Month: February 2023

You didn’t get to bed on time and so you are late for work.

You are late for work so you run the red light.

You got in an accident because you ran the red light.

These things happen all the time. We become so hyper-focused on the outcome of the last decision that we ignore the ten decisions that led before that.

This is an avalanche problem: One bad decision that leads to even more bad decisions.

Avalanche forecasters have a set of checklists they use to figure out if a slope is safe enough to ski. It isn’t foolproof, but you can certainly save yourself a lot of heartache by observing the conditions around you to avoid these traps.

It is also worth pointing out, that one positive decision can lead to more favorable outcomes too.

It’s obviously a throwing problem. If you throw a ball too far away, we are now reaching making it difficult to set up the next throw. If you throw the ball in the correct zone, the catching takes care of itself.

While most of us don’t know how to juggle, we know how to juggle the many tasks associated with a connected economy.

The visual cannot escape me. We fall short when we are out of balance. Perhaps, it is also better to let some of the balls fall down and focus on the ones we can keep up.

From what I observe, we juggle too much. YMMV.

When we don’t have enough information or context to a complex problem, we immediately jump to conclusions to get over the gap of knowledge we lack.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. How could you be an expert in every aspect of your life? I write more than most people but am a terrible mechanic. And while creating shortcuts in decision-making can aid us, it also hurts us by creating blind spots. It may be a good idea to walk fast in a dark alley when you see someone in a hood, but then again, are we just imagining a problem that doesn’t exist?

When we don’t fully understand how things work it creates tension. It challenges our authority and status. And instead of sitting with it, we look for ways to resolve it quickly. Even if we are just creating the appearance that we know better. Compounding the problem, we rely too much on our biases/prejudices to make these decisions.

We have a difficult time, especially in a position of power, saying, “I don’t know.” Yet, we have people right now on Capitol Hill making decisions for the masses who are uninformed, who are afraid, and who see the world differently than you do. It may be the best system we got, but it is also flawed.

No one is an expert in every category–even if we pretend we are. Your title doesn’t give you authority, only responsibility.

In mathematics, an imaginary number is a real number time the square root of the imaginary unit i.

The visualization is powerful. Human beings constantly apply their imagination to real-life situations. Think about all the possible problems we come up with in our heads and all the scenarios we play out.

The question we should stop and ask:

Is this a real problem or an imagined one?

Perhaps, we should be more patient and wait and see how things play out before worrying about them.

If we take the observer’s position, we will find that the worst-case scenarios rarely ever play out like we imagine.

The reason why Bernie Madoff fooled all those people wasn’t because the scheme was so bulletproof. It was the story he told to people who had money that they could have more of it.

This is why we continue to fall for the same traps because of the story we continue to tell ourselves.

Familiarity plays a key role here. Even if we know how certain jobs will play out, we take them. “Better the devil you know than the one you don’t,” we claim. We also say, “With my luck…” as if past performance is a key to future outcomes.

These are narrations. Not a fortune cookie of things to come.

Plans are important. However, the best plan is nothing without execution.

The trick then is to have enough to start.

There is way more power in action than in planning. Because once you are on the path, you can then make a plan for whether to go left or right. If you are still stuck in the planning stage, you are just making an educated with your eyes shut–just imagining the obstacles.

You will have a way better idea of what to do next after you take the first step.

12 plus years of school have ingrained in us to do the minimum amount of work to get an A. Don’t break the system. Fit in. That action repeated over again.

In the end, it trains us to ask, “Will this be on the test?”

The school system doesn’t instill experimenting, curiosity, and exploration. All those avenues have a higher chance of failure. Which, in turn, doesn’t fit the model of compliance, efficiency, and short-term gains.

Life is not finished with a letter grade, even though we act like it does.

The destination is the same for everyone, the question is how we get there–it is about the process not the letter at the end.

Over the years I have spoken to many parents in tears about the difficult situation their child is in. And I always remind them that there is another story to tell here. One about hope. We all need to be reminded, especially when we are struggling with tunnel vision, that the universe doesn’t go out of its way to play out the worst-case scenarios we have envisioned. Things are usually not as bad as we think they are. We are usually emotionally tired and need to step back to clearly see the road ahead and not just the speed bump we hit.