People only behave unpredictably when we don’t understand their perspective.
Category: Contemplations
You are delusional
You Act as if people are watching you, when nobody is paying attention. Have anxiety about an airplane crashing, and don’t think twice about hopping on a motorcycle. Talk to people that are dead, loved ones, and it comforts you. Are an expert, yet feel insecure and speak with reservations. Are a novice, yet speak with certainty and confidence. Think…
Less is more
Pricing is not rational, great example:
This example is overkill
If you’re sharing an example, especially if you’re teaching, and the words “this example is overkill” come out of your mouth, maybe listen to what you’re saying. Perhaps another example would suffice. Perhaps something less complex? When you recognize this as a teacher, you can be certain there will be students that can’t connect the dots.
When criticism should be praise
I was reviewing a presentation today when I felt disturbed by the specifics of an example. The example was helping people look at the contents of a very large text file on a computer. At first glance the file appeared empty. That seemed like a bad example, why not have some contents to scroll through? Then, I realized, at the…
The past is as uncertain as the future.
Surely you can relate to the notion that the future is mysterious. This is troubling to many of us, in the form of anxiety. Part of the unease with uncertainty is a false sense of certainty about the past. It’s as if after something happens, we are no longer uncertain about it. But, ask yourself, what did you do a…
Control is illusory
Inquiring about how we can control other people is often the wrong pursuit. In searching for ways to manage others, we fail to realize that we don’t really have control over our own actions. When is the last time you commanded your body to go to sleep? You don’t, you lie down and wait to fall asleep. You don’t flip…
Center of the universe mental misfiring
Center of the universe bias (perhaps complex?): When you worry about what other people think about what you’re doing, when in reality nobody else has a clue what you are doing because they’re too worried about what you might be thinking of what they’re doing. This explains a lot of life, for example, it’s a common impediment to people joining…
It’s not a matter of principle
Yesterday I was getting some numbers ready for my accountant. I was looking up our bills from Time Warner for internet over the last year. I’ve gone through quite the rigmarole this last year with swapping out cable modems, probably 6 times, so there’s a baseline level of frustration just thinking about internet access. In looking at our bill history…
For Example
I used to pride myself on thinking abstractly. For example, creating a software model to mirror the behavior of agricultural futures trading. But I’ve since learned that thinking abstractly is easy and coming up with an example is hard or just not intuitive. For example, I just reviewed a course on business needs analysis with 99% abstraction and at most…