Jakub Petrykowski blog

Books on habits and cognitive biases

Two books I highly recommend if you're interested in how personal /organizational habits can be instilled, and how you fool yourself on a daily basis probably without knowing it (and what to do about that):

"Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg

Many case studies of how various individuals and organizations reshape their habits. The book is not instructional in any way and I would love to see more in-depth look at actual challenges to building new habits on individual level.

Some interesting bits from this book:

• Once a strong habit is formed, it's always present in our head, so it's always possible to relapse. 
• A solid way to remove bad habits is to identify (mostly environmental) cues that make us start on the bad routine; replace the routine with something else that's not as destructive but what also gives same reward. Trivial example: you feel like eating a snack; normally you'd go for a cookie or something; instead you learn to always have a healthier snack (nuts, fruit) at your desk, which provides similar reward.
• Often we are on our good behavior most of the time, but when pressure rises (e.g. Starbucks employee gets into an argument with an angry customer) we do something we later regret. The clever idea is to have a plan ready for when that happens; example in the book: Starbucks employee prepares a written plan for dealing with an anticipated, very stressful situation. That makes it more likely for him to behave "well" where otherwise automatic "bad" behavior might be unavoidable.
• More references to the idea that "willpower is depletable resource" (e.g. why do people often spend most of the day eating healthy food and eventually go on to clear out half the fridge at night? :) I'm not saying it looked like sound scientific research, but it was a good anecdote that when tired / stressed, we act in ways that we don't like later on. That's why I like the suggestion to be mentally prepared for the bad moments to minimize their impact.

"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

A detailed, broad account of how we are prone to mistakes of thought without ever realizing we make them - by describing two systems, System 1 and System 2 - aspects of how our minds work, and how they work together to produce judgements/decisions. I wish policy makers, educators, business people and parents had the kind of mindset Kahneman advocates, i.e. we're wrong more often than we realize, and it may lead to poor results at work and in personal life. 

Some interesting bits from this book:

• Every chapter of the book suggests ways to speak about the issues Kahneman describes, e.g. examples of the way to talk to others in order to combat specific cognitive biases discovered by scientists - like these:
• combat halo effect: “She knows nothing about this person’s management skills. All she is going by is the halo effect from a good presentation.”
• combat wanting only to support what you already know: "“They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.” [WYSIATI = what you see is all there is, a cognitive heuristic Kahneman describes in detail] 
• Even more research suggesting that when people are tired and their "System 2" is depleted  (System 2 is the conscious, slow, deliberate, doubting aspect of the mind/brain), they are prone to bad judgement.
• Many good examples for each of the most prevalent cognitive biases like the halo effect or availability bias (I think I was hit by that one in at least half the conversations in my life) 
• "Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern." and "It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness." - in other words, the more you know, the more information you can hold in your 'active' mind at a time, the more critical, careful and doubtful you will be. This sounds to me a lot like why non-nerds laugh at nerds; nerds tend to hold much more information about a topic in their heads, and this perhaps leads to what non-nerds call "philosophizing". I'll leave you to pick sides in this eternal conflict :)

The hard part, as usual - implementing it all.

Thoughts on willpower, blood sugar and learning too fast

A few random thoughts:

• Willpower - is it a depletable resource? Or maybe it isn't? The article suggests it's probably a dead end. Based on my small experiments with diet changes, changing habits in my case requires environment control, self-education, self-awareness and planning. No moment-to-moment willpower necessary, and in fact if it comes down to that, I usually fail and eat that delicious but unhealthy treat/cookie/pizza.
• I've bought & tried a glucometer. Very cool device, allows you to test actual effects of food on your blood sugar. It's amazing to be able to perform an actual blood test yourself, at home, within less than a minute, using a device that costs around $20. Brilliant.
• I'm experimenting with eating food which has low glycemic index, and seeing how this affects my moment-to-moment energy level, focus, emotions and optimism. So far the results are very encouraging. If you don't know what it is, and you'd like to have more energy and focus on a typical workday, I recommend learning more about glycemic index. 
• There is a phenomenon I'd call "learning too fast". I've concluded that I was reading too many books, and analyzing various areas of my work and life too much, without acting. The way I evaluate it is by looking at the ratio of applied knowledge (change in a way I do things) to acquired knowledge (instructions on how to do things differently, taken from books, friends etc.). This ratio is appallingly low for me. I'd say that I apply maybe 5-10% of what I read in the last year, and that only includes advice that I decided to be meaningful and worthwhile. Rate of knowledge application is just as important as rate of knowledge acquisition. They don't need to be equal, but learning too fast compared to applying what you learn may lead to frustration ("I learned so much, but there are no improvements in my daily work/life") and is just waste if you dedicate lots of resources to it.

Self-control and hyperbolic discounting in humans

Summary: the way people choose smaller-sooner rewards or larger-later rewards is well modelled with hyperbolic discounting, as opposed to exponential discounting known from the world of finance. I am wondering if there's a technology we could use to make people choose larger-later rewards more consistently.

I did some reading on self-control recently, and so I found out about hyperbolic discounting through the book The Science of Self-Control. It shows an approach to self-control, along with its consequences for addiction.

If you like video, here's 3 short videos discussing temporal discounting (in order of appearance: no discounting, exponential discounting, hyperbolic discounting).

The key concept here is preference reversal. Apparently, humans (and some animals) tend to prefer larger-later (LL) rewards to sooner-smaller (SS) rewards if both are available in the sufficiently far future. But as time goes by, SS reward becomes disproportionately more valuable and at some point becomes the preferred choice - just because both are now much closer in time.

For example: in the evening we plan to get up at 7 am rather than 9 am, but in the morning that preference seems absurd and we prefer to sleep until 9 am. 

Put another way: instant gratification (smaller-sooner, SS) pleases the present self while delayed reward (larger-later, LL) benefits the future self.

The book presents the idea and lots of related research, along with how this relates to the development of addiction.

For those really interested: Hyperbolic discounting model contains a constant, the discount factor. The lower the constant, the more likely we're to choose larger-later rewards. Research on humans and various animals (e.g. pigeons) indicates that the more developed the animal, the lower the discount factor, i.e. the longer the perspective when making choices. Also, for humans, the older a person is the lower that factor is (i.e. experience makes humans do better choices over time).

I'm haunted by vision of a technology that would help people make better decisions. We usually know which option is the best in the long term, but we act against that judgement anyway. If there was something that would reverse the trend...

Now some tricks mentioned in the book include broadening time horizon when making decisions, or including commitment mechanisms (e.g. setting our environment up so that the SS choice would be more painful should we choose it in the future). However, they are all "soft" mechanisms, i.e. prone to manipulation by ourselves and in my experience simply don't work.

I'm wondering what would work, e.g. what technology or training.

More on self-discipline

Summary: As I promised to Greg last week, I read through six old articles on self-discipline by Steve Pavlina. Here's detailed comments on these, and how I think his ideas relate to my earlier post on methodical work as a habit.

Note that I am not familiar with scientific research on the topic (though perhaps it would help me a lot if I read a few papers), except that I've seen some books mentioning evidence suggesting that willpower is in limited supply in humans.

Let me discuss each of the six articles by Pavlina in the context of my previous post on methodical work as a habit.

• Part 1 (on self-discipline in general)  - 
  
  I like his definition: "Self-discipline is the ability to get yourself to take action regardless of your emotional state" 
  
  He claims that self-discipline can be trained like a muscle. I sure hope it can. But he shows examples like, say, getting up early in the morning. Well that sounds like building an individual habit of getting up early rather than working on "self-discipline", doesn't it?
  
  Obviously when you train a repeatable behavior, over time you will get better at that specific behavior. But does it later "overflow" into other areas of life?
  
  By training those individual habits or behaviors, are we improving our capacity to self-discipline in any area?
  
  I think more likely than not we are simply training individual habits. Whether or not we increase our capacity to act regardless of emotional states remains unknown.
• Part 2 (acceptance) -  he merely restates that after a long time of practicing various habits (working out, diet, ...) he had made great progress in these areas of life. 
  
  Here's the key sentence: "It’s still hard work, but I’ve become a lot stronger such that things that would have been insurmountable for me at age 20 are easy today"
  
  It sounds a lot like he basically trained well in these specific areas he named, so they are easy to him now, but that doesn't mean a bit that doing something new is easier! Also we don't know what "would have been"... 
  
  Since these areas of his life are now governed by long-trained habits (10 years or more), obviously he can focus on other things, which appears to him like he was much more disciplined in general. But in general means simply in these areas of life.
  
  Also, perhaps his own general ability to push himself and work hard methodically is far above average (and possibly rather constant over adult lifetime), which is what allowed him to build those habits in the first place... 
  
  Basically he now doesn't use up a lot of "discipline" on those "basic" areas of life, and can use this "energy" on something else. That doesn't mean he improved his self-discipline. It seems to me that over time he setup good, optimized routines for all that he does effectively; one result is that he is physically and mentally stronger now (exercise, diet etc. all are known to improve mental and emotional capacity a lot!) and he was able to organize his habits and life so that he can focus on higher level, bigger objectives where he just can't waste time on washing up etc.
  
  He then calls this improved situation in his life "improved self-discipline", but it is simply a set of new habits and better mind-body condition which allows him to operate on a different level (be more successful etc.).
  
  So this second part only strengthened the following model in my mind:
  
  - some things should be done on a regular basis (I call them "maintenance projects", ones where regular work brings good results)- turning these things into habits is a great way of having them done (maximize efficiency);
  - once they are habits - which may take months or years to build - we can focus on more important, bigger goals and achieve them with more ease since the baseline is working on autopilot for us.
  
  I don't see self-discipline as a muscle anywhere in the picture so far. Let's go on to the next part.
• Part 3 (Willpower) - this article seems to refer to scientificly researched area. Yes, willpower is in limited supply, and some people seem to be able to distract themselves from dangerous thoughts and tendencies which on the outside may have the appearance of strong will  (famous marshmallow experiment comes to mind).
  
  Pavlina states that knowing this, one should use that limited supply of willpower to organize his environment  so that sustaining "good" habits is easier. I like this idea, and won't argue with that :) It's actually known technique in the self-help industry.
  
  I am a fan of "environment control" when building habits (examples: changing diet, doing workout etc.). In other words - by setting up specific environment, make it hard to fall into bad habits and easy to maintain good habits, and you'll succeed. No revolution here, and if it says anything about willpower or self-discipline it's that we should never rely on them too much! :)
  
  He sums it up nicely: "By the end of the day, you’ve used your willpower not to diet directly but to establish the conditions that will make your diet easier to follow." But is it willpower we use to setup environemnt? Is it that "hard" emotionally to get rid of sugar or remodel house?
  
  
  I think that's the way to go with new habits. It might be one of the least controversial ideas in the whole self-help industry :)
• Part 4 (Hard work) - this article shows that he is a hard worker, and I guess most of us would agree that hard work is good and brings great results over time :)
  
  If someone is naturally a hard worker, someone focused on improving oneself and his surroundings, that's great. But what if someone isn't? How is self-discipline related to choosing "hard" work (that which challenges you, per Pavlina's definition)
  
  So again, I agree with the value of hard work and even with his specific definition of hard work, but how can one do more of hard work if he wishes to? What's the method? He never discussed it, and that's what I was looking for.
• Part 5  (Industry) - this article states that our lifestyle implies certain tasks that require a lot of time investment from someone - could be us, could be someone we hire or ask for help. 
  
  Not a word about self-discipline here. He simply suggests to be wise and only do the stuff that really needs to be done, and even delegate if possible. I have nothing to add. 
• Part 6 (Persistence) - His definition of persistence in article 6 is the same as his definition of self-discipline in article 1 ("Persistence is the ability to maintain action regardless of your feelings." vs "Self-discipline is the ability to get yourself to take action regardless of your emotional state.")
  
  This article is mostly about when to change direction (goals), but it does have a hint at what keeps Pavlina persistent: a clear vision of the future he really desires. "Persistence of action comes from persistence of vision. When you’re super-clear about what you want in such a way that your vision doesn’t change much, you’ll be more consistent — and persistent — in your actions. And that consistency of action will produce consistency of results."
  
  Again, this is hardly surprising or controversial. Some sources on facilitating change (like "Switch") are adamant on providing crystal-clear direction when we want any kind of change to happen.

So in the end, the general mechanisms or values stated by Steve Pavlina in these articles are very close to what I believe, e.g.

• hard work brings great results, 
• it helps to be clear about what we want, 
• if you control your environment, changing habits gets much easier
•  it's good to be realistic about what you can achieve (my restatement of his article on "acceptance")

I am not sure that by building arbitrary new habits we improve our self-discipline, but it could be so. Human behavior seems to me much too broad a topic to nail it down with such a simple concept as "self-discipline", here's some reasons why I think so:

• what's emotional regulation role in what appears as "self-discipline" or willpower? (I mean the struggle between executive center of the brain and the amygdala or other areas; not an expert, but I mean the part that is supposed to be made stronger by meditation)
• since we know some traits of emotional intelligence can be improved in adults with relatively simple practice, isn't it more useful to see  self-discipline just as one aspect of emotional self-regulation, which is just one aspect of emotional intelligence? If so, what does research on EI tell us about ways to improve self-discipline?

You see, I now like to think in terms of behaviors and things (as opposed to opinions and ideas):

• what actions do I perform specifically (what do I say and when, where do I go, what do I look at, what question do I ask myself at what time) to achieve change/objective I am after?
• what things (e.g. tools) do I bring into my life to make a new habit? to "appear" more disciplined? to do more hard work? to get more done? I.e. how do I redesign my work/home environment?

Actions. Things. These are controlled and real. If specific actions and things bring results I want, that's great.

In the absence of these specific instructions, I am of course willing to look at other concepts - emotions (if I feel them); metaphors (if I can understand them). 

So what I'm looking for is perhaps a detailed, step-by-step instructions that will lead a randomly selected person to becoming a disciplined hard worker :) Any suggestions outside of what's already discussed above?

Methodical work as a habit

Methodical work leads to success. 

Methodical work means being disciplined, working a lot, staying motivated, persevering despite setbacks. 

Methodical work brings results, but the work itself often stays invisible to others.

My personal challenge - and in general the key to long term growth of any person - is to stay motivated, disciplined, to do the work on a regular basis. In other words, I wish to work methodically towards my long term goals.

It's  hard. Why? Well, I guess we all know the answer. It's tiring. More often than not humans crave rest, fun, relaxation, pleasure, peace, quiet.

Work frequently means indecision, ambiguity, effort, anxiety, stress. 

Short term desires are easily satisfied. Instant gratification is easy to get, especially when we have personal freedom, time and money. 

Long term goals, even if well understood by an individual, simply lose to what some call "lack of strong will". 

I am leaning towards the belief that this thing called "strong will" doesn't exist. It's imaginary. It doesn't have its own brain area. It's not that most people don't have it (but some do). Nobody does.

If someone is called disciplined, motivated and methodical, it simply means that he has a habit of working. This habit is stronger in him than a habit of satisfying other (short term) desires. He works more often and with more ease than he watches soap operas or eats donuts.

Working is a habit. It's a habit to choose work-like tasks and actions over non-work-like tasks.

As most habits in most people, it can be trained. I'm training it right now. Not sure how exactly - haven't found a single book on the topic so far. So I'm looking at what hard working people do and how they think.

I recently read a book about methodical work titled "The War of Art".

Now, "The War of Art" has two aspects. One of them is positive, another not so much.

The positive is that the book contains a great description of what methodical work looks like in the real world. The author calls a person doing methodical work "a professional". The book contains detailed description of the behaviors and mindset of a professional (as opposed to an amateur).

A professional does the work every day. He knows his trade well. He doesn't fall victim to everyday excuses. He understands it's going to be tough to work every day. He knows he'll face fear or anxiety of publishing what he did; he doesn't trick himself into believing he'll never get tired or afraid. He doesn't stop when others criticize his work.

A professional does the work every day.

I want to be a professional in that sense. I don't think I ever was; I was more of an amateur (inspired and agitated, but easily distracted), sometimes guided by fear (especially in school, but also at work, afraid of losing face). I'd rather be a professional though, guided by a habit of hard work.

So that aspect of the book, what a real pro looks like, was nice. A good summary of what methodical work is and what it takes to do it. (It's not free! Workaholics usually sacrifice their personal relationships, good health or other life opportunities!)

The other aspect of the book is spiritual. It's pretty bad.

The spiritual dogma of the book sounds so ridiculous to me that it was really painful to find it in the same book as the no-nonsense description of a pro. The author believes that there are gods, or God, demons, angels, Muse, "other dimension" beings all around us. The book mixes all this together in a "surely you must believe in something like this!" soup. Terrible. 

The author believes that all great work comes not from people, but through people. Where does it come from exactly? Why, obviously there must be some ethereal beings that inspire selected artists (the professionals) while not inspiring others (the amateurs). They reward hard work with inspiration.

I do not approve of such nonsense. It's a classic example of a human being replacing what he doesn't know or understand with fantasy that makes sense to him. I think that the usual case is that a person is so uncomfortable with not having all the answers about the foundations of the world that they accept whatever nonsense reaches their ears.

Luckily it is quite easy to skip those "spiritual" parts since the book is divided into a series of extremely short chapters (1-2 pages each). Start a chapter, estimate how many angels show up, skip if more than zero. Worked well for me.

I am now very much focused on how to build a habit of methodical work. Doing some research, but also trying myself. Building that mindset of a pro. Incidentally, I'm a StarCraft player and I watch Korean pro league; it's quite informative as well. These are pros like any other and they also work hard, starting at an early age.

It might be the habit that's extremely hard to build. Once I acquire it though, perhaps I could share the trick with others. Would be really great to be able to help others become methodical in their work -- for a lifetime. Imagine a society that is more methodical at work than other societies around. What an advantage! Or more broadly, what a boost to human civilization if it was typical of people to be hard working citizens?

Also, once I build that habit it should feel great and bring great results quickly. As you may have noticed, I strongly believe that it's learnable and that it's indeed a habit. Could be wrong. That would be sad.

It's going to be hard work to change the motivation to work from "I love doing it so I keep doing it" or "I fear not doing it so I keep doing it" to "I will do it now because I said so, despite really craving something else at the moment". But I believe this is what long term success requires.

Do you?

Emotionally intense projects

Summary: Different goals, tasks or projects require varying degree of emotional engagement. Some are emotionally intense, while others are rather bland and light on our emotions. It helps to be aware of the load coming from those intense projects. 

Projects are emotionally intense when:

• situation is new
• we experience uncertainty, anxiety, ambiguity, indecision
• there is  risk
• stakes are high

Examples of emotionally intense projects (for me):

• starting a new business or product
• buying a car for the first time
• deciding on a brand name for a new business
• shopping for something expensive where I'm not sure what I need yet

Things are emotionally easy when:

• stakes are low
• we've done them before 
• there is no risk

Examples of projects / tasks that are usually emotionally easy for me:

• paying bills
• buying food 
• doing taxes

I noticed that at any given time I may have any number of upcoming, emotionally easy tasks. It doesn't hinder my productivity in any way.

But if I have multiple emotionally intense projects in a short period of time, my productivity goes down. 

Risk, ambiguity, anxiety and uncertainty that come from those projects are costly to handle. Since earlier this year I began to plan consciously for closing an intense project before starting a new one. It builds some momentum in accomplishing goals and helps me stay focused. 

Every time I start something new I try to assess how emotionally difficult it will be. I try not to put too much pressure on myself at any given day or week.

In other words, making difficult decisions (in those emotionally intense projects) is hard enough on its own; adding multiple different decisions in different areas of life to be made in a short period of time is too stressful and/or unproductive.

Try a visual editor for text, lists, todos

A few weeks back I wrote another app to collect information, knowledge, ideas etc. Have a look here:

http://petrykowski.net/editor/

From the Help doc:

"The app http://petrykowski.net/editor/ is about having an editor for multiple textual lists visible on a single screen.

The idea is that paper has "geography", while most computer text/todo editors do not. They offer a single flow of text, from top to bottom. I use paper a lot, and I think one of its great features is that human (spatial?) memory makes it so easy to work with multiple pieces of information spread across many pages of text, or many different places on a single big sheet of text.

So here's first attempt to bring in geography to list/text/todo editor. This is a followup to my earlier work on a note taking app, http://mindquant.com/.

The multi-editor app is intended to "expand" our working memory (loosely speaking). I've been using it daily for the past few weeks.

I have about 10-15 editors in my screen, each with a distinct type of items: 

• todo
• errands
• people
• promises made
• projects
• shopping list
• etc.

Data is saved in the browser, it's never sent to any server/backend (in fact you can copy the HTML, CSS and JS files and use it on your own computer if you like). The app probably won't work in Internet Explorer 8 and below (it uses HTML5 local storage mechanism), but should work fine with Chrome, Firefox, Safari.

If you use the app for something, I'd be delighted to learn how you use it.

If you have ideas or the will to improve it, let me know as well. 

Everyone wants to be around optimists

Summary: Most people prefer to spend time with optimists, but because pessimists are more numerous, and because optimists frequently avoid pessimists, few have the luxury of spending time only with optimists. Optimist and pessimists thus create separate clusters.

Sources: I've done little research on this topic, so I'll just point you to three topics which you can read about a bit on Wikipedia: Explanatory style, Optimism, Martin Seligman (psychologist who discovered the state of learned helplessness and seems to have worked on optimism & explanatory style), and a long article on optimism vs pessimism. 

The reason why I'm writing about it is because I think it's such a brilliant description of attitudes of people around me -- emotional and verbal (explanatory!) attitudes. I used to be on both sides of the spectrum at different times in my life, and I also have spent lots of time with both very pessimistic and very optimistic people. I have seen how these groups affect me, and what kind of emotional reality they create in me. I was moved by the simplicity of the distinction dr Seligman describes in his short video below. You can guess which group I decided to stick with :)

Definition: Who's an optimist and who's a pessimist? Watch the first minute of the video below.

  

Definition summary:

When a pessimist has a bad experience or a setback, he thinks:

- It's going to last forever

- It's going to undermine everything

- It's my fault.

An optimist with a bad experience thinks:

- it's temporary

- it has little to do with me

- it only affects one small part of my life

Now reverse each one for reaction to a positive experience.

Now a few thoughts based on my personal experience.

• once you get this explanation in your head, it gets very easy to quickly spot optimists and pessimists around you - just listen to how people explain their life circumstances, problems, successes and failure, how they distance themselves (or not) from external forces like weather, boss, job, politics etc.
• it might look like optimists are irrational, even delusional. It very well could be. I think this is not a problem for most optimists, because it mostly applies to their life's history -- not to their plans! For example, when an optimist is planning what to do next, he'll generally see things quite similar to everyone else - but he'll get so much more motivation and support from their (perhaps completely inaccurate) beliefs!
• for the most part it is the optimists that share smiles with everyone for no apparent reason, speak in excited tones about anything, and generally appear to have a good day more often than others 
• I don't care if there's a "pure pessimist" and a "pure optimist" out there - it's more important to classify someone's general explanatory style as mostly pessimistic or optimistic.

Here's why I think this model of optimistic vs pessimistic attitude is such a useful tool for handling relationships with others:

1. optimists share lots of joy, hope, happiness, smile and - broadly speaking - positive emotions with others. It's not to say that they only share these things, but typical meetings of optimists have this positive tone. 
2. pessimists share concern, worry, critical analysis, stories of problems and - broadly speaking - how life is a burden to them or to others, and how things won't ever change for the better.
3. because of 1. and 2., almost everyone prefers to spend time with optimists
4. there are fewer optimists than pessimists in societies (I also believe that for example in Poland the ratio is at least as bad as 4:1 for pessimists, or worse. This is a hunch though - no analysis done.)
5. many optimists have much more power in life than pessimists (they have more energy/hope to try new things, more friends, better jobs, more money, thus more freedom) and realize that they can choose who they spend time with. Not surprisingly, they wall off pessimists because pessimists steal positive energy and introduce too much anxiety and frustration into optimists' life.
6. clusters of optimistic people are created. pessimists cluster together as well, probably because having pessimists around is better than having nobody
7. many people spend most of their life without a single optimist around them (I believe it's completely destructive), falling into learned helplessness in important areas of life   

And a few concluding thoughts (again, these are my own hunches and combination of opinions of some of my mentors - not research-backed results!):

• It might be possible to change one's style. I can't say I have a clear example in my mind though! If any of you do, I'd love to hear the story :)
• it should be relatively simple to fake optimism when interacting with others, at least for a while, and in fact some aspects of this attitude are shared in many self-help, team-work and communication resouces. I'm not sure how to fake emotions, but for verbal communication some typical tips are:
  • do not complain. DO NOT COMPLAIN! It's so trivial, but apparently so hard to do (I still do it from time to time, then apologize for complaining to the people around me and quickly change the topic :). There's a fine line between complaining and sharing one's bad experience :) Perhaps just laughing and making a joke out of it is all that it takes...
  • when trouble comes, become "constructive', i.e. admit that you/someone has a problem (one of the hardest things to do for humans :) and focus on finding & executing a solution (not just finding and rejecting every single one after critical analysis, without trying :)
  • praise others, even for small accomplishments
  • praise yourself, even for small accomplishments
• if faking works for a while, perhaps it works longer term, too (it's just practice in looking at life events in a different way and paying more attention to good things)
• family is first important environment where it's possible for someone to be surrounded exclusively by pessimists.

Happy optimizing your life :)

Spend more time with optimists and those who inspire you

Summary: spend more time with optimists and less time with pessimists.

Recently I've had some great conversations about motivation, discipline, optimism vs pessimism etc.  One of the conclusions: it is critical to have people around you that are optimistic and who are really good at something; ideally they would be succesful, optimistic and disciplined people. (More on discipline in another post.)

Optimism is so important because you want others to share their "positive energy" with you - not the dull, sad pessimistic outlook on life and future that many folks unfortunately project. By "positive energy" I mean joy, inspiration, sense of wonder about the world, and the motivation to go out there and kick ass (presumably, kick ass just like the other side does). 

Ideally, that sharing of excitement and hope would be mutual. 

Because emotions and attitudes are contagious, spending too much time with pessimists is probably some of the greatest risks out there. It takes away motivation and desire to improve your life, and even the belief that it's possible to improve it in any significant way. 

I recommend an interesing speech on wisdom and mindset by Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet's enterprise). He mentions the importance of spending time with people you admire.

More on optimism and pessimism on Thursday. In particular, I'll write about definitions, how I distinguish between the two in real life, and about a model I have of how societies cluster around those two extreme mindsets :)

Anger and refractory period

Interesting thing about anger is that when we get angry, we often act like idiots. Poor "anger control" causes stupid behavior -- behavior that we later regret.

Over the past few years I was able to learn how to detect that I am angry. Yeah, I had to learn it - I know that it's natural and obvious for some people, but for me it took therapy, books and practice to be able to do something as basic as realize "Oh, I think I'm getting really angry right now!"

Some typical situations for me are when someone beats me in a competitive game after a mistake I made (so it's my fault, but I still get angry with the other person!) or when someone violates traffic rules when I'm driving, causing a dangerous situation on the road with me as a potential "victim". I have done a lot of work to get angry less frequently and to be able to control anger better when it occurs - both with good results.

Now, let's get to the "acting like an idiot" part.

For example, when playing online strategy games (one of my main hobbies) - I tend to blame the other players for my defeat. The other players may be allies who made a mistake, or opponents who did something clever to win; you may have seen the word "noob" being written in an in-game chat... that's typical of people who get angry at others. Immature, but very frequent.

Another situation: you get angry at someone in their presence, you raise your voice, tone of your voice is changed. It gets unpleasant for that person, and I think sometimes even more unpleasant and awkward for the other people around.

After you calm down, you refret what you said - how immature you behaved. I know I was often ashamed how foolishly I behaved while at the mercy of anger. I decided it's time to stop this, and began to work towards better anger control. Good news is: you can improve at this!

A very interesting phenomenon is called refractory period (described in detail in "Emotions revealed" by Paul Ekman, and there's a brief description of refractory period in here).

Refractory period is a mental state that causes your mind to ignore (filter out) all signals that contradict the emotion you are feeling. It doesn't just work with anger, but I think it's most apparent with anger because many people are poor at controlling it, and others try to talk to them to calm them down - to no avail of course.

Basically, when someone gets angry, they will often hear others say "calm down" or "hey, nothing happened" or even "I'm sorry". Or they will keep having their own thoughts like "hmm, I'm angry, I should calm down" or whatever else. But then funny thing happens - they decide that they are right to be angry; that feel that their anger is just and warranted by the situation; that the offender was way out of line!

To me this struggle between "I should stop being angry" and "keep going, I am right to be angry!" is really funny - I can feel my own mind wanting to stay in the angry state.

I can see how it is important from evolutionary perspective for emotions to be "resistant" in this way - it if was easy to make others stop feeling angry or happy, we would be prone to manipulation. Imagine someone slaps you in the face, then smiles, and this smile causes you to forgive and stop being angry - that wouldn't work out well for people, would it? So perhaps refractory period is actually useful... but I think more often than not it causes us to act silly, make others want to leave us alone when we're angry, and it delays solving the actual issue that caused the anger in the first place.

Funny thing, anger.

(Photograph by Ryan Hyde)