One of the biggest advances in neural enhancement occurred only 5,000 years ago, when humans discovered a game-changing way to increase the capacity of the brain’s memory and indexing system. The invention of written language has long been celebrated as a breakthrough, but relatively little has been made of what exactly were the first things humans wrote — simple recipes, sales receipts, and business inventories mostly.
Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestor had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information. Memory is fallible, of course, but not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations.
It’s helpful to understand that our modes of thinking and decision-making evolved over tens of thousands of years that humans lived as hunter-gatherers. Our genes haven’t fully caught up with the demands of modern civilization, but fortunately human knowledge has — we now understand better how to overcome evolutionary limitations. This is the story of how humans have coped with information and organization from the beginning of civilization. It’s also the story of how the most successful members of society — from successful artists, athletes, and warriors, to business executives and highly credentialed professionals — have learned to maximize their creativity, and efficiency, by organizing their lives so that they spend less time on the mundane, and more time on the inspiring, comforting, and rewarding things in life.
Once memories became externalized with written language, the writer’s brain and attentional system were freed up to focus on something else. But immediately with those first written words came the problems of storage, indexing, and accessing.
Being able to access any memory regardless of where it is stored is what computer scientists called random access. Our ability to randomly access our memory from multiple cues is especially powerful. Computer scientists call it relational memory. You may have heard of relational databases — that’s effectively what human memory is.
Did you ever wonder why, if someone asks you to name a bunch of red things, you can do it so quickly?
To be more specific: The brain isn’t organized the way you might set up your home office or bathroom medicine cabinet. You can’t just put things anywhere you want to. The evolved architecture of the brain is haphazard and disjointed, and incorporates multiple systems, each of which has a mind of its own (so to speak). Evolution doesn’t design things and doesn’t build systems — it settles on systems that, historically, conveyed a survival benefit.
These pipes wouldn’t have frozen if you had run them through the walls, which you couldn’t do because of the central air-conditioning. If you had planned all this from the start, you would have done things differently, but you didn’t — you added things one at a time, as and when you needed them.
Happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it.
But Buffett does to satisfice with his investment strategies; satisficing is a tool for not wasting time on things that are not your highest priority. For your high-priority endeavors, the old-fashioned pursuit of excellence remains the right strategy.
In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9K unique product; today that number has ballooned to 40K of them, yet the average person get 80-85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items.
It’s as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are. The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize.
Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.
These highly successful person (HSPs) have many of their daily distractions of life handled for them, allowing them to devote all of their attention to whatever is immediately before them. They seem to live completely in the moment. Their staff handle correspondence, make appointments, interrupt those appointments when a more important one is waiting, and help to plan their days for maximum efficiency. Their bills are paid on time, their car is serviced when required, they’re given reminders of projects due, and their assistants send suitable gifts to the HSP’s loved ones on birthdays and anniversaries. Their ultimate prize if it all works? A Zen-like focus.
As a group, one thing is remarkably constant. I’ve repeatedly been struck by how liberating it is for them not to have to worry about whether there is someplace else they need to be, or someone else they need to be talking to. They take their time, make eye contact, relax, and are really there with whomever they’re talking to. They don’t have to worry if there is someone more important they should be talking to at that moment because their staff — their external attentional filters — have already determined for them that this is the best way they should be using their time. And there is a great amount of infrastructure in place ensuring that they will get to their next appointment on time, so they can let go of that nagging concern as well.
Two of the most crucial principles used by the attentional filter are change and importance. The brain is an exquisite change detector.
Here, importance is not just something that objectively important but something that is personally important to you.
Due to the attentional filter, we end up experiencing a great deal of the world on autopilot, not registering the complexities, nuances, and often the beauty of what is right in front of us. A great number of failures of attention occur because we are not using these two principles to our advantage.
A critical point that bears repeating is that attention is a limited-capacity resource — there are a definite limits to the number of things we can attend to at once.
A lot of instances of losing things like car keys, passports, money, receipts, and so on occur because our attentional systems are overloaded and they simply can’t keep track of everything. In real biological sense, we have more things to keep track of than our brains were designed to handle. Even towering intellectuals such as Kant and Wordsworth complained of information excess and sheer mental exhaustion induced by too much sensory input or mental overload. This is no reason to lose hope, though. More than ever, effective external systems are available for organizing, categorizing, and keeping track of things.
Humans have been around for 200,000 years. For the first 99% of our history, we didn’t do much of anything but procreate and survive.
Plato was among those who voiced these fears; his King Thamus decried that the dependence on the written words would “weaken men’s characters and create forgetfulness in their souls.” Such externalization of facts and stories meant people would no longer need to mentally retain large quantities of information themselves and would come to rely on stories and facts are conveyed, in written form, by others.
Descartes famously recommended ignoring the accumulated stock of texts and instead relying on one’s own observations. Presaging what many say today, Descartes complained that “even if all knowledge could be found in books, where it mixed with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life and more effort to select the useful things than to find them onself.”
Our brains evolved to focus on one thing at a time. This enabled our ancestors to hunt animals, to create and fashion tools, to protect their clan from predators and invading neighbors. The attentional filter evolved to help us to stay on task, letting through only information that was important enough to deserve disrupting our train of thought. But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century: The plethora of information and the technologies that serve it changed the way we use our brains. Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system.
With air travel, we’re now expected to complete our own reservations and check-in, jobs that used to be done by airline employees or travel agents. At the grocery store, we’re expected to bag our own groceries and to scan our own purchases. We pump our own gas. Telephone operators used to look up numbers for us. Collectively, this is known as shadow work — it represents a kind of parallel, shadow economy in which a lot of the service we expect from companies has been transferred to the customer. Each of us is doing the work of others and not getting paid for it. It is responsible for taking away a great deal of the leisure time we thought we would all have in the 21st century.
Many of us find we don’t know whom to believe, what is true, what has been modified, and what has been vetted. We don’t have the time or expertise to do research on every little decision. Instead, we rely on trusted authorities, newspapers, radio, TV, books, sometimes your brother-in-law. Sometimes these authorities are worthy of our trust, sometimes not.
Amos asked him what made him change his mind after all that research pointed to the Volvo. Was it that he didn’t like the price? The color options? The styling? No, it was none of those reasons. Instead, the colleague said, he found out that his brother-in-law had owned a Volvo and that it was always in the shop.
The act of categorizing helps us to organize the physical world but also organizes the mental world in our heads and thus what we can pay attention to and remember.
Because events during prehistory, by definition, left no historical record, we have to rely on indirect sources of evidence to answer these questions.
The “lexical hypothesis” assumes that the most important things humans need to talk about eventually become encoded in language.
One of the most important things that language does for us is help us make distinctions.
No other species makes this self-conscious distinction among past, present, and future. No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones. Of course many species respond to time by building nests, flying south, hibernating, mating — but these are preprogramed, instinctive behaviors and these actions are not the result of conscious decision, meditation, or planning.
Our own term bugs is an informal and heterogeneous category combining ants, beetles, flies, spiders, caterpillars and a large number of living things that are biologically and taxonomically quite distinct. “Bugs” promotes cognitive economy by combining into a single category things that most of the time we don’t need to think about in great detail, apart from keeping them out of our food or from crawling on our skin. It is not the biology of these organisms that unites them, but their function in our lives — or our goal of trying to keep them on the outside of our bodies and not the inside.
The lack of a term doesn’t mean you don’t understand the concept; it simply means that the category isn’t reflected in our language. This could be because a need for it hasn’t been so pressing that a word needed to be coined.
Now here’s the most interesting part: When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red. A fourth term is either yellow or green. The sixth term is blue.
Out of 30K edible plants thought to exist on earth, just 11 account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye. Yet our brains evolved to receive a pleasant shot of dopamine when we learn something new and again when we can classify it systematically into an ordered structure.
One thing HSPs do over and over every day is active sorting, what emergency room nurses call triage. It simply means that you separate those things you need to deal with right now from those that you don’t.
- Things that need to be dealt with right away.
- Things that are important but can wait.
- Things that are not important and can wait, but should still be kept.
- Things to be thrown out.
Active sorting is a powerful way to prevent yourself from being distracted. It creates and foster great efficiencies, not just practical efficiencies but intellectual ones. After you have prioritized and you start working, know that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful. Other things can wait — this is what you can focus on without worrying that you’re forgetting something.
The most fundamental principle of the organized mind is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.
Have you ever sat in an airplane or train, just staring out the window with nothing to read, looking at nothing in particular? You might have found that the time passed very pleasantly, with no real memory of what exactly you were looking at, what you were thinking, or for that matter, how much time actually elapsed. You might have had a similar feeling the last time you sat by the ocean or a lake, letting your mind wander, and experiencing the relaxing feeling it induced. In this state, thoughts seem to move seamlessly from one to another, there’s a merging of ideas, visual images, and sounds, of past, present, and future. Thoughts turn inward — loosely connected, stream-of-consciousness thoughts so much like the nighttime dream state that we call them daydreams.
This distinctive state and special brain state is marked by the flow of connections among disparate ideas and thoughts, and a relative lack of barriers between senses and concepts. It also can lead to great creativity and solutions to problems that seemed unsolvable.
If you’ve ever stopped what you were doing to picture the consequence of some future action or to imagine yourself in a particular future encounter, maybe your eyes turn up or down in your head from a normal straight-ahead gaze, and you became preoccupied with thought: That’s the daydreaming mode.
Daydreaming and mind-wandering, we now know, are a natural state of the brain. This accounts for why we feel so refreshed after it, and why vacations and naps can be so restorative. It is called the default mode. This mode is a resting brain state, when your brain is not engaged in a purposeful task, and your mind wanders fluidly from topic to topic. It’s not that you can’t hold on to any one thought from the rolling stream, it’s that no single thought is demanding a response.
The discovery of the mind-wandering mode also explains why paying attention to something takes effort. The phrase paying attention is well-worn figurative language, and there is some useful meaning in this cliche. Attention has a cost. It is a this-or-that, zero-sum game. We pay attention to one thing, either through conscious decision or because our attentional filter deemed it important enough to push it to the forefront of attentional focus. When we pay attention to one thing, we are necessarily taking attention away from something else.
There is a clear evolutionary advantage to being able to stay on task and concentrate, but not to entering an irreversible state of hyperfocus that makes us oblivious to a predatory or enemy lurking behind the bushes, or to a poisonous spider crawling up the back of our neck. This is where the attentional network comes in; the attentional filter is constantly monitoring the environment for anything that might be important.
Memory is unreliable because the untrained brain has a crappy filing system. It takes everything that happens to you and throws it all willy-nilly into a big dark closet — when you go in there looking for something, all you can find are the big obvious things, or stuff that you don’t need.
Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just a replaying, but a rewriting.
Perhaps the biggest problem with human memory is that we don’t always know when we’re recalling things inaccurately. Many times, we have a strong feeling of certainty that accompanies an incorrect, distorted memory. This faulty confidence is widespread, and difficult to extinguish. The relevance to organizational systems is that the more we can externalize memory though physical records out-there-in-the-world, the less we must rely on our overconfident, underprecise memory.
The two most important rules are that the best-remembered experiences are distinctive / unique or have a strong emotional component.
Events or experiences that are out of the ordinary tend to be remembered better because there is nothing competing with them when your brain tries to access them from its storehouse of remembered events.
Evolutionarily, it makes sense for us to remember unique or distinctive events because they represent a potential change in the world around us or a change in our understanding of it — we need to register these in order to maximize our chances for success in a changing environment.
The second principle of memory concerns emotions. If something made us incredibly frightened, elated, sad, or angry — four of the primary human emotions — we’re more likely to remember it. This makes evolutionary sense — the emotionally important events are probably the ones that we need to remember in order to survive, things like the growl of a predator, the location of a new freshwater spring, the smell of the rancid food, the friend who broke a promise.
The implications of this are far-reaching. Skillful attorneys can use this, and principles like it, to their clients’ advantage by implanting ideas and memories in the minds of witnesses, juries, and even judges.
The act of categorizing is one of cognitive economy. We treat things as being of a kinds so that we don’t have to waste valuable neural processing cycles on details that are irrelevant for our purposes. When looking out at the beach, we don’t typically notice individual grains of sand, we see a collective, and one grain of sand becomes grouped with all the others.
The ability to go back and forth between these modes of focus, to change lenses from the collective to the individual, is a feature of the mammalian attentional system, and highlights the hierarchical nature of the central executive. A painter needs to see the individual brushstroke or point she is painting but be able to cycle back and forth between that laserlike focus and the painting-as-a-whole.
Your wallet, childhood photographs, cash, jewelry, and the family dog. They don’t have any physical similarities, and they lack functional similarities. What binds them together is that they are “things you might take out of your house in case of a fire.” You may never have thought about their going together or being conceptually bound until that moment when you have to make a quick decision about what to take.
David Allen, the efficiency expert, calls this kind of note-taking “clearing the mind.”
Remember that the mind-wandering mode an the central executive work in opposition and are mutually exclusive states; they’re like the little devil and angel standing on opposite shoulders, each trying to tempt you. While you’re working on one project, the mind-wandering devil starts thinking of all the other things going on in your life and tries to distract you. Writing them down gets them out of your head, clearing your brain of the clutter that is interfering with being able to focus on what you want to focus on.
If an obligation remained recorded only mentally, some part of me constantly kept thinking that it should be attended to, creating a situation that was inherently stressful and unproductive.
Your brain needs to engage on some consistent basis with all of your commitments and activities. You must be assured that you are doing what you need to be doing, and that it’s OK to be not doing what you’re not doing. If it’s on your mind, then your mind isn’t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind. That trusted system is to write it down.
Allen suggest the 2-minute rule: If you can attend to one of the things on your list in less than 2 minutes, do it now.
Normally your mind says to these ideas, “Go away, I’m busy,” but that attitude is deadly to quality.” Soem fo the best ideas you’ll have will come to you when you’re doing something completely unrelated. The unassimilated pile helped solve the problem. This is the junk drawer, a place for things that don’t have another place.
Things we take for granted — something as basic as the kitchen — didn’t exist in European homes until a few hundred years ago. Until 1600, the typical European home had a single room, and families would crowd around the fire most of the year to keep warm.
He can keep 10 games going at once just in his memory but, he says, “I forget all kinds of other stuff. I regularly lose my credit cards, my mobile phone, keys, and so on.”
Organization isn’t — nor it should be — the same for everybody. However, there are fundamental things like To Do lists and carrying around notepaper or index cards, or “putting everything in a certain place and remembering where that place is.”
The prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new — the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
Learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. People can’t do multitasking very well, and when they say they can, they’re deluding themselves.
Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviors.
To make matter worse, lots of multitasking requires decision-making: Do I answer this text message or ignore it? How do I respond to this? How do I file this email?
And to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you’ve got a recipe for addiction: You receive a text, and that activates your novelty centers. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you 15 seconds earlier).
Notions of privacy that we take for granted today were very different just 200 years ago. It was common practice to share rooms and even beds at roadside inns well into the 19th century. Diaries tell of guests complaining about late-arriving guests who climbed into bed with them in the middle of the night. It was entirely usual for a servant to sleep at the foot of his master’s bed, regardless of what his master might be doing within the bed.
We organize our friendships around a variety of motivations and needs. These can be for historical reasons (we stay in touch with old friends from school and we like the sense of continuity to earlier parts of our lives), mutual admiration, shared goals, physical attractiveness, complementary characteristics, social climbing… Ideally, friends are people with whom we can be our true selves, with whom we can fearlessly let our guard down. (Arguably, a close friend is someone with whom we can allow ourselves to enter the day-dreaming attentional mode, with whom we can switch in and out of different modes of attention without feeling awkward.)
Friendships obviously also revolve around shared likes and dislikes — it’s easier to be friends with people when you like doing the same things. But even this is relative. If you’re a quilting enthusiast and there’s only one other in town, the shared interest may bring you together. But at a quilting convention, you may discover someone whose precise taste in quilts matches yours more specifically, hence more common ground and a potentially tighter bond.
A large part of organizing our social world successfully, like anything else, is identifying what we want from it. Part of our primate heritage is that most of us want to feel that we fit in somewhere and part of a group. Which group we’re part of may matter less to some of us than others, as long as we’re part of a group and not left entirely on our own. Although there are individual differences, being alone for too long causes neurochemical changes that can result in hallucinations, depression, suicidal thoughts, violent behaviors, and even psychosis.
Social networking sites allow us to do all this without demanding too much time. On the other hand, as many have observed, we lost touch with these people for a reason! There was a natural culling; we didn’t keep up with people whom we didn’t like or whose relevance to our lives diminished over time.
There is perhaps an illusion in all of this. Social networking provides breadth but rarely depth, and in-person contact is what we crave, even if online contact seems to take away some of that craving.
Beyond companionship, couples seek intimacy, which can be defined as allowing another person to share and have access to our private behaviors, personal thoughts, joys, hurts, and fears of being hurt. Intimacy also includes creating shared meaning — those inside jokes, that sideways glance that only our sweetie understands — a kind of telepathy. It includes the freedom to be who we are in a relationship (without the need to project a false sense of ourselves) and to allow the other person to do the same. Intimacy allows us to talk openly about things that are important to us, and to take a clear stand on emotionally charged issues without fear of being ridiculed or rejected. All this describes a distinctly Western view — other cultures don’t view intimacy as a necessity or even define it in the same way.
Not surprisingly, men and women have different images of what intimacy entails: Women are more focused than men on commitment and continuity of communication, men on sexual and physical closeness.
Throughout history and across cultures, intimacy was rarely regarded with the importance or emphasis we place on it now. For thousands of years — the first 99% of our history — we didn’t do much of anything except procreate and survive. Marriage and pair-bonding was primarily sought for reproduction and for social alliances. Many marriages in historical times took place to create bonds between neighboring tribes as a way to defuse rivalries and tensions over limited resources.
A consequence of changing definitions of intimacy is that today, many of us ask more than ever of our romantic partners. We expect them to be there for emotional support, companionship, intimacy, and financial support, and we expect at various times they will function as confidante, masseuse or masseur, and through it all we expect them to be consistently alluring, sexually appealing, and to stay in lockstep with our own sexual appetites and preferences. We expect our partners to help us achieve our full potential in life. And increasingly they do.
A large part of human social interaction requires that we subdue our innate primate hostilities in order to get along. Although primates in general are among the most social species, there are few examples of primate living groups that support more than 18 males within the group — the interpersonal tensions and dominance hierarchies just become too much for them and they split apart. And yet humans have been living in cities containing 10s of thousands of males for several millennia. How do they do it? One way of helping to keep large numbers of humans living in close proximity is through the use of nonconfrontational speech, or indirect speech acts. Indirect speech acts don’t say what we actually want, but they imply it.
Marsha can say, “Screw you.” This signals that she doesn’t want to play the implicature game, and moreover, she is conveying aggression. John’s options are limited at this point — either he can ignore her (effectively backing down) or he can up the ante by getting up, stomping past her desk, and forcefully opening the damn window. (Now it’s war.)
The simplest cases of speech acts are those in which the speaker utters a sentence and means exactly and literally what he says. Yet indirect speech acts are a powerful social glue that enables us to get along. In them, the speaker means exactly what she says but also something more. The something more is supposed to be apparent to the hearer, and yet it remains unspoken.
A doctor who pronounces you dead changes your legal status instantly, which has the effect of utterly changing your life, whether you’re in fact dead or not. A judge can pronounce you innocent or guilty and, again, the truth doesn’t matter as much as the force of the pronouncement, in terms of what your future looks like. The set of utterances that can so change the state of the world is limited, but they are powerful. We empower these legal or quasi-legal authorities in order to facilitate our understanding of the social world.
When a person has an orgasm, oxytocin is released, and one of the effects of oxytocin is to make us feel bonded to others. Evolutionary psychologists have speculated that this was nature’s way of causing couples to want to stay together after sex to raise any children that might result from that sex.
Most people rate their friend in terms of traits but rate themselves in terms of situations. Why? Because by definition, we see only the public actions of others.
Like visual illusions, cognitive illusions are automatic — that is, even when we know they exist, it is difficult or impossible to turn off the mental machinery that gives rise to them.
Dispositional explanations say, “I was born (or made) that way.” Situational ones say, “The devil made me do it.”
Dozens of experiments have shown that the original knowledge — now known to be false — exerts a lingering influence on your judgments; it is impossible to hit the reset button. Lawyers know this well, and often plant the seeds of a false idea in the minds of jurors and judges. After opposing counsel objects, the judge’s admonition, “The jury will disregard that last exchange,” comes too late to affect impression formation and judgment.
Belief perseverance shows up in everyday life with gossip. Gossip is nothing new of course. Humans gossip for many reasons: It can help us feel superior to others when we are otherwise feeling insecure about ourselves. It can help us to forge bonds with others to test their allegiance.
If Democrats are asked to describe how similar Democrats are to one another, they might say something like “Oh, Democrats come from all walks of life — we’re a very diverse group.” If then asked to describe Republicans, they might say, “Oh, those Republicans — all they care about is lower taxes. They’re all alike.”
What do they mean, “white people”? There are all kinds of white people. White people is too broad and meaningless a cateogry.
You’re probably thinking that a cure for this is increased exposure — if members of groups get to know one another better, the stereotypes will fall away. This is true to a large degree, but in-group / out-group bias, being so deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology, is hard to shake completely. Once we have a stereotype, we tend not to reevaluate the stereotype; instead we discard any new, disconfirming evidence as “exceptions.” This is a form of belief perserveration.
Instead of advancing our agenda using force, we should have instead built schools and hospitals in these countries, improving the lives of their children. By now, those children would have grown into positions of influence, and they would be grateful to us instead of hating us.
The act of living in cities and towns together is fundamentally an act of cooperation. The government, at various level (federal, state, country, municipal), passes laws to define civil behavior, but at best they can address only the most extreme cases at the margins of civility. We rely on each other not just to observe law but to be basically helpful and cooperative beyond the law. Few jurisdictions have a law that says if you see Cedric’s 4-year-old fall of her bicycle in the street, you must help her or notify Cedric, but it would be widely seen as monstrous if you didn’t.
Both mystics and physicists tell us that time is an illusion, simply a creation of our minds. In this respect, time is like color — there is no color in the physical world, just light of different wavelengths reflecting off of objects; the light waves themselves are colorless. Our entire sense of color results from the visual cortex in our brains processing these wavelengths and interpreting them as color. Of course that doesn’t make it subjectively any less real.
Photograph are interesting because they can capture and preserve the world at resolutions that exceed those of our visual system. When this happens, they allow us to see a view of the world that our eyes and brains would never see on their own.
That’s because one of the great achievements of the human prefrontal cortex is that it provides us with impulse control and, consequently, the ability to delay gratification, something that most animals lack.
As if that weren’t enough, advanced prefrontal cortex damage interferes with the ability to make connections and associations between disparate thoughts and concepts, resulting in a loss of creativity.
The ones who get the sugary treat perform better and more quickly because they are supplying the body with glucose that goes right to the brain to help them feed the neural circuits that are doing the problem solving. However, chronic ingestion of sugars can damage other systems and lead to diabetes and sugar crash, the sudden exhaustion that many people feel later when the sugar high wears off.
It takes more energy to shift your attention from task to task. It takes less energy to focus. That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they’ll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it. Daydreaming also takes less energy than multitasking. And the natural intuitive see-saw between focusing and daydreaming helps to recalibrate and restore the brain. Multitasking does not.
Perhaps most important, multitasking by definition disrupts the kind of sustained thought usually necessary for problem solving and for creativity. “Ten and a half minutes on one project is not enough time to think in-depth about anything.” Creative solutions often arise from allowing a sequence of altercations between dedicated focus and daydreaming.
In multitasking, we unknowingly enter an addiction loop as the brain’s novelty centers become rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which wants to stay on task and gain the rewards of sustained effort and attention. We need to train ourselves to go for the long reward, and forgo the short one.
When we say that someone is focused, we usually mean they’re attending to what is right in front of them and avoiding distraction, either internal or external. On the other hand, creativity often implies being able to make connections between disparate things. We consider a discovery to be creative if it explores new ideas through analogy, metaphor, or tying together things that we didn’t realize were connected.
Building a house, for example, might seem impossibly complicated. But builders don’t look at it that way — they divide the project into stages and chunks: grading and preparing the site, laying the foundation, framing the super structure and supports, plumbing, electrical, installing the drywall, floors, doors, cabinets, painting. And then each of those stages is further divided into manageable chunks.
More cognitively taxing is being able to take a set of separate operations, each with their own completion time, and organize their start times so that they are all completed at the same time.
The secret to planning the invasion of Normandy was that, like all projects that initially seem overwhelmingly difficult, it was broken up deftly into small tasks — thousands of them.
In many tasks, both creative and mundane, we must constantly go back and forth between work and evaluation, comparing the ideal image in our head with the work in front of us.
This constant back-and-forth is one of the most metabolism-consuming things that our brain can do.
I once worked with a recording engineer who blew through a budget trying to make one 3-minute song perfect before I was able to stop him and remind him that we still had 11 other songs to go. The real job in supervising PhD students isn’t teaching them facts; it’s keeping them on track.
This is where expertise comes in — in fact, it could be said that what distinguishes experts from novices is that they know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
Stories don’t include every single detail about every minute in a character’s life — they jump to salient events, and we have been trained to understand what’s going on.
We make sense of the events in our lives by segmenting them, giving them temporal boundaries. We don’t treat our daily lives as undifferentiated moments, we group moments into salient events. That is, our brains implicitly impose a beginning and an ending to events.
We can imagine a film sequence in which someone is preparing a salad, and every little motion of tearing lettuce leaves is shown as a close-up. This might seem to violate a storytelling convention of recounting information that moves the story forward, but in surprising us with this seemingly unimportant lettuce tearing, the filmmaker or storyteller creates a dramatic gesture. By focusing on the mundane, it may convey something about the mental state of the character, or build tension toward an impending crisis in the story.
Because we are coparticipants in figuring out the joke, cartoons like these are more memorable and pleasurable than ones in which every detail is handed to us. This follows a well-established principle of cognitive psychology called levels of processing: Items that are processed at a deeper level, with more active involvement by us, tend to become more strongly encoded in memory. This is why passing learning though textbooks and lectures is not nearly as effective a way to learn new material as is figuring it out for yourself, a method called peer instruction that is being introduced into classroom with great success.
Sleep has been shown to enhance the formation and understanding of abstract relations, so much so that people often wake having solved a problem that was unsolvable the night before. This may be part of the reason why young children just learning language sleep so much.
Musicians who learn a new melody show significant improvement in performing it after one night’s sleep. Students who were stymied by a calculus problem the day it was presented are able to solve it more easily after a night’s sleep than an equivalent amount of waking time. New information and concepts appear to be quietly practiced while we’re asleep, sometimes showing up in dreams. A night of sleep more than doubles the likelihood that you’ll solve a problem requiring insight.
There’s another kind of distortion that occurs when we sleep — time distortion. What may seem like a long, elaborate dream spanning 30 minutes or more may actually occur within the span of a single minute.
What about those delicious afternoon stretches on the couch? There’s a reason they feel so good: They’re an important part of resetting worn-out neural circuits.
We’re aware that members of the Latino cultures have their naps — siestas — and we consider this a cultural oddity, not for us. We try to fight it off by having another cup of coffee when the drowsiness overtakes us. The British have institutionalized this fighting-off with 4 o’clock teatime.
Early on, Jake identified his chief weakness: a tendency to procrastinate. To combat it, Jake adopted a strict policy of “do it now.” If Jake had a number of cals to make or things to attend to piling up, he’d dive right in, even if it cut into leisure or socializing time. And he’d do the most unpleasant task the first thing in the morning to get it out of the way. Following Mark Twain, Jake called it eating the frog: Do the most unpleasant task first when gumption is highest, because willpower depletes as the day moves on.
Across the whole spectrum, all procrastination can be seen as a failure of self-regulation, planning, impulse control, or a combination of all three. By definition, it involves delaying an activity, task, or decision that would help us to reach our goals. In its mildest form, we simply start things at a later time than we might have, and experience unneeded stress as a deadline looms closer and we have less and less time to finish.
Many people work on projects that have a long event horizon. That is, the thing they’re working can take weeks or months (or even years) to complete, and after completion, there can be a very long period of time before they get any reward, praise, or gratification. In general, activities with a long time to completion are the ones more likely to be started late, and those with an immediate reward are less likely to be procrastinated.
Steel says that two underlying factors lead us to procrastinate:
Humans have a low tolerance for frustration. Moment by moment, when choosing what tasks to undertake or what activities to pursue, we tend to choose not the most rewarding action but the easiest. This means that unpleasant or difficult things get put off.
We tend to evaluate our self-worth in terms of our achievements. Whether we lack self-confidence in general — or confidence that this particular project will turn out well — we procrastinate because that allows us to delay putting our reputations on the line until later. (ego-protective maneuver.)
Steel identifies what he calls two faulty beliefs: first, that life should be easy, and second, that our self-worth is dependent on our success.
Self-confidence entails accepting that you might fail early on and that it’s OK, it’s all part of the process. Successful people have paradoxically had many more failures than people whom most of us would consider to be, well, failures. Successful people deal with failures and setbacks very differently from everyone else. Their internal dialogue is more along the lines of “I thought I knew everything I needed to know to achieve my goals, but this has taught me that I don’t. Once I learn this, I can get back on track.” They don’t subscribe to the faulty belief that life should be easy.
Reading the biographies of great leaders — corporate CEOs, generals, presidents — the sheer number and magnitude of failures many have experienced is staggering.
Most people try to focus on the words intently and come up with a solution. Most of them fail. But if they start to think of something else and let their mind wander, the solution comes in a flash of insight.
Part of the answer has to do with how comfortable we are in allowing ourselves to enter the daydreaming mode under pressure of time. Most people say that when they’re in that mode, time seems to stop, or it feels that they have stepped outside of time.
For all this to work, the relaxation phase is crucial. That’s why so many insights happen during warm showers. Teachers and coaches always say to relax. This is why.
If you’re engaged in any kind of creative pursuit, one of the goals in organizing your time is probably to maximize your creativity.
During flow, two key regions of the brain deactivate: the portion of the prefrontal cortex responsible for self-criticism, and the amygdala, the brain’s fear center. This is why creative artists often report feeling fearless and as though they are taking creative risks they hadn’t taken before.
During flow, you experience freedom from worry about failure; you are aware of what needs to be done, but you don’t feel that you are doing it — the ego is not involved and falls away completely. Rosanne Cash described writing some of her best songs in this state. “It didn’t feel like I was writing it. It was more like, the song was already there and I just had to hold up my catcher’s mitt and grab it out of the air.”
One thing that characterizes flow is a lack of distractibility — the same old distractions are there, but we’re not tempted to attend to them. A second characteristic of flow is that we monitor our performance without the kind of self-defeating negative judgments that often accompany creative work. Outside of flow, a nagging voice inside our heads often says, “That’s not good enough.” In flow, a reassuring voice says, “I can fix that.”
Flow states don’t occur for just any old task or activity. They can occur only when one is deeply focused on the task, when the task requires intense concentration and commitment, contains clear goals, provides immediate feedback, and is perfectly matched to one’s skill level.
Sting organizes and partitions his time to maximize creative engagement. On tours, his time is well structured by others to give him maximum freedom. He doesn’t need to think about anything at all except music. Where he has to be, what he has to do, when he eats, all these parts of the day are completely scheduled for him. Importantly, he has a few hours of personal time every day that is sacrosanct.
There’s a fundamental principle of neuroscience behind this: As we noted earlier, the brain is a giant change detector. Most of us are easily distracted by newness, the prefrontal cortex’s novelty bias. We can help ourselves by molding our environments and our schedules to facilitate and promote creative inspiration.
A large part of efficient time management revolves around avoiding distractions. An ironic aspect of life is how easily we can be harmed by the things we desire.
The greatest life satisfaction comes from completing projects that required sustained focus and energy. It seems unlikely that anyone will look back at their lives with pride and say with satisfaction that they managed to send an extra thousand text messages or check social network updates a few hundred extra times while they were working.
The tendency is to put everything else on hold and devote all our time to that big project — it seems as though every minute counts. But doing this means that lots of little tasks will go undone, only to pile up and create problems for you later. You know you should be attending to them, a little voice in your head nags at you; it takes a great deal of conscious effort to not do them.
The solution is to follow the 5-minute rule. If there is something you can get done in 5 minute or less, do it now.
One thing that many successful people do for time management is to calculate how much their time is subjectively worth to them. This is not necessarily what it is worth in the marketplace, or what their hourly pay works out to, although it might be informed by these — this is how much they feel their time is worth to them.
Do not spend more time on a decision than it’s worth.
A colleague once complained “you made a decision without having all the facts!” Well, getting all the facts would take me an hour and the amount of income at stake means that this decision is only worth 10 minutes of my time.
For all this to work, it’s important to put everything in the calendar, not just some things. The reason is simple: If you see a blank spot on the calendar, you and anyone else looking at it would reasonably assume that the time is available. You can’t just partially use a calendar, keeping some of your appointments in your head — that’s a recipe for double booking and missed appointments.
As people grow older, they frequently say that time seems to pass more quickly than when they were younger. There are several hypotheses about this. One is that our perception of time is nonlinear and is based on the amount of time we’ve already lived.
Another factor is that after the age of 30, cognitive processing speed, and metabolic rate slow down — the actual speed of neural transmission slows. This leaves the impression that the world is racing by, relative to our slowed-down thought processes.
The way we choose to fill our time naturally changes across the life span as well. When we’re young, we are driven by novelty and motivated to learn and experience new things. As we get older, most of us place a higher priority on actually doing the things we already know we like rather than trying to discover new things we like.
These different views of how we want to spend time are partly fueled by how much time we feel we have left. When time is perceived as open-ended, the goals that become most highly prioritized are those that are preparatory, focused on gathering information, on experiencing novelty, and on expanding one’s breadth of knowledge. When time is perceived as constrained, the highest-priority goals will be those that can be realized in the short-term and that provide emotional meaning, such as spending time with family and friends.
Tell a 20-year-old that he has only 5 years left to live and he tends to become more like a 75-year-old — not particularly interested in new experiences, instead favoring spending time with family and friends and taking time for familiar pleasures.
Prisoners on death row tend to ask for familiar foods for their last meals.
For people of any age, the world is becoming increasingly linear. Nonlinear thinkers, including many artists, are feeling more marginalized as a result. As a society, it seems we take less time for art. In doing so, we may be missing out on something that is deeply valuable and important from a neurobiological standpoint. Artists recontextualize reality and offer visions that were previously invisible. In this way, engagement in art as either a creator or consumer helps us by hitting the reset button in our brains. Time stops. We contemplate. We reimagine our relationship to the world.
“Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” President Obama observed. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it.”
In any sufficiently large organization, with an effective management system in place, there is going to be a pyramid shape with decision makers at every level. The only time I am brought in is when the only known solutions have a downside, like someone losing their job, or the company losing large sums of money. And usually the decision is already frame for me as two negatives. I’m the one who has to choose which of those two negatives we can live with.
Most of us are ill-equipped to calculate such probabilities on our own. We’re not just ill-equipped to calculate probabilities, we are not trained to evaluate them rationally. The news is delivered to us during a period of what can be extreme emotional vulnerability and cognitive overload.
Some medical decision-making falls into category 2 (delegate it), especially when the literature seems either contradictory or overwhelming. We throw up our hands and ask, “Doc, what would you do?” essentially delegating the decision to her.
Other kinds of outcomes are not even theoretically calculable, but are still countable. The probability of a baby being born a boy, of a marriage ending in divorce, and of a house catching fire all fall into this category. For questions like these, we resort to observations — we count because there’s no formula that tells us how to calculate the probability.
It would be foolish to say, “I’ve already been hit by lightning once, so I can walk around in thunderstorm with impunity.”
If you get “heads” 10 times in a row, the probability of the coin coming up “tails” on the next toss is still 50%. Tails is not more likely and it is not “due.”
The expected value of an event is its probability multiplied by the value of the outcome.
Were all these patients stupid? Not at all. But they were vulnerable. When a doctor says, “You have a disease that could kill you, but I have a treatment that works,” it is natural to jump at the chance. There is a tendency to shut down our own decision-making processes when we feel overwhelmed, something that has been documented experimentally.
Medical schools and surgeons may not worry so much about quality of life, but you should. How much of your time are you willing to spend driving to and from medical appointments, sitting in doctor’s offices, fretting about results?
This “average” life extension of 6 weeks is simply a statistical fiction, like the parking example.
Two of the physicians sheepishly admitted that they deliberately withhold this information. As one put it, “We don’t mention these complications to patients because they might be discouraged from getting the biopsy, which is a very important procedure for them to have.” This is the kind of paternalism that many of us dislike from doctors, and it also violates the core principle of informed consent.
The problem with Bayes and heuristic arguments is they fail to recognize that much of what physicians learn to do is to extract information from the patient directly, and to individualize decision-making from this. It is extremely effective. A good doctor can walk into a hospital room and smell impending death.
This is what Bayesian updating is all about — finding statistics that are relevant to your particular circumstance and using them. You improve your estimates of the probability by constraining the problem to a set of people who more closely resemble you along pertinent dimensions. The question isn’t “What is the probability that I’ll have a stroke?” but “What is the probability that someone my age, gender, blood pressure, and cholesterol level will have a stroke.”
Alternative medicine is simply medicine for which there is no evidence of effectiveness. Once a treatment has been scientifically shown to be effective, it is no longer called alternative — it is simply called medicine.
Pseudoscience often uses the terminology of science and observation but does not use the full rigor of controlled experiments and falsifiable hypotheses.
Vitamins and supplements fare not better. It’s been found that multivitamins are not effective for anything at all.
Every parent who has stayed up waiting for a teenage daughter who is late from a party will recognize the feeling. You may know that there is really (almost) nothing to worry about, but you cannot help images of disaster from coming to mind.
The important point is that these are not scientific studies, they are just stories. They are uplifting, quizzical, mysterious, challenging stories but just stories. The plural of anecdote is not data.
Both gains and losses are nonlinear, meaning that the same amount of gain (or loss) does not cause equal happiness (or sadness) — they’re relative to your current state.
10 people out of 100 dying is the same as 90 people out of 100 living — but they are not identically psychologically. People are more likely to choose surgery in the first case and radiation in the second.
My disposition is that I’m more willing to trade money for convenience and safety. Others like the added assurance and are willing to pay for it. This is essentially what insurance is.
The other chapters in this book have been particularly concerned with attention and memory, but the great boon to making decisions about things that matter is mathematics, the so-called queen of the sciences. It might seem like dull, lifeless arithmetic at times, but to get organized in our thinking about life, we are ultimately going to have let go of our abiding distaste for what sometimes seems like the inhumanity of probability analysis and mathematical calculations.
Your relationship with a doctor shouldn’t be one of parent and child, but one of partners who can work together in the business of achieving a common goal.
When all the components of a complex system achieve maximum value, and when it is impossible to make any one component of the system better without making at least one other component worse, the system can be said to have reached the Pareto optimum.
Because of these developments, managers suddenly had greater control over the workers, specifically, over who was doing the work. Processes and procedures that had been kept in workers’ heads were now recorded in handbooks and shared within the company, giving each worker an opportunity to learn from prior workers and to add improvements. Such a move follows the fundamental principle of the organized mind: externalizing memory.
50 companies in the world have more than a quarter million employees, and 7 companies have more than 1M.
Each data analyst was ultimately responsible to an entirely different VP, making it virtually impossible for them, their bosses, or even their bosses’ bosses to know about the existence of the others. Booz consultants were able to bring the analysts together for weekly meetings where they pooled their knowledge, shared certain tricks they had learned, and helped one another solve common technical problems they were facing. This led to great efficiencies and cost savings for the company.
While managers and administrators do not typically do the main work of a company, they play an essential role in accomplishing the company’s objectives. Even though is is the machine gunner and not the major who fights battles, the major is likely to have a greater influence on the outcome of a battle than any single machine gunner.
The old cartoon image of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, giving competing advice to a flummoxed head in the middle, is apt here. Benefits are evaluated deep inside the brain, while costs are simultaneously evaluated in the amygdala.
Perhaps surprisingly, the US Army has been among the organizations most adaptable to change, and has thought deeply about how to apply the findings of psychological science to organizational behavior. Its current policy strives to empower people throughout the chain of command, “allowing subordinate and adjacent units to use their common understanding of the operational environment and commander’s intent, in conjunction with their own initiative, to synchronize actions with those of other units without direct control from the higher headquarters.”
Superiors often resist delegating authority or decisions. They rationalize this by saying that they are more highly skilled, trained, or experienced than the subordinate. But there are good reasons for delegating decision-making. First, the superior is more highly paid, and so the cost of the decision must be weighed against the benefit of having such a high-paid individual make it. Along the same lines, the superior has to conserve his time so that he can use it for making more important decisions. Secondly, subordinates are often in a better position to make decisions because the facts of the case may be directly available to them and not to the superior.
Once in a while decision comes along where both outcomes look bad. They have a choice between A and B and neither one is going to be good, and they can’t figure out which one to choose. That’s when they end up on my calendar. My job when that happens is not to make the decision for them as you might think. By definition, the people who are coming to me are the real experts on the problem. All I can do is try to get them to look at the problem in a different light. I try to get them to see things from 5,000 feet up. I tell them to back up and find out one truth that they know is indisputable. But I don’t make the decision for them. They’re the ones who have to bring the decision to the people under them, and they’re the ones who have to live with it, so they need to come to the decision themselves and be comfortable with it.
A leader is someone willing to make decisions. Politicians can get elected if voters think they can do things, even if they don’t support all those things. Bush was elected not because everyone agreed with him but because they knew he was sincere and would do what he thought needed to be done.
If we see other cars parking in a no-parking zone, we are more likely to park there ourselves. If we see other dog owners ignoring the law to clean up after their dogs, we are more likely to ignore it, too. Part of this comes from a sense of equity and fairness that has been shown to be innately wired into our brains, a product of evolution.
The ethical person may eventually find him- or herself thinking, “I’m fighting a losing battle; there’s no point in going the extra mile because no one notices and no one cares.” Doing the right thing when no one is looking is a mark of personal integrity, but many people find it very difficult to do.
All warfare challenges the morals and ethics of Soldiers. An enemy may not respect international conventions and may commit atrocities with the aim of provoking retaliation in kind. All leaders shoulder the responsibility that their subordinates return from a campaign not only as good Soldiers, but also as good citizens. Membership in the Army profession carries with it significant responsibility — the effective and ethical application of combat power.
They tend to be adaptable and responsive, high in empathy, and able to see problems from all sides. These qualities require two distinct forms of cognition: social intelligence and flexible, deep analytic intelligence. An effective leader can quickly understand opposing views, how people came to hold them, and how to resolve conflicts in ways that are perceived to be mutually satisfying and beneficial. Leaders are often adept at bringing people together who appear to have conflicting goals. A great business leader uses her empathy to allow people or organizations to save face in negotiations so that each side in a completed negotiation can feel they got what they wanted (and a gifted negotiator can make each side feel they got a little bit more than the other party).
There are no technical alternatives to personal responsibility and cooperation in the workplace. What’s needed are more people who will stick their necks out.
Some of these are obvious and well known, such as setting clear goals and providing high-quality, immediate feedback. Expectations need to be reasonable or employees feeling overwhelmed, and if they fall behind, they feel they can never catch up.
If we can predict some (but not all) aspects of how a job will go, we find it rewarding. If we can predict all aspects of the job, down to the tiniest minutiae, it tends to be boring because there is nothing new and no opportunity to apply the discretion and judgment.
We function best when we are under some constraints and are allowed to exercise individual creativity within those constraints. In fact, this is posited to be the driving force in many forms of creativity, including literary and musical.
Internals tend to be higher achievers, and externals tend to experience more stress and are prone to depression. Internals exert greater effort to influence their environment (because they believe their efforts will amount to something). Internals tend to learn better, seek new information more actively, and use that information more effectively, and they are better at problem solving.
Externals make more compliant followers or subordinates than do internals, who are likely to be independent and resist control by superiors and other individuals.
The Toyota management method was built around the idea that, if only given the chance, workers wanted to take pride in their work, wanted to see how their work fit into the larger picture and have the power to make improvements and reduce defects.
Being one’s own boss requires a lot of discipline, but for those who can manage it, greater productivity appears to be the reward.
Again, an efficient system is one in which you’ve exploited affordances by off-loading as many memory functions as possible from your brain into a well-labeled and logically organized collection of external objects.
We all bet high multitaskers were going to be stars at something. We were absolutely shocked. We lost all our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.
The companies that are winning the productivity battle are those that allow their employees productivity hours, naps, a chance for exercise, and a calm, tranquil, orderly environment in which to do their work. If you’re in a stressful environment where you’re asked to produce and produce, you’re unlikely to have any deep insights.
Why do psychiatrists work 50-minute hour? They use that extra 10 minutes to write down what happened. Rather than scheduling meetings back-to-back, experts advise giving yourself 10 minutes to write down what happened, to make notes about what needs to be done, and other comments that will orient you to this project when you next start to work on it. And to give yourself 10 minutes before a meeting to review what is going to happen there.
In the extreme, an encyclopedia entry could tell you every possible fact about a person or place, leaving nothing out — but such an entry would be too unwieldy to be useful. The usefulness of most professional summaries is that someone with perspective has used their best judgment about what, in the scheme of things, should be included.
Social media isn’t journalism, it’s information. Journalism is what you do with it.
It’s easy to imagine, then, that a partisan watching a news report that is skewed toward his or her beliefs will find that to be neutral.
Something similar happens in art. When we read well-written literary fiction, our prefrontal cortex begins to fill in aspects of the characters’ personalities, to make predictions about their actions, in short, we become active participants in figuring out the story. Reading gives our brains time to do that because we can proceed at our own pace. We’ve all had the experience of reading a novel and finding that we slow down in places to contemplate what was just written, to let our minds wander, and think about the story. This is the action of the daydreaming mode and it is healthy to engage it — remember, it is the brain’s “default” mode.
As I’ve emphasized throughout this book, the most fundamental principle of organization, the one that is most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is this: Shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world. If we can take some or all of the process out of our brains and put it into the physical world, we are less likely to make mistakes. But the organized mind enables you to do much more than merely avoid mistakes. It enables you to do things and go places you might not otherwise imagine.
Why is it so difficult? Because of the way memory works: We encode new information only if we pay attention to it, and we aren’t always paying attention at the moment we’re introduced. In that instant of meeting a new person, many of us become preoccupied with the impression we’re making on them — we think about how we’re dressed or whether our breath stinks, or we try to read their body language to see how they’re sizing us up. This makes encoding any new information, such as a name, impossible.
Many scientific careers were fueled by ideas that came to researchers by stumbling upon articles that captured their attention while searching for something else that turned out to be far more boring and less useful. Many students today do not know the pleasure of serendipity that comes from browsing through stacks of old academic journals, turning past “irrelevant” articles on the way to the one they’re looking for, finding their brain attracted to a particularly interesting graph or title. Instead, they insert the name of the journal article they want and the computer delivers it to them with surgical precision, effortlessly. Efficient, yes. Inspiring, and capable of unlocking creative potential, not so much.
The greatest scientists are artists as well. Einstein’s own creativity arrived as sudden insight following daydreaming, intuition, and inspiration. “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge. All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.”
I think not. One’s junk drawer, like one’s life, undergoes a natural sort of entropy. Every so often, we should perhaps take time out and ask ourselves the following questions:
- Do I really need to hold on to this thing or this relationship anymore? Does it fill me with energy and happiness? Does it serve me?
- Are my communications filled with clutter? Am I direct? Do I ask for what I want and need, or do I hope my partner / friend / coworker will psychically figure it out?
- Must I accumulate several of the same things even though they’re identical? Are my friends, habits, and ideas all too similar, or am I open to new people’s ideas and experiences?
It’s usually obvious when you’re talking to somebody a level above you, because they see lots of things instantly when those things take considerable work for you to figure out. These are good people to learn from, because they remember what it’s like to struggle in the place where you’re struggling, but the things they do still make sense from your perspective (you just couldn’t do them yourself).
Talking to somebody two or more levels above you is a different story. They’re barely speaking the same language, and it’s almost impossible to imagine that you could ever know what they know. You can still learn from the, if you don’t get discouraged, but the things they want to teach you seem really philosophical, and you don’t think they’ll help you — but for some reason, they do.
Somebody three levels above is actually speaking a different language. They probably seem less impressive to you than the person two levels above, because most of what they’re thinking about is completely invisible to you. From where you are, it is not possible to imagine what they think about, or why. You might think you can, but this is only because they know how to tell entertaining stories. Any one of these stories probably contains enough wisdom to get you halfway to your next level if you put in enough time thinking about it.