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We often think someone is wrong because they see things from a different perspective than we do. Relativity helps us to understand that there is more than one way to see everything. That doesn’t mean everyone’s perspective is equally valid, only that we might not have the most complete view into a problem or situation.
Our perspective is very much unique to us, as both Galileo and Einstein so vividly demonstrated. In the day-to-day world that we live in, this means that you are seeing what nobody else sees but also that you do not automatically, unconsciously see through the eyes of others.
People rewrite and reshape their memories, often to fit their existing beliefs. We often feel committed to our original perception and unconsciously adjust our memories to support what we think we originally saw.
We have all been in situations where we have a totally different perspective on events than the person standing next to us. It’s important to be aware of and compensate for different perspectives if you want to get the most complete picture possible of the situation you are in. What you see is never all there is.
When you see someone doing something that doesn’t make sense to you, ask yourself what the world would have to look like to you for those actions to make sense.
How other people frame something is their vantage point. It’s not an unobstructed description of reality, but rather their individual perspective.
Making efforts to understand someone’s view helps you understand their frame, their set of beliefs and biases that guide how they see their world.
What matters is understanding the complexity and value of multiple perspectives. No one sees it all. Multiple perspectives layered together reduce blind spots and offer us a more textured and truer sense of the underlying reality.
Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement.
According to Kahneman, people are willing to risk losing $100 for every $250 of potential gains.1 The loss aversion coefficient is 1:2.5.
Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.2 When it comes to reciprocity, we need to understand, “We are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains.”
Evolutionary biologists argue that our tendency to engage in reciprocal behavior is a natural product of evolution. You are more likely to survive if you receive help from others. And you are more likely to receive that help if you have offered assistance in the past. So the genes that encode the reciprocal instinct were more likely to be passed on. And thus the fact that the human species has made it to now is directly dependent on our building social interactions that are reliable, useful, and trustworthy.
The more people you help, the more people you will have willing to help you.
it’s a normal feeling that ties to our evolutionary programming and sense of fairness. We even use it as a form of bonding.2
benefiting our own group, even if it might not. Second, seeing things go wrong for other individuals gives us a stronger sense of our own superiority because we look and feel better in comparison. We naturally position ourselves within hierarchies based on every possible quality and are highly sensitive to where we stand in relation to others. Any sign of their inferiority transpires to be a plus for us.4 Status is always relative.
A lot of people seem to expect the world to just hand them things without putting in any effort. This is a poor strategy because it doesn’t align with the human behavior you can observe around you every day.
If you want an amazing relationship with your partner, be an amazing partner.
People tend to receive what they offer to the world.
There are more ways for peanut butter and jelly to contaminate each other’s containers than to remain completely pure. To the extent that chance is operating, it is likely that a closed system that has some order will move toward disorder, which offers so many more possibilities.”
Keeping things as they are requires almost no effort and involves little uncertainty. We need force to effect change, and force requires effort. This model offers a lens to help us understand resistance to change and why we fail ourselves when we get complacent.
Most of the time, our consumption patterns are based on habit, not new thinking.
Inertia as a lens shows us that beliefs can become habits. Habits are entrenched behaviors, some of which are good, while others are bad.
Thus, sometimes the inertia of our beliefs hinders us, such as when they make us blind to new opportunities. Or when we dismiss new information or ideas because they don’t fit with what we think we know about the world.
The inertia of belief can make it difficult to cause real change in the world. But that same inertia can help those who are determined to cause change to hold onto their beliefs and push through.
It’s human nature to allow the current state to remain as changing it requires us to expend energy.
Getting started is the hardest part. Once something is moving in a direction, it’s much easier to keep it in motion. But once something is in motion, it’s hard to stop.
shaping our environment to reduce the challenges of opposing forces is a key to improving productivity.
First, what is easy in one environment might be harder in another. For instance, what we can accomplish in times of peace is different than what we can accomplish in times of war. Second, we also learn that the main forces relevant to a particular situation depend on the scale you are operating at.
To achieve our aims, reducing resistance is often easier than using more force. While often hidden, friction and viscosity work against us whenever we try and do something. To overcome resistance, we often default to using more force when simply reducing the friction or viscosity will do.
This model teaches us that it’s much more important to pay attention to where you are going and not how fast you are moving.
While speed ensures movement, velocity produces a result.
Once you have judgment, you want to continue to leverage it in order to decrease the amount of effort needed to achieve your goals.
wasn’t until we developed tools that allowed us to leverage small changes in individual performance that we started to see a lot of variation in productivity.
In any system, it’s natural for parts to continuously wear and need replacing.
We have to deal with the environment we are in, not the one we wish we were in. Adaptations are successful relative to their performance in a specific environment, relative to the pressure and competition the organisms face. We don’t have to be objectively best, just better than those we are competing against.
adaptability is about recognizing when the way you have done things in the past is becoming less and less successful in a changing environment.
You can’t stop adapting, because no one around you is stopping. If you do, your competitive position declines, bringing your survival into question.
What we learn from exaptation is that we don’t always know the value of something at the outset, and there doesn’t always have to be a justification for doing everything.
what exaptation is fundamentally about is flexibility. We cannot know the exact pressures we will face in the future. So what we need is a box of diverse tools that can be used and combined in almost a limitless number of ways to meet the challenges we face.
Survival of a business often depends on being able to change quickly.
The knowledge we’ve accrued, the lessons we’ve learned, are all available to us at any given moment to forge new paths in the environments we are in. The most amazing part of this concept is that it happens on two levels.
Complacency will kill you. The stronger we are relative to others, the less willing we generally are to change. We see strength as an immediate advantage that we don’t want to compromise. However, it’s not strength that survives, but adaptability.
It is not necessarily what is available that matters. What is scarce can be paramount too. We can see this in our own lives as well. If you skip on sleep to have more time, tiredness then becomes the limiting factor to your productivity, not time. In manufacturing, a bottleneck is a similar concept. A factory process can only move as fast as the slowest step. Likewise, in mathematics we refer to multiplying by zero which is akin to the Law of the Minimum—put a zero at the end of a multiplicative calculation and it cancels out the numbers before it, no matter how high.
Many species of animals only stick around because individuals have evolved to display completely selfless behaviors. If a behavior is beneficial overall for a population, despite its impact on the individual, it is likely to be selected for.
How do you hit the sweet spot between execution of strategy and flexibility to adapt to changing conditions? There are four elements of commander’s intent: formulate, communicate, interpret, and implement.
Hierarchies in the human world act as information filters causing us to potentially miss opportunities and ideas. The way we organize ourselves is often a default to our instincts on leadership and authority.
Our hierarchical organizations are where we derive our ego, status, and reputation, and they are what conditions us to focus on growing ourselves rather than growing others.
Hierarchies reduce creativity.
“the fashions they feature are as much products of social competition as the finest bird feathers or the sweetest birdsong.”
The easiest way to lead, it turns out, is to serve.”
