More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
two main foundations of chasing—social comparisons and functional fixedness. The first depends on sizing up our resources relative to others, which often leaves us disappointed, spurs us to seek out more resources, and makes us overlook the value of what we have. The second leads us to take a fixed view of resources, limiting what we think is possible with what’s at hand and therefore prompting us to go get more.
third foundation of chasing—mindless accumulation.
When chasing, we rack up as many resources as possible, not because we have a specific goal in mind bu...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The problem is that chasers become so fixated on acquiring resources that they lose sight of what those resources will do for them, leading to a fourth misstep caused by relentless chasing: resource squandering.
the Perky effect holds that having a prior mental image of something alters how we perceive and assimilate new information.
multi-c rule: a diversity of experiences allows people to think more expansively about their resources, leading to more divergent ways of approaching problems. Musgrave saw his mission as an operation, allowing him to use his experience as a physician to repair the flawed telescope.
First, explore the world around you. Embrace the multi-c rule to build a mental database of ideas—not to serve a specific goal but rather to satisfy a curiosity.
Outsiders don’t operate along the same conventions as experts, so instead of honing in on a traditional body of knowledge about a topic, they cast a wide net,
Thomas Edison’s advice: “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”
Second, make sure resources remain accessible and top of mind. It’s easy to forget what we already know and overlook what we already have, preventing us from making connections between resources we’ve used in one situa...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Third, use analogical reasoning.
opening up the possibility of drawing on an unrelated experience to solve what turned out to be a similar problem.
By using analogies to make connections to similar problems that on the surface look different, the organization and its members find that it has already solved many of the new problems it faces.
Finally, regularly test ideas, expecting most to fail.
The problem is that we find it hard to abandon our ideas even in the face of evidence that shows they don’t work because of the escalation of commitment we learned about in chapter 2.
By stepping outside, people discover greater richness in what they already have.
openness to experience.
The more diverse the non-work experiences, the more resourceful people were at work.
two very different approaches to using experience to find success. In the first path, we gain experience in a limited set of activities to achieve expertise, whereas in the second path, we emphasize breadth of experiences. Those with the most training, strongest credentials, and best connections don’t always prevail, and a diversity of experiences grants us a way to stretch.
The value of our resources dramatically increases when we join forces with outsiders.
Take advantage of your disadvantages, feature the few assets you may have, and work harder than anyone else around you.”
our regulatory modes. These are the beliefs and states that control how we think about and use resources to achieve goals. When operating from a planning regulatory mode, people feel a strong drive to evaluate potential uses for their resources comprehensively. They seek out as much information as possible about different choices to help pick the best option.
When people follow this mode, they are never satisfied with a good choice; they want the very best choice, even if it takes tremendous resources to make it. And when they act, they’ll often second-guess what they’re doing, regret their choices, and wonder if there’s a better way. They’ll also speculate about how their paths stack up against others, invoking the dangerous social comparison instinct favored by chasers that upends personal satisfaction. Now if you tend to jump right in, you’re following an acting regulatory mode. When in this mode, we do anything to move away from the status quo
...more
great success. Our cultural expectation is that planning provides the best, if not only,...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Planning bred anxiety from always worrying about following the plan, and then second-guessing whether it was even the best plan.
Too often planning stifles our action because we’re trying to put together a perfect plan, even when an adequate one will serve us well.
The self-serving way we evaluate our successes and failures, relative to others, protects our ego but sacrifices the expectations we have for others. We feel better about ourselves but think less of those around us.
The intertwinement of routines and creativity helps us realize that individuals make a big difference for even the seemingly dullest types of work.
We frequently encounter situations in which we feel compelled to make a choice between two opposing sides of what appears as an unresolvable conflict. Research shows two different ways of approaching these situations. The first approach involves treating both parts as opposing forces.
Being more of a parent naturally makes you less of a professional, just like electrifying the developing world necessarily involves harming the environment. Such bucketing seeks to place each part of an apparent trade-off into its own, separate category, allowing us to simplify the world by putting things into tidy, clearly defined groups. The reasoning goes that it’s futile to mix the different buckets. Like oil and water, they’ll naturally separate, no matter how hard we try to prevent it.
Buckets highlight the similarities within a category and the differences across categories, making it harder to see how the two can mix. But there’s actually a lot of variety and diversity inside a bucket. ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
There is a second, and better, way that people can choose to approach potential trade-offs: mixing opposed concepts together.
three critical steps to overcome bucketing. First, accept the competing demands of a trade-off. Obviously, there are times when the different sides of a trade-off will conflict. By ignoring these competing demands, we set ourselves up for inevitable disappointment.
Second, recognize the distinct value of each side of the trade-off. To successfully do this, we need to embrace the independent value of each side.
Third, find synergies between both sides. Ask how one side (such as being a parent) helps with the other side of the trade-off (such as being a dedicated employee), and vice versa. Although our natural tendency is to view the two sides only as opposing forces,
consider how each side can advance the goals of the other side.
As Aristotle wrote, all virtues can become vices when taken to their extreme. On one end lies what Aristotle called vulgarity—excessive spending beyond what circumstances warrant, often to make a show. It’s common among chasers. Equally damning for Aristotle was the other extreme—a focus solely on doing things more cheaply and amassing wealth rather than using that wealth for a higher purpose. It is this vice that leads to a major injury from overstretching: becoming a cheapskate.
There are notable differences between the frugal and the cheap. Frugal people take pleasure in saving and cheap people feel pained by spending.
A valuable point.. just like the thin line between confidence and overconfidence .
gradually diversifying our work enables us to be more creative and get promoted faster.
High expectations, when calibrated correctly, can create positive prophecies but when imposed without safeguards can trip up even the most promising people.
When people set positive expectations for us, they give us two different types of information. First, there’s information that shapes our own expectations. To the degree that we believe in the expectations others set for us, we’re more likely to live up to them. We reason that if others expect great things of us, we must be capable of delivering. Second, there’s a social aspect of a positive expectation—and with it comes the dark side that sacked Ryan Leaf: performance pressure. Performance pressure distracts us with worrying about
satisfying what others want from us.
high expectation of someone else would trigger performance pressure if that expectation wasn’t believed by that person. It wouldn’t create any of the benefits from shaping a person’s own expectations but would come with all of the downsides of social pressures.
To harness the power of positive prophecies and avoid the curse of high expectations, it’s important that those expectations be credible and delivered in ways that avoid unnecessary performance pressure. It might be comfortable to play on our home turf, but as the stakes get higher, we’re better off working in an environment where we have supportive fans, but not overly zealous ones watching our every move and expecting perfection.
Another way of avoiding the curse of high expectations is to get some early “small wins.”
Finding small wins—having an interception-free game, finishing a first project, or landing a new account—goes a long way toward internalizing others’ positive expectations about us, while minimizing performance pressure.
When we botch up a mixture, it’s often because we struggle to manage successfully an underlying tension needed for the most successful combinations: novelty and usefulness.
Without novelty, there is little value in mixtures, as someone has already thought about how to combine that set of resources. But without usefulness, there’s no purpose for a mixture.
coming up with both novel and useful mixtures requires two very different orientations to our work. When we’re intrinsically motivated, we tend to come up with novel ideas. We enjoy learning and experimenting to find new combinations. In contrast, when we focus on performance, we tend to come up with useful ideas. We take the perspective of others and rely on more familiar ideas likely to be accepted by others.
First, occasionally do work you’re overqualified for—these are easily mastered and less demanding tasks but ones that are still important to complete.
