Post Category → Psychology

Taylor Pearson on Procrastination

Taylor Pearson really has become a fine essayist. This one on procrastination was packed with wisdom:

“Whenever you feel that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who are ruining your life… feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you canâ – the so-called “iron prescription” – I think that really works.” Charlie Munger

In his letter to shareholders back in 2016, Jeff Bezos gave the best advice I’ve ever heard on how to stop procrastinating:

“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

What Bezos is saying is that you should think like a C student. When you’re about 70% sure, you take a guess and see what happens.

Colin Powell has a similar rule for how to stop procrastinating. You should make a decision when you have between 40% and 70% of the possible information. He believes that with less than that, you are bound to make a wrong decision.

However, if you keep looking for information beyond 70%, then by the time you make the decision, it will be so late that you will have missed the opportunity.

…Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired…Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut.

…Courage is the Cure for Procrastination

In his account of an expedition into the Himalayas in the 1930’s, explorer William Hutchison Murray put it this way:

“… but when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money — booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.”

William Hutchinson Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951)

How to Stop Procrastinating Using the 70% Rule

Ryan Holiday on High Agency People

The mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high agency person”.  As Eric would elaborate on Tim Ferriss’ podcast:

“When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something? So, how am I going to get past this bouncer who told me that I can’t come into this nightclub? How am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience?”

It was Steve Jobs who once said that, “Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”

Once you learn this, he said, you’ll never be the same again.

People have spoken of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” and this is really what it was. He believed more in his own agency – his own power to change and affect things – than he did in conventional wisdom or other people”s opinions.

But this idea of agency is a controversial one today. Most of discourse is marked with shibboleths that reveal our doubts about agency. We speak of privileges and systemic biases. We talk of our problems as if they are intractable, overwhelming and malevolently created. Even on the extreme right, there is an obsession with biological differences between sexes and races, about whether one gender or another is naturally better at this or that. Again, these are simply averages that have nothing to do with individuals. Our focus on it all, from either side, is a way of subtly erasing agency. We emphasise where we are disempowered rather than opportunities for empowerment.

The line from Hannibal when he was told that crossing the Alps was impossible: Aut inveniam viam aut faciam. I shall either find a way or make one.

This is what high agency individuals do. This is how they respond to bad odds, to big doubts, or frustrating situations.

https://journal.thriveglobal.com/are-you-a-high-agency-person-how-to-respond-when-you-hear-no-db3cafff6b1d

Moral Foundations Theory

I was just reminded of Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, something I first encountered in The Righteous Mind.

Moral Foundations Theory was created by a group of social and cultural psychologists to understand why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes. In brief, the theory proposes that several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. The five foundations for which we think the evidence is best are:

1) Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]

3) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”

4) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

We think there are several other very good candidates for “foundationhood,” especially:

6) Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor. We report some preliminary work on this potential foundation in this paper, on the psychology of libertarianism and liberty.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory