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The Cliff of Care

too much Importance is the worst thing to put on art, comedy—creativity of any kind. […] If you think this is important, you’re screwed before you write the first word.

—Jerry Seinfeld, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee with Lewis Black

What is the difference between caring too much and not enough? Sometimes it’s just one last straw—one final incident that pushes us over the edge. We see this at our workplaces, contrasting an excited intern with the embattled veteran clocking in and out like a robot. We see it with new parents who trade fashion for durability. And we see it in politics when the news creates such a piercing noise that we simply go deaf to the din.

Like eating or drinking too much, our care has a breaking point. A gluttonous night out can force our stomach from too full to completely empty in an instant, and it is this momentary purge that exemplifies the Cliff of Care. With so many names—outrage fatigue, clarity, burnout, calm, apathy, patience—it can be difficult to know whether the valley beyond the cliff is a safe place to be. As with any journey, it depends on how we got there and our attitude along the way.

Once we reach the cliff’s edge, we can either walk off gracefully, landing softly on the ground below, or get pushed, kicking and screaming, breaking bones on the way down. This is the difference between coming to peace with our situation or becoming apathetic in our resentment. The graceful among us land on their feet through the power of perspective. These are the people who after battling illness, divorce, violence, bankruptcy, discrimination, and many other hardships, still find the positive in each challenge, putting them into perspective. They are calm and kind despite every reason not to be. And they serve as inspiration to “get over” whatever small annoyances we face in life.

Unfortunately, the less gracious cliff jumpers—the ones who bitterly or hopelessly give up the will to care—also exist. Fortunately, the Cliff of Care is not a standalone phenomenon. We may tumble off the cliff and become apathetic to the politics of our world but safely detached at work, no longer wrapping our self-worth in what our boss thinks. This is where awareness can be helpful. Just by knowing about the difference between being on the cliff and being in the valley can help us safely navigate our way.

Detaching emotionally is not something we can will ourselves to do (at least, not immediately). Stepping off the cliff allows us to leave behind our emotional baggage, but first it requires a gradual climb of frustration. This is why telling someone they need to just “get over it” rarely works. Seeing the cliff for what it is can make us come across as callous or cold-hearted when dealing with those who have not yet moved on. Brushing off their emotional concerns as unimportant is seen as dismissive. Rather than pushing them off the cliff to a painful, bitter landing, we must try to remember what it was like to be atop the cliff, empathize, and help guide them down safely.

Conversely, when we’re stranded on the peak of care, pulling our hair out, and wondering why no one else gives a shit, it is difficult to see our position for what it is. We don’t have the perspective. Holding on to what feels important can be blinding. Whether it’s the cleanliness of the kitchen, quarterly sales at work, or death of a loved one, not everyone is going to understand our level of care. And while intense care can motivate us to act, we shouldn’t expect others to follow. When we find ourselves in isolation in a sea of seeming apathy, it may be time for self-reflection. It is immodest to think that we are the only sane people in a world full of crazies.

cliff of care_graph

Confidence Bank Account

Part 5: Charity

This is the final part of a series titled the “Confidence Bank Account.” To start from the beginning, please click here.

confidence_sharing-1 To conclude our discussion, let’s examine a part of the Confidence Bank Account that does not fit the financial analogy: charitable donations. In the financial world, giving money requires actual dollars flowing from one person to another. In the confidence economy, donations can be made without being withdrawn from our accounts. This distinction is possibly the most important aspect of the Confidence Bank Account: We can boost others’ confidence at no cost to our own.

Confidence is as much about others as it is about ourselves. It’s about showing appreciation for other people. Verbal acknowledgment, financial contributions, writing positive online reviews—in whatever form it takes, sharing positive feedback is the currency of our confidence economy, and it’s free to give. In fact, confidence donations can grow our confidence wealth in the process.

Appreciation can help us see the positives in our lives, buffering negative feedback; it can act as an investment in high-yield confidence assets like meaningful relationships; and showing our gratitude can even build upon our personal integrity.

Having confidence does not require some bold, audacious goal. Rather, creating confidence wealth is about doing the little things well. Integrity, gratitude, humility, confidence—these virtues do not stand alone; they are deeply related to who we are, what we are capable of, and what is found within our Confidence Bank Account. And once we are confident, we can afford to take the risks required to make and achieve our most impossible goals.

SUMMARY

C = pF – nF , Confidence = Positive Feedback – Negative Feedback
C = pK(pF) + nK(nF), Confidence = (Positive Disposition Coefficient x Positive Feedback) – (Negative Disposition Coefficient x Negative Feedback)
I = C – D, Integrity = Confidence – ConfiDebt
A = ∞, Charitable giving of confidence (i.e. appreciation) is infinite (and free!)

Equation to fool you into thinking that confidence can be quantified: confidence equation *Disclaimer: The Confidence Bank Account is in no way scientific, mathematically sound, nor inclusive of quantitative data, so please sit back, relax, and enjoy the thought experiment.

Resources:

Bandura, Albert. “Human Agency in Social Cognitive Theory.” American Psychologist 44.9 (1989): 1175. (Source)

(Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies. Dir. Yael Melamede. Roco, 2015. Film Documentary. (Source)

Dubner, Stephen J. “Why Is My Life So Hard?” Audio podcast. Freakanomics Radio. freakanomics.com, 15 March 2017. (Source)

Kahneman, Daniel. “Chapter 24: The Engine of Capitalism.” Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan, 2011.

Manson, Mark. “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.” markmanson.net (8 Jan. 2015). (Source)

Confidence Bank Account

Part 4: Investment Strategy

This is part 4 of a series titled the “Confidence Bank Account.” To start from the beginning, please click here.

If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduce, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. […] Of course, the blessings of optimism are offered only to individuals who are only mildly biased and who are able to “accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality.

—Daniel Kahneman, psychologist, Thinking, Fast and Slow

There are two ways to increase our Confidence Bank Account balance: 1. Earn more or 2. Spend less. A skilled investor chooses investments that yield high returns (earning more) while simultaneously minimizing losses (spending less). This is why natural optimists are natural confidence investors: They focus on positives instead of negatives, increasing the value of their accolades while minimizing the confidence withdrawals of their failures. In this way, natural optimists start out with a huge advantage in life. But while our temperament certainly plays a role, confidence investing can be learned by even the most pessimistic among us.

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To spend less in the confidence economy is to care less. This is not the same as being careless or indifferent; it’s about having priorities—focusing our energy on the what’s important. Learning to have an optimistic outlook leads us to focus more on the positive sides of life. In other words, positivity breeds gratitude, and gratitude leads to huge confidence savings.

In the confidence economy, negativity is what constitutes our spending—either through criticism, self-doubt, scandal, or otherwise. Yet many of us continually invest in negative thinking, negative speech, and negative actions. Some of us even make our living by finding faults in others (ex. dentists). Being grateful, on the other hand, is equivalent to using coupons and shopping on sale. By regularly focusing on our blessings, we decrease the costs of our negativity.

To be clear, there will always be some level of negativity to life. A positive temperament does not protect us against making poor confidence investments, but it can make us more resilient. As renowned psychologist, Albert Bandura, writes, “The important matter is not that difficulties arouse self-doubt, which is a natural immediate reaction, but the speed of recovery of perceived self-efficacy from difficulties.” Or to quote another highly academic source, “I get knocked down, but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down” (Chumbawamba, 1995). Skilled confidence investors know how to cut their losses, focus on the positive, and move forward (rather than dwelling on the past). They also know where to invest.

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Earning more confidence is a matter of investing in high-yield assets. Everyone’s preferences and values are unique; therefore, there are no universal “right” investments. But there are clear differences between putting too much focus on our appearance and social media followers while neglecting to develop useful life skills and meaningful relationships. In economic jargon, we want to invest in confidence assets not liabilities. And as with any good investment account, diversification helps protect against the downside.

To quote television personality, Judge Judy, “Beauty Fades, Dumb is Forever.” Like the depreciation of a new car, physical appearance and other confidence liabilities are depreciating utilities—vehicles to get us from point A to point B. This is not to say we shouldn’t invest in confidence liabilities. They can certainly create value in the short-term. Many of us even use our physical attributes as leverage to achieve long-term ends (ex. Sugaring, as in “sugar daddy” relationships). But over-investing in liabilities can lead to a lack of confidence later in life. Everyone ages, and when we do, we need confidence assets in our portfolio.

Unlike confidence liabilities, assets compound over time. Developing valuable skills, individual passions, meaningful work, friends and family—these types of investments have the ability to grow exponentially. Investing in deep relationships, for instance, allows us to be comfortable with who we are and create a safe and secure environment to build our confidence wealth.

But meaningful relationships do not always yield short-term confidence. In fact, our closest friends and family can often be so brutally honest that they crush our confidence. That’s when we focus on the positives of life, put short-term criticism into perspective, and move on. That’s when we learn to be skilled confidence investors.

SUMMARY

C = pF – nF , Confidence = Positive Feedback – Negative Feedback
C = pK(pF) + nK(nF), Confidence = (Positive Disposition Coefficient x Positive Feedback) – (Negative Disposition Coefficient x Negative Feedback)
pK [negative demeanor] < 1 < pK [positive demeanor], If Positive Disposition Coefficient is >1, consistent with a Positive Demeanor (enhancing positive feedback)
nK [positive demeanor] < 1 < nK [negative demeanor], If Negative Disposition Coefficient is <1, consistent with Positive Demeanor (minimizing negative feedback)

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*Disclaimer: The Confidence Bank Account is in no way scientific, mathematically sound, nor inclusive of quantitative data, so please sit back, relax, and enjoy the thought experiment.

Confidence Bank Account

Part 3: Integrity

This is part 3 of a series titled the “Confidence Bank Account.” To start from the beginning, please click here.

[Lily:] Hey, Barney, it’s weird not seeing you in a suit. What’s going on?

[Barney:] Uh, not much. My entire sexual history was built on a rotting foundation of lies. My whole identity is lost in a pit of menthol ashes. Work is good.

—How I Met Your Mother, Season 3, Episode 10: “The Yips” (2007)

There is debt in the world of self-confidence (let’s call it, “ConfiDebt,” for short). This debt occurs when we make a promise, either to ourselves or to others, and then never deliver. There’s an initial feel-good aspect at the time of any promise—attending a friend’s stand up comedy performance or a child’s ballet recital, we may say “I’m such a good friend/parent/sibling/etc. I’m going to do X, because I promised.” But these initial positive feelings (confidence deposits) come at a cost: We must actually do what we promise to do. And just like a credit card, if we do not pay off our debt in a timely manner (ex. at the time of the comedy show), the cost of those seemingly little promises add up at insanely high interest rates.

This idea of purchasing confidence on credit goes beyond friendships. Swindling, fabricating data, general dishonesty—people use these techniques to gain prestige, material wealth, and positive feedback all the time. There are repercussions to our actions, however. Hindus may call it “Karma,” Wall Street may call it a “correction,” emotionally it’s often felt as guilt, but whatever the manifestation, buying confidence with dishonesty is like racking up huge amounts of debt and not having the means to pay it back. When lenders come to collect, it leads to personal ruin—both in actual money and in confidence. We cannot prop ourselves up on a foundation of lies forever. So while overall confidence is an important KPI of a person’s life, it is a person’s integrity that is a more accurate indicator.

In the Confidence Bank Account, Confidence is the gross total of our account, but Integrity is the net. In business-speak, Confidence lest ConfiDebt is Integrity. Or, to put it another way, integrity is our confidence earned through honest, healthy principles—well-deserved and well-earned confidence—the opposite of the prototypical 1980s investment banker without moral compass.

To have integrity—to have a net positive in our Confidence Bank Account—requires a balanced approach to life. High integrity indicates honesty, positive self-esteem, self-assurance, being well-grounded, and often a diversified portfolio of confidence assets (including positive personal relationships). Finding the right personal investment strategy and optimizing our current portfolio in the confidence economy is an ongoing process. But more on that next week…

SUMMARY

C = pF – nF , Confidence = Positive Feedback – Negative Feedback
I = C – D, Integrity = Confidence – ConfiDebt

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*Disclaimer: The Confidence Bank Account is in no way scientific, mathematically sound, nor inclusive of quantitative data, so please sit back, relax, and enjoy the thought experiment.

Confidence Bank Account

Part 2: Income Streams

This is part 2 of a series titled the “Confidence Bank Account.” To start from the beginning, please click here.

Our lives are made up one simple cycle: Doing, feedback, adjusting (repeat). Within this cycle, the balance between feedback is key to our self-confidence. Everyone has a unique mix of internal and external feedback in their lives. The difference between us is in the ratio between the two—how much confidence we earn in either the public or private sector: Do we primarily seek approval through our own critiques or through the opinions and evaluations of others?

Like the financial world, individuals often gravitate toward one confidence sector more than the other. As people frequently fluctuate between the two, it is impossible to know the motivations of those around us. From the scantily clad bombshell at the bar to the high-achieving, future Madam President, we cannot know if they work primarily for their own approval or the approval of others. We can only know ourselves (and even that can be tricky).

PUBLIC SECTOR

Some of us earn the majority of our confidence from outside accolades. In fact, this is how all of us start in the confidence economy. As infants, the outside world is entirely new, so we explore it for signs of encouraging feedback—a parent’s loving voice, a bright colored toy, or, alternatively, a not-so-delicious handful of dirt.

As we get older, we begin to develop our own internal assessment of how we’re doing (private sector), but public feedback can continue to guide us. The Confidence Public Sector can provide a sense of reality that we would not otherwise have. After all, no one’s perception of reality is 100% accurate. We use others’ input to improve and help validate our actions. (A fresh set of eyes can make all the difference after spending countless hours on a project.) That being said, there are downsides to focusing too heavily on the opinions of others.

Relying on public feedback for our confidence puts us in a vulnerable position: Others’ preferences—not our own—dictate how we gain approval, how we earn our confidence. Surround ourselves by honest, moral, hard-working people, and the Confidence Public Sector can provide a lucrative stream of income. But if death and destruction are what our surroundings seek, then death and destruction are what will be rewarded.

Unfortunately, when our self-esteem is running low, we may be “low-confidence” for that very reason: Our surroundings are not ideal. And having low-confidence can make internal validation—a private sector job—difficult (or even impossible). There is a minimum confidence requirement before we have the space to self-evaluate. We must have enough self-confidence before we can trust our internal judgements. Just as an infant must first learn to crawl before he walks, we must build up our Confidence Bank Account with public feedback before moving into the private sector.

PRIVATE SECTOR

For those of us who work primarily in the private sector of the confidence economy, we enjoy the control that comes with creating confidence for ourselves. Like growing our own food rather than relying on others, private confidence can protect us against negative outside forces. One example of this protective mechanism is the internal pep talk.

If our daily grind is relatively negative, it can be helpful to periodically stop and remind ourselves that we’re “on the right track,” that our efforts are not in vain, and that we can and will achieve our goals. This type of internal validation can be extremely productive. We are making small, frequent deposits into our Confidence Bank Account, which grow into a substantial sum over time. But, as with all things, there are limitations, including at least two caveats to private sector earnings:

The first caveat is that self-delusion is a real risk of private confidence. When we make an unfounded confidence deposit (ex. telling ourselves how great we are at work, when there is considerable evidence to the contrary), we are using borrowed confidence points; we are, in essence, taking a small confidence loan that will need to be paid back. And “paying back confidence” means performing to the level we’ve stated we would. When we are unable to deliver on our claims, a confidence default occurs, and the negative consequences far outweigh the confidence boost of the initial loan. But more on that next time.

The second caveat to the Confidence Private Sector is that our natural temperament makes a huge difference in how effective internal validation can be. If a person is inherently negative, working in the private sector may backfire. Crippling self-doubt can blind us to positive praise and external accolades, forcing even the most laudable deeds to go unnoticed. Confidence earned with a negative mindset goes undeposited, like earning a large paycheck and leaving it in our wallet forever.

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If we are unable or unwilling to accept our good deeds as positive, then whether we work primarily in the public or private sector makes no difference. But ultimately, we need both internal and external feedback to have a balanced Confidence Bank Account. Too much internal validation and we lose touch with reality. Too much external feedback and we fall victim to the opinions, values, and desires of others, in turn, taking away one of the most important components of the Confidence Bank Account—ourselves.

SUMMARY

C = pF – nF , Confidence = Positive Feedback – Negative Feedback
pF = eVL + iVL, Positive Feedback = External Validation + Internal Validation
nF = eDS + iDS, Negative Feedback = External Disapproval + Internal Disapproval

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*Disclaimer: The Confidence Bank Account is in no way scientific, mathematically sound, nor inclusive of quantitative data, so please sit back, relax, and enjoy the thought experiment.

Confidence Bank Account

Part 1: Account Balance

We all have a Confidence Bank Account. Some people seem to have an endless supply of confidence, which buffers them from criticism, mistakes, and failures. Others seem to be forever “in the red,” suffering from self-doubt, low self-esteem, and even depression. But where does this elusive quality come from? How can we earn more of it? And why do some people seem to be immune to the psychologic effects of failure?

At the most basic level, our lives are a cycle of doing, receiving feedback, making adjustments, and repeating. The more positive feedback we receive, the more confident we become; we’re “on the right track.” On the surface, the Confidence Bank Account is a simple concept: Positive feedback is a deposit into the account, negative feedback is a withdrawal, and any positivity left over means we’re confident. As we know from experience, however, self-confidence isn’t so simple.

There are modulating (modifying) factors that affect our confidence levels. Most of us can probably think of at least one person who, despite constant criticism and teasing, seems unfazed or unaware—blissfully ignorant to the negativity. For the rest of us (the people who are very aware of the feedback we receive from the world), our ego fluctuates with the tide of negative and positive validation, both internally and externally.

Theoretically, a person with more positive than negative feedback in her life has more confidence overall. After all, history has shown that, on average, her actions are more likely to be rewarded than punished. But like money in an actual bank account, confidence is unevenly distributed in the population, is subject to market forces, and people make poor investment decisions. Also, while positive feedback may create significant deposits at the time—whether good grades in school, complements on our looks, or the honeymoon happiness of a new relationship—there is deflation to worry about. Those big deposits are less valuable as time goes by.

But why does any of this matter? Well, confidence itself is just one aspect of life, but it serves as a valuable proxy for several other factors. It acts as a KPI (Key Performance Indicator). For most of us, being genuinely confident serves as a rough estimate for the health of our interpersonal relationships, having strong guiding principles, our mental well-being, and life stability overall. It’s not a perfect metric, but it’s a useful litmus test. With a handful of other KPIs (ex. humility, integrity, and appreciation to name a few), we can monitor and evaluate the overall health of our lives.

In this multipart series, I will attempt to shed light on the Confidence Bank Account as a whole, including key sources of revenue, confidence investment strategies, confidence debt, maximizing profits, and charitable donations. It is my personal goal that the financial analogy will help clarify the often ambiguous and elusive qualities of life—the parts that make life worth living.

SUMMARY:

C = pF – nF , Confidence = Positive Feedback – Negative Feedback

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*Disclaimer: The Confidence Bank Account is in no way scientific, mathematically sound, nor inclusive of quantitative data, so please sit back, relax, and enjoy the thought experiment.

Uncategorized

Rock-Paper-Scissors: Body, Heart, Mind?

heart-beats-body I’m hurt, no doubt about it. I’m not worried about the pain. I don’t care about the pain, don’t even feel it. I’m not even worried about hurting myself anymore than I already have—no, I’m worried about hurting the team.

—Ray Lewis, former NFL linebacker, I Feel Like Going On: Life, Game, and Glory

Rock-paper-scissors is a hand-gesture game played to settle childish disputes (or so I thought until three days ago). As it turns out, the millennia-old game helps explain a lot in the world. Rock-Paper-Scissors is surprisingly well represented in academic literature—alternative male-mating strategies in lizards, antibiotic-mediated antagonism, protecting public goods from the tragedy of the commons, and that’s just getting started. The New York Times even has an online version of the game to play a computer, which pulls from over 200,000 previous rounds (p.s. It will probably beat you). But why is this simple game so ubiquitous?

We often think of win-lose games in terms of two teams battling head to head; however, nature (including human nature) rarely works in such a direct way. An action in one area often has unintended consequences in another. Rock-Paper-Scissors is a game of checks and balances. And with only three variables, it is the simplest version. If the goal is, for example, to reduce the amount of Scissors in the world, then Rock should be thrown time and time again. Throw a lot of Rocks and we’ll get rid of the Scissors, but with less Scissors, more Papers survive—leading to trouble for all those Rocks we threw. This is the basic premise for what scholars call “circular dominance,” otherwise known as Rock-Paper-Scissor dynamics. And this concept helps explain much of the human experience.

While we all have different personal motivations, there’s a universal internal tug-o-war—a motivation triad—that can either get in the way of or optimize our goals. The balance between our physiologic needs (Body), our emotions/feelings (Heart), and our logical reasoning and processing (Mind) are what create the diverse range of behavior we see everyday. Being human may not be simple, but let’s take a closer look at a simple game to see if we can improve our performance:

Body—like Rock, it’s solid, dependable, strong, and can be used like a weapon.
Heart—like Paper, it can be written on, read, shared, crumpled, or torn.
Mind—like Scissors, it’s sharp, precise, specialized, but can be dangerous.

Heart beats Body. What motivates a person to push through the pain, in order to run one more lap in practice? What about staying awake all night to finish a project with an impending deadline? What possesses a person to start a fight despite obvious physical danger? Or to charge into enemy territory, bayonets at the ready? Human emotions can push our bodies beyond comfort. They transcend our normal physiology, creating adrenaline rushes to push through the pain, get passed the tired, or forget the hunger. Depending on the circumstance, this can be an advantage or disadvantage. Professional athletes, like Ray Lewis (quoted above), use their “pumped up” emotional state to achieve a high level of physical performance. But there are instances when emotions can put our bodies in jeopardy—like fighting for pride, love, or anger. And we can all relate to those sleepless nights, tossing and turning over emotional stresses at work, arguments with a significant other, or any number of other feelings.

Mind beats Heart. When we’re up at night, working ourselves up into a sleepless, emotional frenzy, only a calm mind can put our anxiety into perspective. Emotions can cloud our understanding of the big picture, making us feel like the emotion we are experiencing at that moment is the most important thing in the world. By adding context and perspective, our Minds can neutralize our irrational side. This concept of primitive and evolved brain is represented in different ways throughout the literature; the Heart/Mind dichotomy goes by different names—Think vs. Blink, System 2 vs. System 1, Analytical vs. Intuitive—but essentially it’s this: We all have an immediate reaction brain (Heart) that is fueled by basic emotional needs (ex. love and respect), and when we feel those needs are in conflict or under attack, we tend to react. Only our level-headed Mind can defeat the negative side of emotions.

Body beats Mind. Obviously, the Mind does not always beat the Heart, but perhaps it’s because the Mind has already been defeated. Graduate education is rife with unhealthy study behavior—caffeine binges, all-nighters, a diet consisting of power bars and skittles. But the lie of this type of behavior is thinking that the Body doesn’t matter—that if a student can cram for one more hour at 3 A.M. then he will perform better on an exam. There is an eventual breaking point, a point where our minds starts to get cloudy, our work starts to slip, we begin to forget things, and have trouble sayings words. That point is when the body is forcing a shutdown. Being chronically fatigued, having insufficient nutrients in one’s diet, even physiologic sexual frustration can all play a role in how clearly our thinking is. Being deprived of physiological needs wears down our willpower and pushes us from a mind-deciding person to an emotion-deciding one. And taken to the extreme—extreme hunger, extreme thirst, extreme sickness—we become physiological-driven creatures.

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It is helpful to recognize the interrelationship between the three parts of ourselves—Body, Heart, Mind. Knowing how they interact, we can buffer known problems. For example, after starting a business, launching a product, or quitting a job, there are a lot of unknowns; the task at hand has just begun. That reality can be an emotional time, but it’s a known emotional time. To get through challenges like the stress of not yet finding a new job, we require clear thinking about the big picture, and doing so requires our bodies to be well fed, well rested, and somewhat active. And that’s just one example.

Body-Heart-Mind dynamics are as important for interpersonal relationships as they are for self-improvement. Often, we are not able to see our crazy while we’re in the crazy. That’s why it’s important to recognize it in others—friends, family, spouse, colleagues, etc. Reacting emotionally when faced with someone that’s emotional is rarely the right course of action—”Don’t fight fire with fire.” Instead, helping an emotional friend see the rationale side of a situation, a different perspective, and adding some context to an emotional and confusing time is what will help. Knowing ourselves and others—having an awareness of what’s going on—that’s the first step. What we do with that information is up to us.

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Semmann, Dirk, Hans-Jürgen Krambeck, and Manfred Milinski. “Volunteering leads to rock–paper–scissors dynamics in a public goods game.” Nature425.6956 (2003): 390-393. (Source)

Too Smart for Your Own Good

Beliefs (or lack thereof)

fairy-stare What is religion? It’s community, history, cultural identity; it’s a way to make sense of the world. Some of us use religion as our primary source of answers; others use mysticism; others: science; and still others use a combination of methods. This is not an argument for one way over the others, but rather a look at beliefs through several different lenses:

We all try to make sense of the world. Our methods may differ, but we are all seeking to understand the same universe:

People find themselves in a mysterious and mysteriously ordered universe. They find themselves equipped with sort of intense moral instincts. They have religious experiences, and they develop systems that explain those.

—Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion, speaking on Real Time with Bill Maher (2012)

Religion plays a comforting role for some people:

[P]eople who lose personal control take comfort in religion, because it suggests to them that the world is under God’s control and, therefore, predictable and nonrandom.

—Zuckerman et al., “The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity” (2013)

But the comfort of belief is not confined to religious doctrine:

Human beings are believing animals, period. […] Even secular liberals have their [beliefs…] What is the idea of universal human rights if not a metaphysical principle? Can you find universal human rights under a microscope? Is it in the laws of physics?”

—Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion, speaking on Real Time with Bill Maher (2012)

It is becoming more difficult to understand a world defined by modern technology:

The modern technologies of the day are a bit of a black box for the average person. […] the average person I meet on the street doesn’t feel any kind of connection to the technologies that are defining their world and shaping the fabric of society.

—Steve Jurveston, billionaire tech investor, “Acclerating Rich-Poor Gap,” Solve for X (2013)

But humans are resilient creatures: Make the world incomprehensible, and they will find a way to comprehend it:

The explosion in communication technologies over the past decades has re-oriented society and put more psychological strain on us all to find our identities and meaning. For some people, the way to ease this strain is to actually reject complexity and ambiguity for absolutist beliefs and traditional ideals.

—Mark Manson, author, “The Rise of Fundamentalist Belief” (2013)

While we are getting better at adapting to the ever-changing world…:

“The rate at which we can adapt is increasing,” said Teller. “A thousand years ago, it probably would have taken two or three generations to adapt to something new.” By 1900, the time it took to adapt got down to one generation. “We might be so adaptable now,” said Teller, “that it only takes ten to fifteen years to get used to something new.”

—Thomas Friedman quoting Astro Teller, CEO of Google’s X Research & Development Laboratory

…the world is changing at an ever-increasing rate:

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).

—Ray Kurzwell, computer scientist,“The Law of Accelerating Returns” (2001)

Technology may soon make everyone feel as if they’ve lost control:

“If the technology platform for society can now turn over in five to seven years, but it takes ten to fifteen years to adapt to it,” Teller explained, “we will all feel out of control, because we can’t adapt to the world as fast as its changing.“

—Astro Teller, CEO of Google X, quoted in Thank You for Being Late (2016)

And while some people think the world is still divided into those who “understand” and those who don’t…:

[Disconnection from technology is] a different kind of estrangement. It’s almost like a cognitive separation—those who know and those who don’t know about the world they live in.

—Steve Jurveston, billionaire tech investor, “Acclerating Rich-Poor Gap,” Solve for X (2013)

…technological advancement will eventually humble even our brightest minds:

“None of us have the capacity to deeply comprehend more than one of these fields [genomic cloning, medical robotics, artificial intelligence]—the sum of human knowledge has far outstripped any individual’s capacity to learn—and even experts in these fields can’t predict what will happen in the next decade or century.”

—Astro Teller, CEO of Google X, quoted in Thank You for Being Late (2016)

For, at the end of the day, we are all humans (no matter how intelligent). And that is the thesis of this entire “Too Smart for Your Own Good” series:

You are never too smart to be humble.

Intelligence does not make a person immune to faulty logic, insensitivity, poor timing, or technological change. There are biological limitations to being human. However we choose to make sense of the world—whatever strategies for life we employ—we are making a personal choice. So remember: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

Additional Reading:

Urban, Tim. “Religion for the Nonreligious.” waitbutwhy.com (2014): (Source)

Sharov, Alexei A., and Richard Gordon. “Life before earth.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1304.3381 (2013). (Source) (Summary)

Zuckerman, Miron, Jordan Silberman, and Judith A. Hall. “The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A meta-analysis and some proposed explanations.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 17.4 (2013): 325-354. (Source)

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This is the fifth installment of a series titled “Too Smart for Your Own Good.”

Too Smart for Your Own Good

The Benefits of Doubt

big-head

This is a story of two brainiacs—both pioneers in their chosen fields, both knowingly intelligent, and both recipients of the Nobel Prize. Despite their similarities, the stories of William Shockley—and his eventual demise—and Daniel Kahneman’s ultimate redemption differ in each genius’s relationship with self-doubt. While doubt is often cast as the villain of our lives, this is a different tale, one where doubt is the protagonist, the saving grace. This is a story of two men whose success and failure hinged on the benefits of doubt.

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William Shockley grew up in California during the 1920s, receiving a B.S. from California Institute of Technology in 1932. Quantum physics was still a fresh discovery, and Shockley reportedly, “absorbed most of it with astonishing ease.” In 1936, he earned his Ph.D. from M.I.T. and began his innovative career at Bell Laboratories, one of the most prolific R&D enterprises in the world. As a research director at Bell, Shockley helped invent the transistor (as in “transistor radio”), for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956—an achievement that would lead to his eventual undoing.

That same year, Shockley moved back to Mountain View, California to start Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the first technology company in what would become Silicon Valley. As a researcher and a manager, William Shockley was brilliant, innovative, but domineering. His arrogance at Shockley Labs was a point of contention among the employees and a problem that would only be exacerbated after the Nobel Prize. Winning the prize seemed to eradicate any residual self-doubt left from his youth. Shockley became deaf to outside opinion, blind to reason, and unforgivingly egotistical. In 1957, less than a year after becoming a Nobel Laureate, eight of Shockley’s best and brightest left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor.

The Shockley schism was in large part due to William Shockley’s unwillingness to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors despite his employees’ belief that silicon would be the future. His hubris would be his end, as Shockley Labs never recovered from missing the silicon boom. The cohort who left would later create numerous technology firms in Silicon Valley (including the tech giant, Intel), giving birth to what has become one of the most innovative regions in the world.

William Shockley, himself, faded into obscurity, estranged from his children, his reputation tarnished after years of public touting of eugenics. Along with Henry Ford, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, and Mahatma Gandhi, Time Magazine would name William Shockley as one of the “100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.” Yet he died bitter and disgraced in 1989, still headstrong, self-doubt still absent from his life. For Shockley, arrogance and intellect seemed to be inextricably linked; however, such a fate is not inevitable.

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Daniel Kahneman’s story is different. It’s one where self-aware intellect meets a healthy dose of self-doubt. Born in 1936, Kahneman grew up a Jew in France during the Nazi occupation. His family was displaced several times and his experiences with Nazis would show him firsthand the complexities and peculiarities of the human mind—a foreshadowing of his illustrious career in psychology.

As an adolescent after World War II, Kahneman moved to Palestine where in eighth-grade he finally found like-minded friends. Acknowledging both his intellect and its dangers, he writes, “It was good for me not be exceptional anymore.” While Kahneman knew he was smart, he always saw his deficits (and sometimes to a fault). As Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Undoing Project, puts it, “Everything [Daniel Kahneman] thinks is interesting. He just doesn’t believe it.” And this self-doubt would lead directly to his success.

After getting degrees from Hebrew University and U.C. Berkley, Kahneman’s work in psychology would take off after his first collaboration with Amos Tversky. Between 1971 and 1981, Tversky and Kahneman would publish five journal articles that would be cited over 1,000 times. Their work in cognitive biases—largely fueled by the ability to doubt their own minds—has been instrumental in upending the long-standing belief that humans are purely rational creatures.

In 2002, Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that even the brightest among us make mental mistakes everyday—prospect theory, cognitive biases and heuristics. Like William Shockley, winning the Nobel Prize would be a turning point in Kahneman’s life; unlike Shockley, the prize made Kahneman better not worse. Michael Lewis again comments, “[T]he person who we know post-Nobel Prize is entirely different from the person who got the Nobel Prize […] he is much less gloomy, much less consumed with doubts.” In a stroke of irony, it would take what is arguably the most prestigious award in the world to finally provide Kahneman with the validation that his thoughts on doubt are worthwhile.

Kahneman’s career has been largely focused on the benefits of doubt—the idea that humans may be mistaken in our confidence and intuition, and need to question our assuredness. While his legacy is still to be seen, Kahneman’s work may prove to change how humans think about thinking forever. His impact may even put him on Time’s list of “100 Most Important People of the 21st Century.”

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The stories of Shockley and Kahneman serve as both a warning and a call to action. Doubt should not be seen as a curse, but rather a necessity—a blessing, even. It is when we are not in doubt that we should take notice. Arrogance at any level can blind us. We don’t have to be a savant to be egotistical or have a “big head” (yet the smartest among us are often guilty of this). Only through our doubts can we expect to learn from others, question our assumptions, and, ultimately, be successful long-term. As soon as we stop doubting, stop questioning, we stop growing.

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This is the fourth installment of a series titled “Too Smart for Your Own Good.”

Too Smart for Your Own Good

Ignorance Is Bliss-ish

ignorance-is-bliss Life is like pouring concrete. (Bear with me here.) The world provides an endless supply of mystery—raw concrete mix—and over time this concrete pours out into our lives, moving from the unknown (concrete mixer) to the known (exposed, wet concrete). We learn new things, have new experiences, and make new discoveries. In this process, we shape our new knowledge into a unique worldview—a concrete foundation. And just like concrete, our worldviews harden over time.

Children are exposed to so much newness that the concrete flows out like a hole in a dam. They mold the onslaught of new information as well as they can, trying to make room for the next layers. As we get older, however, the concrete that once flowed freely begins to slow. For adults, finding new knowledge comes with a cost—our time and energy. Building upon our worldview foundation requires actively seeking the unknown—journeying to the land of new information at the risk (or benefit) of altering our concrete structure.

There are only two ways to change a concrete worldview: Addition or subtraction; either we (a.) add more concrete—more knowledge—that can be molded around the existing structure, or (b.) we take a jack-hammer to our concrete edifice in an attempt to reconfigure its appearance. The former option is more delicate, incremental, and self-directed. The latter is less controlled, more dramatic, and often occurs by outside influence. Experiences that fly in the face of our worldview are processed in different ways by different people. And while the truth has a way of eroding our most egregious misconceptions, some people’s structures are more protected than others.

The world is essentially made up of three types of people: 1. Never Quitters, 2. Bitter Quitters, and 3. Happy Quitters. This is to say that there are people who persist, people who give up in discouragement, and people who are content watching rather than participating. Let’s examine each of these three groups using a totally nonscientific nor rigorous methodology—the clichés that they most represent.

Never Quitters are the persistent, “lifelong learners” who continually pour and shape concrete onto their worldview foundation. They are so named for the motivational cliché, “Never give up.” Bitter Quitters are ex-Never Quitters who, in their search of the unknown, stumbled upon an undesirable reality and decided to go no further. This group is summarized by the phrase, “Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t.” And the final group—the Happy Quitters—may know of a world beyond their bubble, but choose not to explore it, because… well… why would they? They’re content with their lives. Theirs is a comfortable bubble, like being tucked under warm, cozy blankets in a frigid bedroom. And for this group, “Ignorance is bliss.“

In a world where, as YaleGlobal Online reports, “the gap between job requirements and available skills is widening,” and technological advancement is outpacing society’s ability to keep up, it seems “obvious” to the Never Quitters that continual learning is imperative. To a Never Quitter, bowing out of the world of learning seems like an admission of defeat. “Now, more than ever, is a time for continual learning, up-skilling, and growing to stay relevant in an ever-changing landscape,” the Never Quitter may say. But they are missing a crucial point.

There is value in the known, the familiar, and the comfortable (especially if such a worldview has a solid foundation). The known allows for a state of low-anxiety and contentment. Also, we all become either a Bitter or Happy Quitter eventually. The 97-year-old lifelong learner may decide that he’s perfectly content not understanding how Twitter works. It’s a common mistake of the “Too Smart for Your Own Good” cohort to think that everyone would benefit from journeying down the Path of the Mental Unknown. They fail to acknowledge the personal benefits of a comfortable, insulated worldview, which Quitters regularly enjoy. In order to coexist, people are not required to agree on how best to live life, but we do need to understand one another’s perspective. How each of us shapes the concrete that life provides is completely up to us. concrete-life

This is the third installment of a series titled “Too Smart for Your Own Good.”

For more information on lifelong learners in America, consider reading the following report: Pew Research Center, March, 2016, “Lifelong Learning and Technology.” (Source)