the question of willpower because, at that critical Choice Point, we forget to ask ourselves why we want to do the action and what it means for our future.

The Choice Point is a moment that offers two options: mental mutiny or cognitive control. While mental mutiny threatens to lead us to disappointment in our actions, cognitive control is the antithesis, rooted in a commitment to our long-term goals, values, and meaning.

In a day, even if only 0.1% of the 60,000 thoughts you have are Choice Point moments, that amounts to 60 critical “yes or no,” “stop or go,” “quit or continue” opportunities to choose. The Choice Point is not unconscious; it involves conscious thought. Thus, you have the agency to manage those thoughts as they enter your consciousness rather than default to an arm wrestle with willpower that you might lose due to mental fatigue.

Still, we have found that by teaching our research participants and our clients to manage their attention during specific times of the day by perceiving obstacles and planning next steps through imagery, they report stronger willpower and a greater sense of free will, which increases their confidence and performance.

In our work and research, we’ve found that core values are often neglected or compromised due to day-to-day shifts in personal circumstances such as changing work or family commitments. As these priorities shift, each individual’s handling of their Choice Point becomes of ever greater consequence. When we have people rank their top core value, they rate their health above all else 99% of the time. Yes, above family, above relationships, above happiness, and always above world peace. We all know that to stay healthy, we need to exercise, eat the right nutrients, and stay hydrated. However, in 2021, the World Health Organization estimated that 2.8 million deaths were directly correlated to obesity. Many of those deaths could have been avoided. People know how to eat healthily, they know about hydration, and they know they should exercise. Yet many of us opt not to work out today because there’s always tomorrow. But today’s actions often result in us having the same thought, the same excuse, and the same lack of progress tomorrow.

If personal health is so important to us, why do we struggle to follow through with decisions that directly benefit us? This curious question is where our research starts: Why do some people opt in while others opt out?

The answer is in your attention and imagination. One dramatic demonstration of how this works was revealed in the most significant weight loss study ever conducted without medication. Conducted by Linda Solbrig, PhD, and colleagues from the University of Plymouth, in Great Britain, and Queensland University of Technology, in Australia, it became the most widely read FIT (Functional Imagery Training) study published on weight loss. In the 2018 investigation, 121 participants were recruited from an ad placed in a local paper in Plymouth. They were split into two randomized groups. One group received motivational interviewing, an evidence-based, client-centered intervention that uses open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections, and summaries. Motivational interviewing is the standard in “change talk” (a method that maneuvers people to discuss solutions and plans), and is used by teachers, doctors, coaches, therapists, and counselors in every field. The other group received FIT training and learned to use imagery to plan, anticipate obstacles, and try out new solutions based on past successes.

Solbrig worked with both groups over a period of six months and followed up after 12 months. The time investment to participate in the program was brief for both groups: Each participant received a single one-hour in-person session, one follow-up phone call (of 45 minutes or less), check-in calls (of 15 minutes or less) every two weeks for a period of three months, and then monthly check-in calls for three months. Each participant had just four hours of contact with Solbrig. The results were newsworthy and reported in media outlets around the world.

The FIT group lost an average of 9 pounds at the six-month mark, and most significantly, the results continued beyond the intervention. At 12 months, the FIT group had lost an average of 14 pounds, while the motivational interviewing group had lost only an average of 1.5 pounds. Despite not having received any support after the first six months, the FIT participants continued to make progress. Up until this study, this kind of outcome was unheard of in a weight-loss program. With just four hours of contact with the FIT practitioner in the first six months, and zero contact in the second half, the FIT group became self-sufficient and self-directed and the participants continued to progress toward their goals. It would appear that FIT gave them the confidence and the tools to persist.

This article You face 60 “Choice Points” each day — and they define who you are is featured on Big Think.

By the time you finish reading this sentence, there will have been 300,000 Google searches. That’s a lot of people, asking a lot of mostly banal, pointless, or lurid questions. And so, it requires a lot of processing power. Google’s data centers use roughly 15.5 terawatt hours of electricity a year. To put that into perspective, that’s the same energy consumption as Paraguay. It’s the same as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago combined. When you deal with that much information, you need a lot of processing power.

It’s not just Google that has a lot to deal with. According to one study from the University of California, the average American consumes 100,000 words — from TV, radio, newspapers, music, conversation, and so on — every day. That’s 34 gigabytes of information — which is about the same as watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, ten times, back to back.

With such a large amount of information bombarding us, it’s hard to keep up. Our attention, focus, and problem-solving abilities will slow down under the labor of having too much to do. It’s like trying to run Google search from your grandfather’s PC. This will, of course, impair functionality. And this is exactly what the “noise bottleneck” theory argues — it’s the paradoxical observation that the more we try to process, the less we actually can.

From town crier to 24/7

At the start of the 19th century, roughly half of the British population couldn’t read. This meant that the news and information you got mostly came through chatter and hearsay. There might be a “town crier” who would shout various headlines out, and sometimes you could pay to sit and listen to someone read the newspaper. But mostly, news and gossip worked hand in glove.

In the 20th century, when the vast majority of the developed world could read, people were still getting their news from one or a few sources. You’d buy a certain newspaper or settle down to watch a particular news channel you liked. Fast forward to today, and things have changed drastically. Newspapers are increasingly unpopular and unsuccessful, with many local or smaller papers closing (especially during the COVID years). Likewise, cable news channels are all finding it hard to keep their ratings — losing around a third of their viewers between 2020 and 2021.

What we have, instead, is an always-in-your-pocket, 24/7 news cycle. When you open Twitter or a news app, you’ll notice a brief moment when the “old news” is still there. In a flash, your timeline is refreshed, and the ancient history of a few hours ago is swept away for the next “breaking news” or tweet of the minute. Every second, we are presented with new information. Every day, we have “five essential articles to read.” It’s relentless, but you better keep up.

You are not Sherlock Holmes

In his book, Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduced the world to the phrase, “noise bottleneck.” A noise bottleneck is where we are overwhelmed with so much information (or noise), that our cognitive abilities can’t keep up. Our brains have limited resources, spread across numerous functions. So, while our brain can read five articles a day, and while our attention can watch four hours of TED talks, our long-term learning processes can’t. We simply don’t retain the information we read, or we zone out five minutes into a video.

The matter is made worse by our modern addiction to “multitasking” which is, more often than not, simply a euphemism for divided attention. We flit between tabs, we watch TV holding our phones, and we listen to a podcast, at double speed, while shopping. The problem is that the idea of the super-productive multitasker is a myth. The cognitive scientist, Harold Pashler showed that there is “extensive evidence for a central bottleneck in dual task performance.” While research by Ruthruff et al. suggests that the human brain might have “structural limitation inherent in the cognitive architecture” which causes the “slowing down that occurs when two tasks are performed at the same time”.

In short, your brain is not as good as you think it is. You are not Sherlock Holmes during a time-lapse, brainstorming montage. You are not a Google data centre. You are a human being who can only take in so much a day.

Ways to beat the bottleneck

Understanding the noise bottleneck allows us to fix it. So, here are three tips to get you going:

Curate your content — set up a new account on social media and follow only accounts or people you think are really valuable. Be brutal and pick only the content which enriches you. It’s healthier to have a few wholesome meals that fill you up, than gorging on fast food throughout the day.

Single-task — you don’t need to ditch the phone but do ditch the distractions. Give yourself a time limit or restriction if it helps. Say, “I will only use this app for 20 minutes” or “I will only read this magazine after dinner.” Multitasking is for show; single-tasking is for pros.

Accept your limits — you’ll never read all the news. You’ll never read all the “must-read” articles. Accept you can only choose two or three and embrace that fact. Don’t beat yourself up that you’re being unproductive or you’re missing out. You’re getting more out of those few than that “super-productive” person on Twitter who says they read five books a week.

After all, it’s better to have a little remembered, than a lot forgotten.

This article Swamped by too much info? Here’s how to beat the “noise bottleneck” is featured on Big Think.

Does grandiloquent language, articulated via verbose constructions and multifarious lexicological composition, maximize information consumers’ appraisement of author intelligence? Or is simple better?

A fun psychology study conducted a few tests to probe this question. The author asked different readers to evaluate multiple versions of various texts, written with more or less complex wording and structure. The readers’ preferences were clear and revealed more interesting truths along the way.

For example, readers preferred graduate school admissions essays that used smaller and simpler words over essays that swapped in longer words from a thesaurus. The quality of the essays varied, but the author noted, “Complexity neither disguised the shortcomings of poor essays, nor enhanced the appeal of high-quality essays.” In other words, George Orwell got it right: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”

But perhaps the readers weren’t put off by the big words but rather by the clunkiness of the text that resulted from altering it. To test this idea, an unknown piece of text (the abstract of a PhD thesis) written by an unknown author was given to different readers in two forms. The first was the original text, containing a deluge of long, complex words. The second was a simplified version that replaced some big words with smaller, simpler ones. Readers gave the simple version better marks, even though this time it was the altered text.

Descartes vs. Descartes

The readers were also presented the following two texts, with half receiving the first and the other half receiving the second:

“There remain to be investigated by me many things concerning the attributes of God, and many things concerning me myself or the nature of my mind. But I shall perhaps resume these things at another time, and now nothing seems to be more urgent (after I have noticed against what were to be cautioned and what were to be done in order to reach the truth) than that I might try to emerge from the doubts into which I have gone in the pervious days and that I might see whether something certain concerning material things could be had.”

“Many other matters respecting the attributes of God and my own nature or mind remain for consideration; but I shall possibly on another occasion resume the investigation of these. Now (after first noting what must be done or avoided in order to arrive at a knowledge of the truth) my principal task is to endeavor to emerge from the state of doubt into which I have these last days fallen, and to see whether nothing certain can be known regarding material things.”

Unsurprisingly, readers of the first text rated it as more complex; readers of the second rated it as more intelligent. But here’s the catch: It’s the same text — Meditations by René Descartes — just translated differently by two different people. This dodges the thorny question of text manipulation entirely and underscores again the importance of simplicity.

But what if the readers were told that Descartes wrote it? That changed things. When alerted to the famous text, readers gave higher ratings to both the simple and complex translations. Prestige matters, even if the text is hard to understand. Apparently, famous thinkers can break the “simple is smarter” rule.

Simple is smarter

Why, other things being equal, do readers believe authors of wordier text to be less intelligent than those who write more simply? Folk wisdom suggests that making things complex is easy but making them simple is truly ingenious. The study author suggests a more technical idea: fluency.

Readers evaluate the intelligence of an author not only by the quality of their arguments but also by how well they understand what the author is trying to say. Using simple words and sentences makes the point clear. Big words don’t make writing sound intelligent; they make it hard to understand.

The author tested his hypothesis by assigning some readers a text printed in an atrocious font, while other readers received the common Times New Roman font. Though it was the exact same text, readers gave the hard-to-read font significantly worse ratings.

The advice for writers is straightforward: Make things easy for your readers, and they will find you brilliant.

This article Using big words doesn’t make you sound smarter is featured on Big Think.

If you want to succeed really, really badly, the paradoxical solution proposed by many successful people is to ease up. Albert Einstein was obscenely productive, but his productivity came in bursts. Between those bursts, he was gentle with himself. “If my work isn’t going well,” he said, “I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.” Try to imagine Einstein, white mane and all, lying on his back and staring at the blank ceiling at two in the afternoon. This isn’t the Einstein of myth, but it’s central to what made him great. Rather than fighting friction, Einstein allowed it to wash over him like a wave, using it as an opportunity to take two or three mental steps backward so he could “listen” to his imagination. Instead of fighting friction, he allowed it to defeat him—and, in doing so, learned to fail well. 

The same was true of Mozart, who allowed himself to slow down between bursts of productivity. Mozart found the best of his compositions arrived when he was most placid. “When I am, as it were, completely myself,” he wrote, “entirely alone, and of good cheer—say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep—it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.” Mozart may have experienced fevered bursts of productivity, but those bursts are hard to sustain. You don’t make a string of breakthroughs, composing six hundred symphonies and concertos, by wrestling your demons every time your productivity hits a wall. Like Einstein, Mozart recognized that the quickest way to guide a derailed mind toward productivity is not to exert brute force, but to seek space and solitude—and to accept that some failure is necessary. 

Einstein and Mozart were one-in-a-billion talents, which is why it’s surprising to learn they were in some ways type B personalities. Neither one stood atop a metaphorical mountain proclaiming his love for the hustle. Instead, both retreated inward, embraced quiet, and allowed their ideas to land in good time. 

One of the benefits of this laid-back approach to friction is that it makes room for failure. It accepts that we can’t always produce at peak productivity, and that highs will be separated by lows. Modern theories of learning and development acknowledge that progress is impossible without challenge, which in turn means you’ll have to fail before you can succeed. 

Several years ago, a team of psychologists and neuroscientists sought to identify the perfect success-to-failure ratio. At one end of the spectrum, you have perfect success, and at the other you have abject failure. Both poles are demotivating, but for different reasons. Perfect success is boring and uninspiring, and abject failure is exhausting and demoralizing. Somewhere between these extremes is a sweet spot that maximizes long-term progress. “When we learn something new, like a language or musical instrument,” the authors wrote, “we often seek challenges at the edge of our competence—not so hard that we are discouraged, but not so easy that we get bored. This simple intuition, that there is a sweet spot of difficulty, a ‘Goldilocks zone,’ for motivation and learning is at the heart of modern teaching methods.” 

According to the researchers, the optimal error rate is 15.87 percent. Obviously the true rate varies more than that disarmingly precise number suggests. On good days you might tolerate a higher error rate, and on days when you’re discouraged or tired, you might prefer to avoid error altogether. Some tasks probably demand higher failure rates than others, and perhaps you need to embrace more failure if you’re in a hurry to learn. Personality probably matters, too. Einstein and Mozart, with their laid-back approach to friction, may have been more willing to tolerate error than most people are, and that may explain a part of their ongoing success. 

What makes the mere existence of this optimal failure rate valuable is that it does two things for you. First, it gives you an objective benchmark for optimal difficulty. If you’re failing much more than once in every five or six attempts, you’re probably failing too often; and if you almost never fail or fail rarely, you’re probably not failing often enough. Second, though, from an emotional perspective, the optimal error rate licenses you to fail. Not only is failing okay, but it’s necessary. Without those moments staring at their literal and metaphorical ceilings, Einstein and Mozart may have been less productive and less successful across time. Those blips and troughs weren’t glitches but rather essential components of the process. 

This one-in-five-or-six failure metric is a useful guide when you’re learning a new skill, particularly as technology makes it easier to quantify success. Whether you’re learning a new language, learning to code, learning a new soccer technique, training to run a particular distance at a particular pace, or trying to meditate for a certain duration uninterrupted, you’ll be able to quantify your success. At first, your failure rate may be higher than one in six, but if it isn’t declining to that level, you’ll know you’re failing too often to be productive. 

The same rules apply to organizations, which also do best when they tolerate some failure. In the late 1990s, a decade before the rise of smartphones, Motorola launched a satellite phone provider called Iridium. The company’s name referred to the seventy-seventh element in the periodic table because Iridium’s original plans required a network of seventy-seven satellites that orbited the Earth, just as Iridium’s seventy-seven electrons orbit its nucleus. The company’s promise was spectacular: a global phone network that offered perfect reception anywhere on the planet, and a vanishingly small dropped-call rate. Even today’s most sophisticated smartphones can’t compete with Iridium’s decades-old technology. Wall Street experts were enamored with Iridium as its stock hit the market, but the company’s focus on perfect clarity and perfect connections made the phones prohibitively expensive. Iridium’s executives adopted a zero-tolerance approach to product flaws, but that was not what phone users wanted. They were willing to accept a small drop in clarity and a small rise in dropped calls in exchange for significantly cheaper phones and service plans. The surest way to get stuck is to rigidly pursue perfection. 

Assuming that setbacks are to some extent necessary, the next question is how to manage them. How do you deal with the roughly 15.87 percent of occasions when things don’t go to plan? The answer is not just to fail, but to fail well, and some people fail better than others.

This article To be successful, you need to fail 16% of the time is featured on Big Think.

Those who believe that their intelligence is something they are born with, something fixed at birth, tend to fear and avoid the unknown. They see success in binary terms and view their own abilities as interminably limited. They view the horizon at their own edge of knowledge with a sense of doom. As a result, they experience feedback on what they don’t yet know as criticism and with a deep sense of failure. They believe that effort is pointless, so they give up easily. 

At the same time, they are plagued by a desire to prove that they are naturally gifted. Their motivation is externally driven with an eye toward external validation, such as winning awards or achieving a certain level of recognition. They see themselves only in relation to others, to their comparative ranking, and perceive those who score higher as inherently more valuable. They are threatened by the perceived success of others. They see little value in learning.

By contrast, those who believe that their intelligence is incremental, something that develops throughout their life, see life as full of learning opportunities. Mistakes and setbacks are challenges to improve knowledge. Feedback, even criticism of blunders or weaknesses, is encouragement. So too is others’ success, because it shows a better way forward and highlights opportunities for course correction. Those possessing this kind of mindset see learning as the most essential part of being human. They embrace it as an exercise regime to support their brain.

The differences in outcomes from these mentalities are striking. Nearly a quarter century of research in fields as diverse as psychology, neuroscience, and intelligence has proven that adopting a growth mindset leads to better knowledge acquisition, learning experiences, and test and performance outcomes.

The benefits of a growth mindset, from students to CEOs

For families, a growth mindset has proven to improve outcomes for parents as well as children, especially in the areas of parental and child well-being and kids’ test scores. Comparing parental and child mindsets has shown that children adopt parental mindsets, and those who see their own lives in terms of scores, endpoints, and failure transfer that to their kids, thereby slanting their outcomes downward. Even very young children have been shown to hold fixed versus fluid notions of their own intelligence, and as a result, have performed better or worse on exams and mental tasks. 

The research in parenting suggests that children who are exposed to a growth mindset view their world with hope and appreciation, and that perspective allows them to embrace learning from the outset, which further supports their own neuroplasticity. With a love of learning for the sake of learning, and with the experience of the joy of the process of learning, young children are able to develop healthy patterns of knowledge acquisition and avoid stress.

Education research has also proven that students who believe their learning will enhance their minds, or that it will lead to mastery of a subject, learn more and perform better on tests, even IQ tests, and are more likely to complete courses compared to their score-minded peers. Likewise, students who approach learning with the goal of mastering a subject over their lifetime, as opposed to scoring high in the immediate moment, do better later in life in higher ed and career outcomes.

In addition, research shows that people learn best when they direct their own curriculum based on their personal interests — setting priorities, goals, and even assessments themselves. In other words, the learner who looks around themself and determines what will become the window into new knowledge, who learns because they are invested in their own personal growth, is the one who truly succeeds.

Educators have found that even just an hour of growth mindset training can improve students’ grades in difficult subjects like math. These principles have also been shown to confer benefits during particularly challenging moments in life — such as the transition to middle school or high school. Students who were taught to develop a growth mindset performed better throughout the course of their new education. Low-performing and at-risk youth have been particularly helped by adopting a growth mindset, leading many education systems to adopt Dweck and other researchers’ teacher and student training programs.

In the realm of business, a large body of human resources (HR) research has similarly proven that training leaders in a growth mindset leads to better leadership outcomes, including enhanced leadership awareness, effective leadership strategies, and productive leadership action. Research into employee effectiveness and engagement also has shown upward trends in workplace commitment and satisfaction as well as career outcomes as a result of growth mindset training. 

There are now a number of corporate programs dedicated to growth coaching, organizational citizenship, and work engagement. Large-scale companies like Microsoft have been training employers, managers, and employees using growth mindset technologies for almost a decade, demonstrating just how an entire company culture can be shifted to embrace growth, and how that culture rooted in growth can translate to overall market success.

Your brain on growth

In biological terms, there is another value of challenging yourself to rethink your intelligence and your journey: reducing your stress levels. Attuning your brain to the iterative and generative nature of life, and the ever-present potential of learning and improving your mastery of knowledge, helps your brain respond to the environment with positivity and hopefulness. In high-stress moments, it’s easy to fall into an all-or-nothing mentality and dread the consequences of making a mistake. But our inherent neuroplasticity tells us that life is not a one-shot goal. Implementing a fluid, processual sense of intelligence allows you to align with the journey of learning while removing the pressures of the endgame.

Stress research has shown that students who saw intelligence as fixed had higher cortisol levels when their grades were declining, and they had sustained high cortisol levels when day-to-day academic stressors came their way. Meanwhile, students who saw their intelligence as fluid not only coped better with academic stress, but were also able to let go of stressors immediately, thereby reducing cortisol levels and ensuring proper HPA-axis functioning. 

Other studies have demonstrated that growth mindsets predict higher psychological well-being and school and work engagement. Studies focused on setbacks have shown that those with a growth mindset cope better with setbacks and are motivated to achieve better. Stress research in workplace settings has also shown that a growth mindset not only mediates job stress but even reduces the amount of “counterproductive workplace behavior” in an organization, such as aggression, harassment, and absenteeism.

Most of the research proving the ways that a growth mindset offsets stress examines people living in situations that are relatively normal to them. But since the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2019, researchers have also studied how a growth mindset can help during exceptionally stressful times. Studies have shown that focusing on the mind’s flexibility and one’s unending supply of intelligence, creativity, and ingenuity has rescued many from the psychological distress and post-traumatic stress of essential work, loss and grieving, and even loneliness. Health-care providers and biomedical scientists have found that adopting this way of thinking can reduce depression, substance abuse, and self-injury and increase healthy habits such as quality sleeping, eating, and exercise. Even substance abuse programs initiated in the pandemic have shown better outcomes when patients in recovery have adopted a fluid notion of their own intelligence and begun seeing their recovery in terms of a lifelong practice.

This research shows that, without a doubt, growth mindsets allow our brains to flourish and at the same time they lower our stress levels, and reducing stress is key to maintaining a healthy epigenome. So, in addition to giving you a more realistic picture of what’s really going on with your brain and your intelligence, seeing your potential for growth allows your body to turn on the genes that are beneficial to you. As Dweck says, every moment that you challenge yourself, your brain makes stronger connections within itself. Seizing the learning moment takes this growth beyond the brain to your wider physiological systems, empowering you to live out your true potential.

This article Parents, instill in your children a “growth mindset” to help them succeed in school and beyond is featured on Big Think.

The 16th President of the United States of America did not, as you might imagine, speak in a rich chocolaty baritone. He had a high, squeaky voice and a strong Kentucky accent. Nor — coming from a humble background — could he automatically be expected to have a confident grasp of classical rhetoric. That would have mattered. We may think of the American Revolution as a bold and unprecedented new beginning, the casting off of a European yoke, but it would be hard to overstate quite how deeply immersed in the traditions of classical rhetoric the framers of the U.S. Constitution and their inheritors were. Every town in Massachusetts had a grammar school, and from the age of eight, pupils there would be taught the classics from eight in the morning until dark fell. Candidates for higher education would be expected to have tracts of Cicero, Virgil, Isocrates, and Homer by heart.

Samuel Adams’ master’s thesis was “delivered in flawless Latin,” Alexander Hamilton copied Demosthenes into his commonplace book, and Thomas Jefferson modeled his oratory on the prose of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus. John Adams spent the summer before he became president reading Cicero’s essays. Pamphlets and articles were written under classical pseudonyms — Samuel Adams alone was, inter alia, “Clericus Americanus,” “Candidus,” and “Sincerus.” Displaying classical knowledge was a way of demonstrating education and sophistication — it was, if you like, an ethos appeal in itself.

Rome was more than just a literary touchstone: England, in the narrative of the Revolutionary War, was cast as the bloated and corrupt Roman Empire of late antiquity, whereas the founders saw themselves as harking back to the virtues of the Republic. They sought visible symbols of this. Thomas Jefferson built the University of Virginia on strict classical lines, and when the Capitol was to be built in Washington, he insisted that its architecture should see “the adoption of some one of the models of antiquity which have had the approbation of thousands of years.”

When George Washington was called “the Father of the Country,” that was an echo of what Cato said of Cicero; and Cincinnatus — a plowman who led Rome as dictator but then relinquished his power to return to the fields — was frequently invoked as a spiritual cousin to Washington.

So this was the soil out of which, a generation later, Lincoln’s rhetoric was to grow. But as the largely self-educated son of a Kentucky farmer, he wasn’t able to tap into the knowingly arcane byways of classical history with which his predecessors were able to signal their patrician credentials. Lincoln was a clever, gangly, pugnacious, provincial lawyer.

His special distinction as a speaker was not to deliver the fullbore, self-consciously Greco-Roman ornamentation of his predecessors. It was to tame those techniques — to yoke classical figures to a crisply vernacular style, and to offset his intermittent stylistic flourishes with a folksy swoop down to a register where he all but claps the individual audience member on the shoulder.

In the “House Divided” speech, with which Lincoln accepted the Illinois Republican Party’s nomination to run for the Senate, Lincoln talks the audience through the history of the argument so far — could the union make sense with some states countenancing slavery and others free? — in an absolutely plain and straightforward way, wryly dramatizing it as you might dramatize an argument between friends. “Then opened the roar of loose declaration in favor of ‘Squatter Sovereignty’… ‘But,’ said opposition members, ‘let us be more specific’… The election came, Mr. Buchanan was elected, and the endorsement, such as it was, was secured… At length, a squabble springs up…”

Seeking to avert civil war, in his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln spoke in the same way — reasonable-sounding and without pomp: “I add too, that all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can be given, will be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for whatever cause — as cheerfully to one section as to another.” Note the studied impression of a mind at work: the sense of “and another thing,” the naturalness of the qualifying parentheses, and the amiable excellence of “cheerfully” — yet all in a sentence whose clauses build and interlock artfully in both sound and sense, moving from “laws” to “lawfully,” “all” to “all,” “given” to “given,” “cheerfully” to “cheerfully.”

The peroration to that same speech is not blood and thunder, but an antithesis so intimate in tone — charged with such feeling — its effect is still startling: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”

This article “We are not enemies”: How to master the rhetorical genius of Abraham Lincoln is featured on Big Think.

By anyone’s standards, Charles is a high performer. After rising to top executive ranks at a much vaunted Silicon Valley company, he helped start another one and reached the top ranks there as well. But that’s not how Charles measures his own success. He has created a personalized Venn diagram for a meaningful life and his work is just one part of it. “It’s organized into three buckets,” he shared with us, “which are pursue passion, surround myself with people I love, and be grateful for the ride.”

Yes, the work he does matters, but the specifics of why it matters to him are important. “You have to commit yourself to purposeful work but it’s of no meaning if it’s not done in relationship with others,” he told us. “And if you’re not able to internally feel a sense of gratitude or appreciation for it or recognition of it, then that’s all for naught.”

We met Charles through our research on high performers, a project initially intended to better understand how certain people were able to be more effective at work, for a sustained period. We interviewed 300 people who had been designated as high performers by their organizations (an equal number of men and women, in organizations around the globe). One of the surprising insights of our research was how many of them were powder kegs of stress — without realizing it. We would be deep into our interview before they began to acknowledge that they were struggling to keep up with both work and their personal lives.

After decades of research, we were familiar with the kind of recognizable stress that high performers can endure to achieve their professional goals. But this was something completely different. What became clear as we talked is that it was never one big thing that led people to the feeling of being overwhelmed. Rather it was a relentless accumulation of unnoticed small stresses, in passing moments, that was so drastically affecting the well-being of these people who otherwise appeared to “have it all.” So we started to call this microstress.

But Charles is one of a handful of people we interviewed who seemed to manage and rise above microstress better than the rest of us — a group we began to call the “Ten Percenters.” One of the things the Ten Percenters have in common is their ability to find purpose in small moments in their work and personal lives. In a world where we are constantly bombarded by advertisements and social media influencers trying to convince us that happiness comes from material possessions and instant gratification, it is easy to lose sight of the importance of giving to others. But the Ten Percenters did not. 

Hedonic vs. eudaimonic

Giving to others, even in small ways, can generate a palpable sense of purpose. And that’s not just because we’ve been taught that it’s the right thing to do. There’s actually a scientific explanation for why that happens. It’s rooted in the distinction that researchers often make between activities that are eudaimonic versus hedonic.

Eudaimonic (“eu” meaning good, and “daimon” meaning spirit or soul) activities are outwardly focused and include those in which we give of ourselves to others. The term comes from what Aristotle described as the “pursuit of virtue, excellence, and the best within us.” In contrast, hedonic (meaning “pleasure”) activities are focused inward and concerned with more momentary fulfillment. Getting the latest phone, splashing out on a gourmet meal, or winning a new sales contract may be hedonic activities. None of them are bad on their own. But when your life is dominated by the pursuit of hedonic rewards, you can start to make choices that will not lead you to happiness in the long run.

Emerging neurological evidence shows activities that transcend the hedonic, such as giving to others, lead to greater well-being over time. In one study, functional MRI scans were used to observe neurological activity in the reward center of the brain, the ventral striatum, when exposed to thoughts about either giving or receiving money. In some people, questions about giving money (for example: If you were giving money, who would you give it to and why?) stimulated high reward activity. In other people, questions about receiving money (for example: If you were to get money, what would you spend it on and why?) activated the brain’s reward center. But over time, an interesting patten emerged. When researchers measured depressive symptoms in each group one year later, they found that the participants whose brains had lit up from giving money experienced a decline in depressive symptoms, while the people whose brains rewarded them for receiving money showed an increase in depressive symptoms.

In contrast, hedonic activities beget hedonic activities. Getting more material stuff makes you want more material stuff, what researchers call the hedonic treadmill. But the gains we feel from hedonic activity wash away quickly for two reasons: (1) Our rising aspirations mean we quickly become accustomed to our new clothes, car, house, phone, computer, and so forth and seek the “high” of getting the next item; and (2) social comparison keeps us on the lookout for what others have that we hedonistically want, whether it’s a big house, a desirable vacation, or getting interviews with top organizations.

Palpable sense of purpose

What was remarkable in our research was that though Ten Percenters have the material trappings of success — they are, after all, recognized by their companies as high performers and rewarded accordingly — it isn’t the focus of their identity. Instead, they have a sense of purpose in their lives separate from money or things or society’s expectations that helps them transcend the pressures of “hedonic” lifestyles. 

When the high performers in our research spoke most passionately to us about their sources of purpose at work, it often involved a role they played in helping others. Giving can take many forms — acknowledgement of someone’s contribution, asking them how they are doing and meaning it, showing empathy, passing on a small note, or sharing an article. Even for young people who may not think they have much to give, the simple act of asking someone to mentor you can boost the self-confidence of the person you’re asking. Throughout our research, we found that too often people shut themselves off from the important benefits of giving because they weren’t creative or expansive in how they thought about what they had to give.

What we learned from the Ten Percenters was that giving to others, even in small ways, can generate a palpable sense of purpose. This is because activities that transcend the hedonic lead to greater well-being over time. While hedonic activities are not all bad, when our lives are dominated by them, we can start to make choices that will not lead to long-term happiness. By contrast, finding purpose, even in small moments in a routine day, can change not only how you feel about your job, it can change how you feel about your life.

This article To be a happier, more successful person, get off the “hedonic treadmill” is featured on Big Think.

In June 2021, the US Department of Labor reported that an unprecedented four million Americans had quit their jobs in April alone — the  beginning of a phenomenon that news outlets called “the Great Resignation.” While we can’t ascribe a singular motivation to these resignations, for many workers — particularly those in the knowledge economy — this was an opportunity to reset and reframe their relationship with work. “These people are… leaving their jobs not because the pandemic created obstacles to their employment but, at least in part, because it nudged them to rethink the role of work in their lives altogether. Many are embracing career downsizing, voluntarily reducing their work hours to emphasize other aspects of life,” wrote Cal Newport in the NewYorker.

Some mocked these choices as a YOLO move, but even if they were, the impulse wasn’t entirely wrong. You do only live once. And after surviving a global pandemic, many younger and mid-career workers came to the same realization all at once: As much as you might love your work, work won’t love you back. Or, as writer Maris Kreizman put it, “The idea of meritocracy is a lie and the only thing hard work guarantees is unpaid overtime, not success.”

But believe it or not, there’s an upside to this collective collapse: It frees us from the straitjacket of narrow specialization and linear career paths many of our parents felt stifled by, and instead offers the opportunity to build vibrant lives that fit us better. We cannot make the same choices our parents made because we are not living in the same world. So we are making different choices. Ones that align with our actual needs and values, not the ones we’re expected to maintain. And with the prospect of working until we die — or at the very least, a solid decade or two beyond what our parents are planning — the mirage of retirement makes it feel even more urgent to find a model that is fulfilling and sustainable for the long haul.

This is an opportunity to redefine what “success” looks like using our own variables, and eschew the cult of ambition that has made so many folks miserable. The good news amid all of this disruption is that we get to toss out the status quo and design a new approach to career, relationships, and life that actually makes us happy.

The old playbook doesn’t work: Trothing your long-term commitment to a company in exchange for an identity, some financial stability, and a chance to climb the corporate ladder is no longer a lucrative trade. So what does an alternative model look like?

First, it disentangles your identity from your current job. To put it bluntly, you are more than your work. Derek Thompson, a staff writer for the Atlantic, argues that the decline of traditional religious affiliation in America has coincided with a plethora of “new atheisms,” including what he calls “workism.” That is, the idea that your work is the crux of your identity and life’s purpose. More disturbingly, defining your identity solely by your work means that “anything short of finding one’s vocational soul mate means a wasted life.” Your work can absolutely offer meaning to your life, but it should not be the meaning of your life. Instead, consider your identity through a wider aperture, taking your personal, professional, and relationship goals all into account to define your purpose. Otherwise, Derek cautions, “to be a workist is to worship a god with firing power.” Whew. Write that on a sticky note and keep it handy. Don’t leave your identity in someone else’s hands.

Second, an alternative model is one that redefines your future opportunities (and even your present ones) as a broad set of potential paths rather than a narrow, singular trajectory. As engineer and creative writer Jai Chakrabarti wrote in Fast Company, “There is no linear life, at least I haven’t found one I’d wish to live. Rather there are the meandering paths, all the pursuits of beauty that reward us with their own vistas of the world underneath.” He pushed back on the pressure he felt to continue his fast-rising engineering career and decided to take a break to earn his MFA in fiction, knowing he would return to computer programming at some point. “Growing up in Kolkata, India, I knew that my favorite Bengali writers all had day jobs. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who helped bridge Sanskrit influences with Victorian ones, wrote fourteen novels and collections of poems. He also wrote a series of essays on science and worked for most of his life as a tax collector.” Chakrabarti recognizes that there is space in his present and his future for all of his passions, and the ability to pursue them all, over time and in creative combination, gives him both fulfillment and optionality.

Third, this new model offers the option to meet your needs (financial, developmental, social, and professional) through a combination of sources, rather than depending on one job, company, or industry to provide everything in one offering. It is unlikely that companies are going to reverse their cost-cutting trends and suddenly offer the generous benefits of yesteryear. A more likely possibility would be lobbying for dramatic policy changes around benefits: separating health insurance, life insurance, short- and long-term disability, retirement accounts, and flexible spending accounts from the workplace and making them available — at accessible prices — to individuals. But even that is a medium- to long- term dream, and largely out of our control. In the short-term, this new model allows you to assess what you need and diversify how you address those needs to ensure you can take care of yourself (and, should you wish to have one, your family), now and into the future.

And fourth, this model provides flexibility when it comes to time management, transitions, and rebalancing your commitments. Forget about a parochial definition of work-life balance based on an equal split of your time between personal and professional. Instead, this is about the ability to make time for important things, however and whenever they show up. Rather than the stark binary of on or off, working full-time or taking a break to attend to other commitments in your life, a model that encourages a mix of activity streams — including the uncompensated labor you might be providing to your family or community — offers a more nuanced and inclusive definition of work-life balance.

Identity. Optionality. Diversification. Flexibility. These are the four pillars of the Portfolio Life.

This article Ditch the one-path career: Discover the 4 essential pillars of the “portfolio life” is featured on Big Think.

Every year, thousands of law enforcement officers are trained by self-styled “experts” in the art of detecting lies. Most rely on nonverbal cues to spot fibbers. One of these trainers apparently taught attendees about “the seven universal facial expressions that all people have all over the world as a good indicator” of lying.

There’s just one problem with this commonplace practice.

“It’s completely bogus,” Jeff Kukucka, an assistant professor of psychology and law at Towson University who specializes in interrogations and false confessions, told The Intercept. “And what’s maybe more alarming about it… is that this isn’t new. We’ve known for quite a while that this stuff doesn’t work, but it’s still being peddled as if it does.”

Lying lie detectors

The initial hypothesis behind using body language to spot lies wasn’t altogether terrible. The idea was that lying evokes strong emotions, like guilt, anxiety, or even excitement, that would be difficult to physically contain, trapping liars into behaviors like vocal pauses, wild hand movements, blinking, fidgeting, and averting their gaze. But after decades of research, the evidence hasn’t backed up using body cues as lie detectors.

But again, that hasn’t stopped the aforementioned “experts” from peddling them. Heck, you can even purchase online courses on spotting lies from these hucksters. Even worse, American tax dollars are already funding their unscientific methods.

After 9/11, the federal government launched the $900-million Screening Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT) program to train Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents to identify suspicious individuals and people who may be lying, focusing on 92 body and behavioral cues ranging from yawning and whistling to excessive staring and fidgeting.

“This is nonsensical,” Bruno Verschuere, an associate professor of forensic psychology at the University of Amsterdam, said in a statement. “People can’t assess all those signals in a short time, let alone integrate multiple signals into an accurate and truthful judgment.” 

A simpler lie detector

Verschuere and his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam’s LieLab recently published a study roundly critical of using numerous behavioral and body cues to discern lies. They also tested and offered a far simpler method that relies on just a single data point: the level of detail in a person’s story.

The idea is that people telling the truth can typically provide more in-depth description because they actually experienced the event or subject they’re talking about. Liars could try to invent details to make their deception more believable, but it’s a risk because they could get caught in their own lies or offer up a detail that could be debunked.

In a series of nine experiments, Verschuere and his colleagues had 1,445 participants try to gauge whether various handwritten statements, video transcripts, video interviews, or live interviews were truths or lies. In some situations, subjects were told to use various behavioral and physical cues to determine fact from fiction, while in others, subjects were simply asked to base their decision on the level of detail presented. The truths and lies were created by a group of students, some of whom were instructed to steal an exam from a locker, while others were told simply to spend 30 minutes milling around campus. Afterwards, both groups were tasked with saying that they hung around campus.

Subjects told to use the numerous behavioral cues were able to detect lies at a rate equal to chance or slightly above, while subjects who went off the level of detail were accurate between 59% and 79% of the time — an impressive showing, and potentially superior to the science-based “cognitive load model,” in which interviewers try to overload possible liars with tasks and questions to make it harder for them to coherently weave their fables.

Could AI detect lies?

The researchers next plan to validate their method in real-world settings, and they wonder if it could be algorithmically distilled into an AI program.

“As humans detect deception quite poorly, it is tempting to test whether artificial intelligence tools could outperform humans in the detection of deception. Indeed, it would be exciting to set up a competition between humans and computers to study whether and when artificial intelligence might outperform humans using heuristics,” they wrote.

This article You’ve been lied to about how to detect lies. Here’s a simpler way that actually works is featured on Big Think.

Right now, thousands of internet influencers are trying to sell their followers the recipe for “success,” and many are buying it up. Never mind that this nebulous product has been pitched for decades by self-help gurus via in-person seminars, video classes, and blandly written books. The business of marketing personal betterment has moved online, seducing a whole new generation of individuals aspiring to wealth and achievement.

Influencers on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are marketing online courses on topics like financial psychology, landing a high-paying tech job, and, yes, even starting your own online influencer business.

The latter may be the most popular. After all, more than half of Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, spend more than four hours on social media every day, according to a 2022 Morning Consult survey. So it makes sense that approximately one in four members of this nascent generation desires paid social media stardom — they seek to emulate the celebrities they regularly view on their smartphones.

However, just like with past self-help gurus, many of these influencers peddle pricey online courses — some costing thousands of dollars — filled with boilerplate babble bordering on the nonsensical, repackaged for today’s economy. YouTuber and motivational speaker Brendon Burchard touts “high performance habits” and “the power of encouragement.” Financial influencer Grant Cardone posts inane things like “courage = money.” TikToker Kat Norton has said that “the only limits we have are the ones we’re placing,” and that realizing this puts you on “your destiny path and into your highest timeline.”

A self-help fallacy

In his 2022 book Partial Truths: How Fractions Distort Our Thinking, University of Virginia professor of pathology James Zimring points out that people who create and sell these self-help systems to “boost success” regularly make a fundamental logical fallacy.

By touting anecdotes rather than hard data, self-help influencers essentially commit a base rate fallacy. They tell their followers that adopting the habits of wildly successful people will make them successful, but they ignore the fact that these habits — work hard, wake early, be confident — are also undoubtedly very common among people who aren’t wealthy and famous. After all, a high degree of success comes down to luck.

“The issue is not what characteristics are found in successful people; the issue is what characteristics are found in successful people and not in less successful people,” Zimring wrote.

But have any online self-help influencers actually taken the time to systematically analyze this issue, or — more pertinently — to study whether the courses they sell actually work for their customers? You’d be hard-pressed to find any such evidence-based reflection. It’s far easier to create flashy, but ultimately meaningless, video drivel and market it to the masses. Heck, one influencer who teaches how to create and sell your own online courses touts that the process can make money on “autopilot.” The allure lies in attaining the most success for the least amount of work.

Zimring has a recommendation for anyone considering spending money on this new wave of self-help products.

“Ask the question: ‘Where is the data on how frequently these traits are found in the general population and is it higher or lower than highly successful people?’ Even better, do not accept a single anecdotal example as the evidence, but rather ask for the data on groups of people,” he wrote.

“In my experience, you won’t get a good answer, if you get any at all.”

This article Social media influencers are selling “success” to their followers. Don’t buy it is featured on Big Think.

When Heather Newman, an avid gamer, was applying for the job of director of marketing and communications at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, she included all relevant experience on her résumé, including her prior role as a guild master in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft.

While most people might not consider video gaming to be applicable to the workplace, Newman disagreed. In her in-game role, she managed guilds of as many as 500 people and organized 25 to 40 players to raid dungeons for several hours four to five days a week.

Newman’s intuition proved correct. She got the gig.

More than three billion people now regularly play video games. Gamers have triumphantly escaped their derided status as “lonely, lazy nerds.” They are no longer just pizza delivery people or technical assistant gurus at Best Buy’s Geek Squad; they are managers and CEOs — and astrophysicist Adam Frank.

Video gaming skills are transferable

As Françoise LeGoues, the former vice president of innovation at IBM, told the Wall Street Journal in 2014, gamers can thrive in workplaces “where employees must collaborate with colleagues anywhere in the world, often without having met in person,” foreshadowing the post-COVID era of remote work. “This capability to engage in strategy-building, team-building, knowledge-sharing, and problem-solving remotely is really important,” she added.

Many of the most popular games in the world are multiplayer oriented, in which gamers must communicate and work together to succeed. A growing body of evidence suggests that skills honed in these games translate well to the workplace, including personality traits (like extraversion, agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness) as well as “computer-mediated communication skills and technology readiness,” a 2017 study from researchers at Missouri University of Science & Technology found.

In a previous interview with Big Think, game designer, author, and researcher Jane McGonigal further extolled the potential of social games to enhance work skills. “Studies have shown that we’re more likely to cooperate with someone in our real lives after we’ve played a social game with them where we’re doing some kind of cooperative mission. Or we’re more likely to set an ambitious goal for ourselves after we’ve succeeded in a game.”

In that spirit, writer Matt Lillywhite noted that, anecdotally, video games can help gamers develop resilience and work ethic. Anybody who has played games knows that a player often confronts failure on a regular basis. To get past that seemingly impossible level or challenging boss, you have to keep trying, often adapting your strategy after each maddeningly ill-fated attempt. Lillywhite’s observations have been born out in a study on adolescent gamers, which found that the more strategic games they played, the more their problem-solving skills improved after a year.

In a more recent study, a team of European scientists watched 40 business students play the turn-based strategy game Civilization, in which gamers must build a civilization, managing its military, economy, culture, and religion while competing with AI or human opponents. The researchers then had those same students take various assessments to gauge employment skills. They found that “students who had high scores in the game had better skills related to problem-solving and organizing and planning than the students who had low scores.”

Late last year, a team of psychologists from the University of Surrey analyzed data from the online gaming service Steam. Analyzing the playing habits of more than 16,000 gamers, they found that players with jobs in IT and engineering played more puzzle-platform games like Portal 2. Engineers also spent more time playing strategy games like the aforementioned Civilization. On the other hand, managers tended to play action role-playing games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Each of those respective games could teach gamers “soft skills” pertinent to their respective fields, the authors said.

Unlike that so quintessentially passive pastime, watching television, video games are highly engaging, regularly social, and often mentally challenging, potentially improving work performance while providing a needed respite from work itself.

This article How video gaming could boost your career is featured on Big Think.

When you’re reading a book or watching a TV show, it’s often easy to see why things are going wrong between the characters.

“Why don’t they just be honest with each other?” we shout at the screen as the protagonists bicker (again) because of an entirely avoidable misunderstanding.

“She should leave him,” we say, as a character puts up with an emotionally abusive boyfriend.

“He should just tell his boss to screw himself,” we insist when we read about someone struggling under the daily grind of a soul-sucking job.

The fact is that we’re experts when it comes to giving advice to other people. Most of us, on some level, know what’s good for people. We know what a good life should look like. You probably already know what food you should eat and what habits you should be developing. And yet we talk out of both sides of our mouth. We tell friends to do things we never do ourselves. We criticize TV characters for doing things we did this morning.

Why? It has to do with a curious blinkering we have when it comes to self-reflection. If you want to beat it, perhaps it’s time to consider Solomon’s Paradox. Knowing its secrets might help you.

Wise King Solomon

King Solomon of ancient Israel was known the world over for his wisdom and fair justice. His kingdom was the wealthiest and most peaceful that had ever been known. One day, two women appeared presenting Solomon with a problem: They both claimed to be the mother of an infant.

Since no ancient king holds court without a weapon, Solomon drew out his sword and said, “I shall cut this child in two, so you both shall have your fair share.” Aghast, the true mother fell to her knees, begging the child to be spared and given to the other, imposter woman. Solomon could see who the true mother was and he gave her the infant.

King Solomon is legendary for his wisdom. His name is synonymous with good kingship. Yet, in his own life, he was notoriously shambolic. His poor parenting gave rise to one of the cruelest tyrants in the Bible, his son, Rehoboam, who turned Judah into a pit of abomination and sin. Solomon had many pagan wives and concubines, with a likely host of illegitimate children. He was profligate and extravagant, and gave little thought to the temperate, sensible life. For all his sagacity when it came to others’ affairs, Solomon was woefully myopic when it came to his own.

Solomon’s paradox

In 2014, a paper from psychologists Igor Grossman and Ethan Kross introduced the idea of Solomon’s paradox. Their research revealed two things. One was that people “display wiser reasoning… about another person’s problems compared with their own.” In other words, there’s a widespread social cognitive bias that means we are much better at dealing with other people’s lives and problems than our own. Second, Grossman and Kross noted that when we try to eliminate self-immersion — in other words, when we try to distance ourselves from our own problems — we somehow are much better at making sensible decisions.

In all the studies that have gone on to prove this (and it has been proven over and over again), we find in the literature discussion of two different types of wisdom. On the one hand, we have general wisdom, which is said to be interpersonal — between yourself and someone external to you. On the other hand, we have personal wisdom, which is intrapersonal — between yourself and your own affairs.

There’s an interesting philosophical and scientific debate to be had about the relationship between the two. We clearly have cases of people who are wise in either type of wisdom. King Solomon had general wisdom, for instance. We also know of people who are smart and sensible but awful at giving advice. But what factors connect the two?

The distinction between general and person wisdom ought to serve as a useful reminder against ad hominem attacks (where we criticize someone’s character rather than their ideas). After all, someone like King Solomon can be very wise in certain things, but imbecilic in their personal affairs. “Do as I say, not as I do” is a logically valid position. In fact, according to psychology, what we say is often better than what we do.

Ways to self-distance

Solomon’s paradox teaches us, then, that if we want to give ourselves good advice, we ought to take a step back. If we want to make positive steps in improving who we are, we need to treat our own lives like we would characters in a book. Here are three ways we can do just that:

Talk to yourself

You’ll probably feel like an idiot, at first, so you’ll want to do this alone and in a safe space. Place an empty chair in front of you or just look at yourself in the mirror…and talk to yourself. Imagine you are a therapist and the person in the mirror is your client. Imagine you are a critic, and the empty chair is a character in a movie. Ask two questions, to start: “Why are you doing that?” and “What can you do to help?”

Journaling

For those who have a low tolerance for cringe, and can’t do self-talk like this, try writing things down. Find a time in the day that’s good for you and write down what’s happened in the day or week. Then take a step back for a good while. Read what you’ve written as if you’re reading a book. What advice would you give to yourself from what you’ve read. Obviously, this won’t work for instant problems — this one needs time — but re-reading journal entries is often as important as writing them down.

Identify with someone else

Ask someone who knows you well — a close relative or a best friend — who they think you’re most like. It could be a TV character, an historical figure, or even another mutual connection. Then try to learn as much as you can about that person and see what advice you’d give them. Look to see what went well in their lives and what went wrong. Obviously, no two people are entirely alike, but this kind of third-person identification is often a useful distancing technique.

So, what kind of wisdom do you have? Are you personally very sensible but give awful advice, or are you more like King Solomon — an expert when it comes to others, but a bumbling amateur when it comes to yourself?

Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular account called Mini Philosophy and his first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.

This article How to use “Solomon’s paradox” to give yourself good life advice is featured on Big Think.

When you lose your phone, wallet, or keys, you may resort to a few tricks to relocate them. Maybe you’ll retrace your steps. Maybe you’ll look in each of the locations that you typically put them. Or perhaps you’ll try to remember every unusual place you’ve been lately. Each of these choices makes logical sense.

When an entity with vast resources loses something extraordinarily valuable, like a nuclear submarine, they call in the big guns of Bayesian search theory to help. Fortunately for the rest of us, the basic concepts are simple enough to distill for finding those everyday items. Even if your missing item is worth merely hundreds of dollars, this mathematical process can streamline the logic of your search, saving you time and money.

Dude, where’s my car?

The probability that a lost item is found in one place versus another is an intuitive concept that can be turned into a mathematical object. A simple map, divided into a grid, with each section assigned a probability of containing an item, is a form of probability density function. Let’s say that you left your car in a parking lot with 100 spots, and now you have forgotten where you parked. The most basic parking lot probability density function shows one box for each space, each with a probability of 1/100 (or 0.01).

Let’s further assume that you’re not disabled, and there are ten spaces for disabled people. Now the probability density function looks more like 0.011 in 90 of the spaces and 0.001 in each disabled space. (We are further assuming a 10% chance that you made a mistake parking.)

Let’s bring in some more data. The ten parking spots furthest from the store are empty. The chances of your car being there are zero. Now your density function looks like 80 squares with a probability of ~0.0125. If you tend to drive around and around the lot to find the space closest to the door, then the spaces nearer the store have somewhat higher probability, and the spots further out have somewhat lower probability.

The point is that each time you acquire more information, the probability density function changes. So, in this way, you can narrow down and speed up your search, beginning with the spots with the highest probability of containing your car, and working your way down the probability list, checking the lowest probability spots as a last resort.

Did the dog eat my homework?

The first map is good, but a second map is even better. This second map contains, for each search area, the chance that you would actually find the item if it were in that spot.

To demonstrate, let’s construct a slightly different metaphor. If your homework has disappeared, it would be easier or harder to find in various places you might look. If the homework is on an empty desk, you’re sure to see it there. If you left it on a cluttered desk, covered with piles of paper, your chances are lower. If it could have blown out the window, the chance it might still be in the yard is much smaller because of the wind. If the dog ate it, your probability of finding it goes to zero.

Now, take these two probability distribution maps and multiply them together. Any search area that is both likely to contain the item and has a high likelihood of you finding it if it’s there will be represented by a relatively large number. These are good places to begin your search. Areas where either the item is easy to spot but unlikely to be, or likely to be but hard to spot, have a smaller number. These are a lower search priority. Areas where it isn’t likely to be and you can’t easily spot it — the dog comes to mind — are relegated to the very last resort.

Finding a fugitive

As you search the areas with the greatest combined likelihood, you should re-evaluate your assumptions and update your probability map as you go along.

Let’s introduce a third metaphor. Now you’re searching for an escaped convict. Your pack of tracking hounds can smell where he has been recently. Near the prison is a road leading to a bus stop. The probability that he would run up the road to catch a bus is relatively high, and your chances of spotting him if he is near the open road (as opposed to, say, the woods) are high as well. The glass-walled stop where buses only appear sporadically has a similarly high combined probability.

If you are searching the road and the hounds pick up no scent, then the probability that he is at some location further up the road is greatly diminished. The bus stop is now a lower probability location, too. On the other hand, if the dogs do smell something, the bus stop probability has increased.

If this all sounds relatively straightforward, that’s because it is. The trick to the method is to use intelligent reasoning in your probability distributions, including how you modify them as you go. The probability density function of where the object might be located particularly requires serious thought. The best way to form such a function is not to guess, or presume random chance, but to develop a series of hypotheses about why it disappeared and map out where it is most likely to be as a result. Across the search area, assign a probability to each square for each hypothesis, and then multiply those probabilities together.

Bayesian search is common sense + math

In the case of a missing ship, several probability fields could be constructed by starting with a hypothesis and following its probable conclusions. The first hypothesis might be that the most probable location is centered near where the last radio contact was made, and the probability decreases the further you get from that location. Another hypothesis might be that if a hurricane passed through the area, the path of the eyewall of the storm is the most likely place for the ship to have sunk. If a piece of debris is found floating in one area, then the probability the shipwreck lies nearby goes up, and the probability it is far away goes down. If there is a strong current flowing through the area with the debris, then the upstream path of that current acquires a higher probability, extending back as far as it has flowed since the ship was lost. The areas downstream drop in probability.

Bayesian search is a distillation of smart common sense, formalized and made more rigorous with relatively simple mathematical concepts. If you’re looking for a billion-dollar lost treasure, you might sit down at a computer to map out many probability distributions and mathematically combine them. If you’re on an hour-long search for your wallet, a quick and dirty mental implementation of the Bayesian search method can save you time and increase your chances of success.

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There’s job stress, and then there’s the crushing pressure paramedics went through during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The uncertainty, the dread, the constantly changing protocols, the shortages of personal protective equipment, the multiple calls to the same nursing home — it was almost too much for Kate Bergen of Manahawkin, New Jersey.

“It felt like everything was closing in around us,” Bergen says. “At some point I knew that I couldn’t take any more. Was I headed for a meltdown? Was I going to just walk off the job one day? I was getting very close to that point.”

Instead of quitting, Bergen found a calling. One day while waiting for the next emergency call, she took a picture of herself in her full PPE. The image inspired her to paint a self-portrait poster in the style of World War II icon Rosie the Riveter. The message: “We need you to stay home.”

It was the first in a series of “Rosie” posters of women first responders, an ongoing project that has helped Bergen calm her mind during her downtime. Ultimately, she says, the Rosies helped her withstand the stress of her job and allowed her to show up to work each day with new energy and focus. “They made it possible for me to keep going.”

While workers like Bergen are responding to emergency calls and saving lives, many of us are doing things like responding to emails and saving receipts from business trips. But even for people with jobs in offices, restaurants and factories, there’s an art and a science to making the most of downtime, says Sabine Sonnentag, a psychologist at the University of Mannheim in Germany. The right approach to non-work time can help prevent burnout, improve health and generally make life more livable. “When a job is stressful, recovery is needed,” says Sonnentag, who cowrote an article exploring the psychology of downtime in the 2021 issue of the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.

Workers everywhere are feeling frazzled, overwhelmed and ready for the weekend. With that backdrop, researchers are doing work of their own to better understand the potential benefits of recovery and the best ways to unwind. “Work recovery has become part of the national conversation on well-being,” says Andrew Bennett, a social scientist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. “There’s a growing awareness that we can’t just keep working ourselves to death.”

At a time when many people are rethinking their jobs (if they haven’t already quit), they should also be thinking about their quality of life away from work, Sonnentag says. “People should ask themselves, how much free time do I have and how much energy do I have for my free time? How do I want to continue my life?”

A weekend paradox

We can all use a chance to unplug and unwind, but here’s the rub: Recovery from work tends to be the most difficult and elusive for those who need it most. “We call it the ‘recovery paradox,’” Sonnentag says. “The odds are high that when a job is stressful, it’s difficult to have an excellent recovery.”

That paradox was underscored in a 2021 analysis that combined results from 198 separate studies of employees at work and at home. Workers with the most mentally and emotionally draining jobs were also the least likely to feel rested and rejuvenated during their off time. Interestingly, people with physically demanding jobs — construction workers, furniture movers and the like — had much less trouble winding down. The surest way to feel lousy after hours, it appears, is to think too hard at work.

Sonnentag authored a 2018 study published in Research in Organization Behavior that helped to explain why the paradox is so hard to escape. People who were more stressed out at work tended to get less exercise and worse sleep, an ideal scenario for feeling less than great. In other words, stressful work can disrupt the very fundamentals of healthy living.

To help workers break out of that destructive loop, researchers are pondering both sides of the work/life cycle. As Sonnentag explains, certain tasks, obligations and workplace cultures make it especially hard to unwind when work is done. Time pressure, the feeling that one is constantly under the gun, is especially disruptive. Jobs in health care, where that time pressure often combines with life-and-death stakes, tend to be especially taxing. Working with customers can be exhausting too, Sonnentag says, partly because it takes a lot of focus and effort to act cheerful and friendly when you don’t always feel that way deep down, a task known as emotional labor.

The demands of work vary widely from one person to the next, and so do approaches to downtime. Recovery is highly individual, and different people will have different strategies. “We don’t have a single prescription,” Bennett says. Researchers have grouped approaches into broad categories, including “relaxation” and “mastery.” Relaxation, a concept that’s easier to grasp than it is to achieve, includes any activity that calms the body and mind, whether it’s walking through a park, reading a good book or watching a zombie hunter movie on Netflix. (Note: The latter may not be an ideal choice if your actual job involves hunting zombies.)

Mastery, meanwhile, can be achieved through any activity that challenges a person to be good (or at least passable) at a new skill. Just as painting helped Bergen cope with stress, workers can find relief in their accomplishments. “Anything associated with learning can be helpful,” Sonnentag says. “It could be some kind of sport or exercise. It can be something like learning a new language or trying new cuisines when cooking.” A 2019 study that followed 183 employees over 10 workdays found that people who achieved some sort of mastery during their off time were more energetic and enthusiastic the next morning.

For people who need a break, the “why” behind a particular activity can be as important as the “what.” A 2013 study that followed 74 workers for five days found that people who spent their off time with activities and tasks that they actually wanted to do — whatever they were — were more lively and energetic the next day than those who felt obligated or forced to do something.

Whether they’re relaxing or creating during their time away from the office, Bennett says stressed-out workers should strive to think about something other than their jobs, a process that psychologists call detachment. (The TV show Severance takes this concept to extremes.) It’s OK to have great ideas in the shower and regale your partner with office anecdotes, but research shows people with stressful jobs tend to be happier and healthier if they can achieve some mental and emotional distance from work.

The benefits of tuning out became clear in a 2018 report involving more than 26,000 employees in various lines of work, including judges, teachers, nurses and office workers. The analysis, coauthored by Bennett, found that detachment was a powerful buffer against work-related fatigue. Workers who said they were able to think about things other than work while at home were less worn out than their colleagues. On the other hand, workers who carried on-the-job thoughts throughout the day were more likely to feel exhausted.

Vacations can also help erase work stress and prevent burnout, to a point. Sonnentag coauthored a 2011 study that used questionnaires to track 131 teachers before and after vacations. The teachers returned to work feeling refreshed and engaged, but those benefits tended to fade after only a month. The post-vacation high was more fleeting for teachers with especially demanding jobs, but it lingered a bit longer for those who managed to fit relaxing leisure activities into their regular routine.

How much vacation is enough? That question is hard to answer, Sonnentag says. While many European workers expect and demand four- or five-week breaks, she says there’s no evidence that such long vacations offer any more chance for recovery than a vacation of one or two weeks. She does feel confident saying that most workers will need at least occasional breaks that are longer than just a weekend, especially if that weekend is largely eaten up by household chores and other non-work obligations.

Perhaps an extra day off each week would make a big difference. That’s the premise driving an ongoing four-day-workweek experiment involving 70 companies in the UK. The businesses, including banks, robotics manufacturers, and a fish and chips restaurant, are all expecting employees to maintain their productivity despite working one day less each week. The full results won’t be available until 2023, but early data suggest that the four-day workweek has decreased signs of burnout and stress while improving life satisfaction and feelings of work-life balance, reports Wen Fan, a sociologist at Boston College who is helping to conduct the experiment. “The results are very encouraging,” she says.

Fan says it’s too early to know if the employees and companies were able to stay as productive as ever during the experiment, but she notes that most jobs could be done more efficiently with a little extra planning and streamlining. “A lot of time is wasted on distractions and meetings that go on too long,” she says.

No matter how many days a week a person has to work, minibreaks during the day can help, too. A 2020 survey-based study involving 172 workers in the US found that subjects tended to be in better moods and were less emotionally exhausted toward the end of the workday if they had breaks that allowed them to briefly detach from work. The study also tracked mindfulness, the degree to which people are conscious of their present emotions and circumstances. They did this by asking the participants how much they agreed with statements such as “Today at work I was aware of different emotions that rose within me.” Employees who were the most mindful were also the most likely to truly check out and relax during their breaks from work.

A 2021 study of college students took a closer look at relaxation and exercise during work breaks. Those who tried progressive muscle relaxation, a low-stress activity that involves tensing and releasing muscles, reported more detachment during the break, while students who got their blood pumping on an exercise bike had more energy for the rest of their day. Study coauthor Jennifer Ragsdale, now a research psychologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Cincinnati, says that a better appreciation for the nuance of work breaks can help people choose the right approach for a given day. “If you need some sort of pick-me-up, you can walk round the building to get your energy going,” she says. “If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you can relax.”

As many people have discovered during the pandemic years, it can be challenging to fully check out from work when your living room is also your office. Speaking with at-home workers, Bennett has collected tips for separating work life and life life. Something as simple as wearing a collared shirt or other office attire during work hours and changing into casual wear at the end of the day can help establish boundaries, he says. Using a dedicated laptop for work and putting any work-related materials out of sight at the end of the day can also create much-needed distance.

Ragsdale says that technology can be both an escape and a tether. The same devices that help us play games, listen to podcasts or struggle with online word puzzles also make it possible to receive work emails and other reminders of life outside of the home. Ragsdale cowrote a 2021 commentary calling for more research into the impacts of cell phones on work recovery. “When you’re continuing to be exposed to work through your cell phone, it’s harder for that recovery process to unfold,” she says. The very sight of a work email can trigger thoughts that are just as stressful as the actual job, she adds.

Not many people can completely let go of their phones when they’re at home, but they can take steps to protect themselves from intrusive work pings. “You can adjust your settings in a way that make your phone less appealing,” she says, including turning off notifications for things like email and Twitter.

Bergen can’t be away from her phone when she’s on call, but she can still feel like she’s in her own world when she’s working on a new “Rosie” painting. Psychologists may call it mastery, but for her it’s a validation and an escape. She has recently started painting women first responders who were on duty for both 9/11 and Covid. “I started out painting one thing for myself and it blossomed,” she says. “It’s turned into something beautiful.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

This article How to deal with work stress — and actually recover from burnout is featured on Big Think.