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Dawkins’s River Out of Eden.
Book rec
Asking other believable people about the root causes of your pain in order to enhance your reflections is also typically very helpful—especially others who have opposing views but who share your interest in finding the truth rather than being proven right.
cindy epa at end!
To be effective in helping people learn from painful experiences, you must explain the logic and caring behind what you’re doing clearly and repeatedly.
Understand how to manage pain to produce progress.
1. Have clear goals. 2. Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of your achieving those goals. 3. Accurately diagnose the problems to get at their root causes. 4. Design plans that will get you around them. 5. Do what’s necessary to push these designs through to results. Together, these five steps make up a loop,
every mistake you make can teach you something, so there’s no end to learning.
With practice, you will eventually play this game with a calm unstoppable centeredness in the face of adversity.
Never rule out a goal because you think it’s unattainable. Be audacious. There is always a best possible path. Your job is to find it and have the courage to follow it. What you think is attainable is just a function of what you know at the moment.
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Remember that great expectations create great capabilities. If you limit your goals to what you know you can achieve, you are setting the bar way too low.
Almost nothing can stop you from succeeding if you have a) flexibility and b) self-accountability.
Your mission is to always make the best possible choices, knowing that you will be rewarded if you do.
View painful problems as potential improvements that are screaming at you.
Don’t mistake a cause of a problem with the real problem.
make sure you spend enough time with the small problems to make sure they’re not symptoms of larger ones.
Once you identify a problem, don’t tolerate it. Tolerating a problem has the same consequences as failing to identify it.
You need to develop a fierce intolerance of badness of any kind, regardless of its severity.
what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don’t is their willingness to look at themselves and others objectively and understand the root causes standing in their way.
Write down your plan for everyone to see and to measure your progress against. This includes all the granular details about who needs to do what tasks and when. The tasks, the narrative, and the goals are different, so don’t mix them up. Remember, the tasks are what connect the narrative to your goals.
You will need to synthesize and shape well. The first three steps—setting goals, identifying problems, and then diagnosing them—are synthesizing (by which I mean knowing where you want to go and what’s really going
on). Designing solutions and making sure that the designs are implemented are shaping.
goal setting (such as determining what you want your life to be) requires you to be good at higher-level thinking like visualization and prioritization. Identifying and not tolerating problems requires you to be perceptive and good at synthesis and maintaining high standards; diagnosis requires you to be logical, able to see multiple possibilities, and willing to have hard conversations with others; designing requires visualization and practicality; doing what you set out to do requires self-discipline,
good work habits, and a results orientation.
Having both open-mindedness and good mental maps is most powerful of all.
Once you understand what you’re missing and gain open-mindedness that will allow you to get help from others, you’ll see that there’s virtually nothing you can’t accomplish.
The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots.
Understand your ego barrier. When I refer to your “ego barrier,” I’m referring to your subliminal defense mechanisms that make it hard for you to accept your mistakes and weaknesses.
when someone gets “angry with himself,” his prefrontal cortex is sparring with his amygdala (or
To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true.
Those who adapt do so by a) teaching their brains to work in a way that doesn’t come naturally (the creative person learns to become organized through discipline and practice, for instance), b) using compensating mechanisms (such as programmed reminders), and/or c) relying on the help of others who are strong where they are weak.
these two barriers—ego and blind spots—are the fatal flaws that keep intelligent, hardworking people from living up to their potential.
Radical open-mindedness is motivated by the genuine worry that you might not be seeing your choices optimally.
Recognize that decision making is a two-step process: First take in all the relevant information, then decide.
only by empathizing can you properly evaluate another point of view.
Open-mindedness doesn’t mean going along with what you don’t believe in; it means considering the reasoning of others instead of stubbornly and illogically holding on to your own
point of view. To be radically open-minded, you need to be so open to the possibility that you could be wrong that yo...
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believable people as those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished the thing in question—who
have a strong track record with at least three successes—and have great explanations of their approach when probed. If you have
Remember, you are not arguing; you are openly exploring what’s true. Be reasonable and expect others to be reasonable. If you’re calm, collegial, and respectful you will do a lot better
both parties observe a “two-minute rule” in which neither interrupts the other, so they both have time to get all their thoughts out.
Working through disagreements does take time but it’s just about the best way you can spend it.
Smart people who can thoughtfully disagree are the greatest teachers,
Plan for the worst-case scenario to make it as good as possible.
Closed-minded people don’t want their ideas challenged. They are typically frustrated that they can’t get the other person to agree with them instead of curious as to why the other person disagrees. They feel bad about getting something wrong and are more interested in being proven right than in asking questions and learning others’ perspectives. Open-minded people are more curious about why there is disagreement. They are not angry when someone disagrees.They understand that there is always the possibility that they might be wrong and that it’s worth the little bit of time it takes to
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Closed-minded people say things like “I could be wrong . . . but here’s my opinion.” This is a classic cue I hear all the time. It’s often a perfunctory gesture that allows people to hold their own opinion while convincing themselves that they are being open-minded. If your statement starts with “I could be wrong” or “I’m not believable,” you should probably follow it with a question and not an assertion. Open-minded people know when to make statements and when to ask questions.
But also this is a female speech coping mechanism
A few good decision makers working effectively together can significantly outperform a good decision maker working alone—and even the best decision maker can significantly improve his or her decision making
with the help of other excellent decision makers.
Regularly use pain as your guide toward quality reflection.
So take some time to record the circumstances in which you’ve consistently made bad decisions because you failed to see what others saw.
a number of different believable people say you are doing something wrong and you are the only one who doesn’t see it that way, assume that you are probably biased. Be objective! While it is possible that you are right and they are wrong, you should switch from a fighting mode to an “asking questions” mode, compare your believability with theirs, and if necessary agree to bring in a neutral party you all respect to break the deadlock.
recommend that you seriously consider exploring it.
Against his own advice. Ha.
