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For example, some studies show that businesses started during a recession actually do better over time,
found that the majority of Fortune 500 companies were started during tough economic times.
One way to more systematically take advantage of the butterfly effect is using the super model of luck surface area,
You
covers. In the same way that it is a lot easier to catch a fish if you cast a wide net, your personal luck surface area will increase as you interact with more people in more diverse situations.
For example, you might put yourself in more unfamiliar situations: instead of spending the bulk of your time in your house or office, you might socialize more or take a class.
A happy medium has you attending occasional events that expose you to people who can help you advance your goals.
Your luck surface area relates to the natural concept of entropy, which measures the amount of disorder in a system.
In this context, increasing your luck surface area means increasing your personal maximum entropy, by increasing the possible number of situations you put yourself in. Your life will be a bit less orderly, but disorder in moderation can be a good thing.
own. Russian playwright Anton Chekhov put it like this: “Only entropy comes easy.”
The natural increase of entropy over time in a closed system is known as the second law of thermodynamics.
On a more practical level, the second law serves as a reminder that orderliness needs to be maintained, lest it be slowly chipped away by disorder.
orderliness doesn’t happen naturally.
You must continually put energy back into systems to maintain their desired orderly states.
You can use this 2 × 2 matrix to help you categorize events as either high or low impact and high or low cost (time, money, etc.).
These 2 × 2 matrices draw on a concept from physics called polarity, which describes a feature that has only two possible values.
These visualizations are powerful because you can distill complicated ideas into a simple diagram and gain insights in the process.
One simple way visually to introduce this type of complexity is through a scatter plot on top of a 2 × 2 matrix, which visualizes the relative values of what you are analyzing.
While polarity can be useful, when making comparisons you must be careful to avoid the black-and-white fallacy—thinking that things fall neatly into two groups when they do
Practically, whenever you are presented with a decision with two options, try to think of more.
tendency to create us versus them framings, thinking that the only two options are ones that either benefit themselves at the expense of “others,” or vice versa. This tendency arises because you often associate identity and self-esteem with group membership, thereafter creating in-group favoritism and, conversely, out-group bias.
Instead, most have the potential to be win-win situations, where both parties can actually end up better off, or win. How is this possible? It’s because most negotiations don’t include just one term, such as price, but instead involve many terms, such as quality, respect, timing, control, risk, and on and on.
Otherwise, without misinformation, misunderstanding, or duress, people wouldn’t make all these transactions. Zero-sum is the exception, not the rule.
You can go too far, though. For example, in a complex business negotiation, you cannot discuss every word in the contract or else discussions will take forever, and you’ll never get a deal done. You must instead choose thoughtfully which words are worth discussing and which are not.
You want to be somewhere in the middle of order and chaos, where you are intentionally raising your personal entropy enough to expose yourself to interesting opportunities and you are flexible and resilient enough to react to new conditions and paradigms that emerge.
successful people,
luck plays a significant role in success. However, if you look deeper, you will notice that most also ...
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Yes, they were in the right place at the right time, but they made the effort...
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were at the center of major adoptions of ideas or technologies that swept through society via the critical mass models described earlier.
more often they were the ones who brought the ideas or technologies into the mainstream.
Being adaptable like this helps you in good times and bad. On the positive side, you can make better decisions with your life and career;
negative side, you can be more resilient when setbacks and unfortunate events occur, and even help limit their negative effects.
Our older son never wanted to be put down, but our pediatrician nevertheless advised us to put him down when he was sleepy but still awake. That always led to him screaming the minute he was set down. If he wasn’t deeply asleep, he would just rouse himself and start crying. The first few nights of this were harrowing, with each of us taking turns staying awake and holding him while he slept; he may have slept on his own for an hour a night.
As French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace wrote in his 1812 book Théorie Analytique des Probabilités: “The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability.”
It is human nature to use past experience and observation to guide decision making, and evolutionarily this makes sense.
These are all examples of drawing incorrect conclusions using anecdotal evidence, informally collected evidence from personal anecdotes
when you make generalizations based on anecdotal evidence or weigh it more heavily than scientific evidence.
The Believing Brain, “Anecdotal thinking comes naturally, science requires training.”
Just because two events happened in succession, or are correlated, doesn’t mean that the first actually caused the second. Statisticians use the phrase correlation does not imply causation to describe this fallacy.
What is often overlooked when this fallacy arises is a confounding factor, a third, possibly non-obvious factor that influences both the assumed cause and the observed effect, confounding the ability to draw a correct conclusion.
In fact, there is a hilarious site (and book) called Spurious Correlations, chock-full of these silly results.
the first step is to define or understand its hypothesis, the proposed explanation for the effect being studied (e.g., drinking Snapple can reduce the length of the common cold). Defining a hypothesis up front helps to avoid the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
A similar concept is the moving target, where the goal of an experiment is changed to support a desired outcome after seeing the results.
gold standard in experimental design, is the randomized controlled experiment, where participants are randomly assigned to two groups, and then results from the experimental group (who receive a treatment) are compared with the results from the control group (who do not).
Such experiments must be carefully designed to isolate the one factor you are studying. The simplest way to do this is to change just one thing between the two groups.
of observer-expectancy bias (also called experimenter bias), where the cognitive biases of the researchers, or observers, may cause them to influence the outcome in the direction they expected.
Interestingly, just the act of receiving something that you expect to have a positive effect can actually create one, called the placebo effect.
endpoint, the metric that is used to evaluate the hypothesis.
Some examples of objective metrics include whether someone bought a product, is still alive, or clicked a button on a website.
A proxy essentially means a stand-in for something else. Other uses of this mental model include the proxy vote (e.g., absentee ballot) and proxy war (e.g., current conflicts in Yemen and Syria are a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia).
