Fable mystique raconte par Yogi Raman a Julian qui contient les sept vertus éternelles d'une vie édifiant:

Tu es assis au milieu d’un jardin magnifique, vert et luxuriant. Ce jardin est rempli des fleurs les plus superbes que tu aies jamais vues. Tout est suprêmement tranquille et silencieux alentour. Savoure les délices sensuelles de ce jardin et imagines que tu disposes de tout le temps possible pour apprécier cette oasis naturelle. Tandis que tu regardes autour de toi, tu t’aperçois qu’au centre de ce jardin magique se dresse un phare rouge haut de six étages. Soudain, le silence du jardin est déchiré par un craquement bruyant tandis que la porte à la base du phare s’ouvre. Un gigantesque Japonais de quatre cent cinquante kilos qui pratique le sumo en sort en titubant et s’en va errer jusqu’au centre du jardin. Le lutteur de sumo est nu excepté qu’un câble électrique rose dissimule son sexe. Pendant que l’adepte de sumo se promène dans le jardin, il y trouve un magnifique chronomètre en or oublié par quelqu’un voilà de nombreuses années. Il l’a met à son poignet et s’écroule avec un bruit effrayant. Le lutteur japonais est complètement inconscient et demeure inerte et silencieux sur le sol. Au moment où l’on pense qu’il vient de rendre son dernier soupir, il se réveille, stimulé peut-être par le parfum des roses jaunes qui fleurissent non loin de là. Revitalisé, le lutteur se dresse rapidement et regarde intuitivement à sa gauche. Il est surpris par ce qu’il voit. À travers les buissons qui ornent le bord du jardin, il peut voir un long sentier sinueux recouvert de millions de diamants étincelants. Quelque chose semble lui dire de s’engager dans ce sentier et, fort heureusement, il le fait. Ce sentier débouche sur le chemin de la joie et de la béatitude éternelle.

Un jardin tout à fait extraordinaire

Le jardin est un symbole de l'esprit. Si tu soignes ton esprit et si tu le cultives tout comme un jardin fertile et riche, il produira des fleurs bien au delà de tes attentes. Mais si tu laisses les mauvais herbes s'installer, la paix de l'esprit la profonde harmonie intérieure t'échapperont toujours. Ne te permettre pas d'une pensée négative. La maîtrise mental est une question de conditionnement est nous avons le pouvoir de déterminer à quoi nous allons penser à un moment donné, ce ça qui nous rend humains. Tout les succès dans la vie, matériel ou spirituel, commencent dans notre pensées. Le monde extérieur reflète l'état de ton monde intérieur. Commencé à conditionner ton esprit afin qui'l interprète chaque événement de façon positive. Prends conscience du pouvoir que possède ton esprit pour exaucer tes rêves. Tout changement intérieur durable exige du temps et des effort. La persévérance est la mère de la transformation personnelle. Mais pour atteindre cette destination, tu ne dois pas être obsédé par le résultat. Techniques: Le cœur de la Rose: méditation en regardant fixement le centre d'une rose. Pour développer la forteresse de ton esprit. Pensé opposée: l’esprit ne peut saisir qu'une seule pensée à la fois. Prend conscience des tes pensées et remplacer les pensée indésirable pour une désirable. Les pensées son des choses vitales et vivantes, et leur qualité détermine la qualité de leur vie. Tout est toujours créé deux fois, d'abord dans l'esprit, puis dans la réalité. Secret du Lac: se léver a 4h du matin et en regardant les eaux calmes imaginent que leurs rêves deviennent réalité. Être supérieur à une autre personne n'a rien de noble. La vraie noblesse consiste à être supérieur à celui que vous étiez.

Allumez votre feu intérieur - Le phare

Quand tu sais clairement quels sont les buts que tu souhaites accomplir durant la vie, et que tu passes tes journées à les réaliser, tu trouves finalement la joie éternelle. Il faut prend du temps pour réfléchir à la signification de notre vie, à notre Dharma Techniques: Visualisation du objective, prendre l"engagement publiquement, lui donner une date précise, lui inscrit sur le papier, 21 jours de répétition d"affilée pour créer un nouveau trajet neuronal (habitude)

L'art ancien de la maîtrise de soi - Le lutteur de sumo

Kaizen, amélioration constante et incessante. La maîtrise de soi est l'abc de la maîtrise de la vie. Prend du temps de renforcer ta volonté, ta discipline, ton énergie, ton optimisme, pour obtenir ce que tu veux dans ton monde extérieur. Ce qui différencie les gens qui ont atteint un degré très élevé de réalisation de soi de ceux qui n’ont jamais mené une vie inspirée, c’est qu’ils font les choses que les gens moins évolués n’aiment pas faire, même si eux non plus n’aiment pas les faire. Une fois que tu maîtriseras ton esprit, ton corps et ta volonté, le bonheur et l'abondance entreront dans ta vie presque magiquement. Tu dois passer un peu de te,ps tous les jours à travailler sur toi-même: Les dix rituel de la vie rayonnante: Rituel de la solitude: vertus curatives du silence et apprends qui tu es vraiment; Rituel de la Vigueur physique: yoga, respiration Rituel des Aliments vivants: ceux créés par l'interaction naturelle du soleil, de l'air, du sol et de l'eau. Un régime végétarien Rituel de la Richesse des connaissances: être sélectif en ce que concerne ce que tu mets dans le jardin fertile de ton esprit, il faut que ce sois immensément nourrissant Rituel de la Réflexion personnelle: prendre la résolution de faire des amélioration immédiates sur les choses qui est mal dans ta vie Rituel du Lever matinal: se lever avec le soleil pour bien commencer la journée. ça que importe ce la qualité et non la quantité du sommeil Rituel de la Musique: mantras Rituel de le Conformité aux principes: il faut que tu fasses tous les jours quelque chose qui va augmenter régulièrement ta force de caractère. "Tu plantes une pensée, tu récoltes une action. Tu plantes une action, tu récoltes une habitude. Tu plantes une habitude, tu récoltes la force de caractère. Tu plantes la force de caractère, tu récoltes ta destinée" Rituel de la Simplicité: se concentrer sur les priorités, sur les activités qui ont vraiment un sens.

Le pouvoir de la discipline - Le câble électrique

S'exercer à la vertu de la discipline personnelle par de petit actes, comme les fils fins d'une câble électrique, ensemble, leur somme est plus grande que ses composantes. Autodiscipline. Le manque de volonté est une "maladie de l'esprit" Les gens réellement édifiées ne cherchent jamais à imiter les autres. Ils cherchent plutôt à être supérieurs à ce qu'ils étaient auparavant: Ne rivalise pas avec les autres; rivalise avec toi-même. Prend contrôle de tes pensées, pour contrôler ton esprit, pour contrôler ta vie.

Votre bien les plus précieux, le temps - Le chronomètre en or

Ce qui distingue les êtres qui mènent des vies exceptionnelles des autres est leur façon d'utiliser le temps La règle des vingt: 80/20 Apprends à dire non, cela te donnera le pouvoir de dire oui aux grandes choses? un rythme échevelé et frénétique n'est pas celui que la nature a prévu Canalise ton énergie pour commencer à rêver plus grand. N'accepte pas une vie de médiocrité. Deviens l'architecte de ton avenir.

Le but ultime de la vie - Les roses parfumées

La qualité de ta vie dépendra de la qualité de ta contribution à la société Un petit peu de parfum demeure toujours sur la main qui te donne des roses Ta vie prend des dimension beaucoup plus magiques quand tu commences à t'efforcer d'améliorer le monde, concentre-toi sur un but plus élevé.

Le secret éternel du bonheur permanent -Le sentier pavé de diamantes

En appliquant ce principe durant ta journée de travaille, tu commenceras à voir des merveilles exquises dans les choses les plus simples et tu vivras avec l'extase que tu mérites. Les but te donnent de l'énergie à ta vie; ne remets jamais à plus tard les choses qui sont importantes pour ton bien être et ta satisfaction. Vis l'enfance de tes enfantes, prendre le temps de les regarder grandir et s'épanouir Nirvana, c'est la destination ultime de toutes les a,es édifiées, c'est un état de sérénité suprême. Il faut savourer le voyage, la route et aussi belle que la destination. Ne te prive pas de ton destin.

“While data scientists are sitting on valuable insights, they cannot sell them properly. Executives and Decision-makers, they often misunderstand or oversimplify the analysis and tend to complain about not seeing tangible results, because they are not communicated in their language.” (1)

It is clear that the ability to communicate well in order to answer business questions, explaining results to non-technical stakeholders (most of the time the decision-makers), is key. This gap represents a field of huge opportunities in every sector where data is making an impact.

Being aware of it and seeking to close this gap, I had to dig deeper to understand the fundamentals of this field and that’s how I came across "Confident Data Skills" by Kiril Eremenko. The book explains the fundamentals of the Data Science Process, its challenges, the principles behind the most common algorithms for data analytics. Throughout the lens of a career strategy, it also presents a very refreshing and optimistic future for those looking into entering the field or using it within their industries.

Let’s dive straight in:

THE DATA SCIENCE PROCESS

1. Identify the question

What is the goal of your analysis and what are the questions you want to answer? Identify the scope of the project.

The very first step requires stepping back and think about the big picture, to consider its multiple components and the context in which the question sits. And it's often the most neglected part of projects that use data. Learning about the organization, the stakeholders, the company’s strategy before even considering the data. Identifying the question, after all, is all about filtering out options.

This step can include Data Mining and it is a test drive for the data available and is where you can afford to be explorative. Even though it can save you a lot of effort later on, it can lead to nothing wasting time.

Here we make sure we understand the scope of the problem, the amount of data at our disposal and the time it will take. Every stakeholder should be on the same page since most of them have the tendency to change their concept of what they want as the projects develop.

2. Prepare the data

Source, clean and prepare the data for analysis.

This step is about establishing a common language between the human and the machine. Since it comprises a number of tasks that can only be completed manually, it normally takes the most amount of time (60-80% of the time). This process is known as ETL:

• **Extract (E)** the data from its sources;

• Transform (T) the data into a comprehensible language for access in a relational database. Dealing with incorrect, Corrupt and/or Missing data;

• Load **(L) **the data into the end source (the warehouse)

3. Analyze the data

Build models, perform data mining, run text analytics. 

Once we finally have the data ready to analyze it. The most basic algorithms used in data analytics fall into three groups:

Classification

It's used when we already know the groups into which we want an analysis to place our data.

• Decisions trees: It runs tests on individual attributes of the data set in order to determine the possible outcomes and continues to add results as further tests are run, only stopping when all outcomes have been exhausted. Best using it with small data sets.

• Random Forest: This is simply an expansion of the Decision Tree algorithms but instead of using one tree, it will use many different trees to make the same prediction, taking the average of individual trees’ results, making much more informed predictions. Best using it with larger data sets.

• K-nearest neighbors (K-NN): It uses patterns in the data to place new data points in the relevant categories. It analyses “likeness” and it will work by calculating the new data point and the existing data point by measuring the Euclidean distance. Using this algorithm is the right choice because it is intuitive to understand and it does not make any assumptions about your dataset (unlike Naive Bayes, see below). However, it takes a very long time to compute. It is a deterministic model because the answer always falls in one of the “k” neighbors defined.

• Naive Bayes: It allows us to express probabilities of events in such a way that any newly uncovered evidence can be easily included in the algorithm to update the probability value. It is a probabilistic model, as it assigns a probability distribution across all classes. Although it cannot be biased by outliers, the drawback of it is that the naive assumptions it makes can create bias.

• Logistic Regression: it can be a Simple linear regression, where we do an analysis of the relationship between one dependent and one independent variable, OR a Multilinear regression, that it allows us to analyze the relationship between one dependent and two or more independent variables. This is better suitable for analyzing more complex data sets.

Clustering

The aim is to segregate groups with similar traits and assign them into clusters. We use Clustering when we do not know what the groups will be, in terms of either number or name.

• K-means Clustering: It is an iterative clustering algorithm that aims to find local maxima in each iteration. it discovers statistically significant categories or groups in our data set. It’s perfect in situations where we have two or more independent variables in a data set and we want to cluster our data points into groups of similar attributes. It shows us groups that the human eye cannot see and help us to draw a line between groups that may be hard for us to identify manually, especially in multidimensional datasets. It’s biggest advantage, it can be used in datasets of any size. The biggest drawback is that it may be hard to find the optimal number of clusters.

• Hierarchical Clustering: It shares the same goal of K-means of identifying clusters in the data but the concept behind is different, and so the resulting clusters are likely to be different. As the name suggests is an algorithm that builds a hierarchy of clusters. This algorithm starts with all the data points assigned to a cluster of their own. Then two nearest clusters are merged into the same cluster. In the end, this algorithm terminates when there is only a single cluster left. > Dendrogram

• Difference between K Means and Hierarchical clustering: Hierarchical clustering can’t handle big data well but K Means clustering can. This is because the time complexity of K Means is linear i.e. O(n) while that of hierarchical clustering is quadratic i.e. O(n2). In K Means clustering, since we start with a random choice of clusters, the results produced by running the algorithm multiple times might differ. While results are reproducible in Hierarchical clustering.

Reinforcement Learning

It is ultimately a form of machine learning and it leans on the concepts of behaviorism to train AI. The way it works is through trailing all the variations available to the machine and then working our the optimal actions from those individual experiences. It is implemented by associating successful progression with a reward, and an unsuccessful progression with a punishment. The process is surprisingly similar to our human processes of knowledge retention. That makes it so powerful is its ability to exploit the options available based on an approach that has been guided by the data.

The multi-armed bandit problem:

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a classic problem in decision sciences. Effectively, it is one of the optimal resource allocations under uncertainty. The name is derived from old slot machines that were operated by pulling an arm — they are called bandits because they rob those who play them. Now, imagine there are multiple machines and we suspect that the payout rate — the payout to pull ratio — varies across the machines. Naturally, we want to identify the machine with the highest payout and exploit it — i.e. pull it more than the others. The MAB problem is this; how do you most efficiently identify the best machine to play, whilst sufficiently exploring the many options in real-time? This problem is not an exercise in theoretical abstraction, it is an analogy for a common problem that organizations face all the time, that is, how to identify the best message to present to customers (message is broadly defined here i.e. webpages, advertising, images) such that it maximizes some business objective (e.g. click-through rate, signups) (2)

Here below the two most common algorithms to solve this type of problems:

• Upper confidence bound (UCB): It combines exploration (random selection) with exploitation (selection based on prior knowledge). It increases in accuracy as additional information is collected. This algorithm is good for a) finding the most effective advertising campaigns, b) managing multiple projects finances

• Thomson sampling (TS): Thompson Sampling is an algorithm that follows exploration and exploitation to maximize the cumulative rewards obtained by performing an action.

4. Visualize the data

*Translate complex insights into easy to digest visuals and animations. *

Visuals have the power to transmit information in a way that text cannot and learning how to present data is key. There are two branches to visuals in data science:

• **Visual analytics: **Used in steps 1 to 3 in the Data Science Process (identifying the question, preparing the data and analyzing the data). It’s about putting the data into interactive objects, charts, and graphs that allow us to see where trends and anomalies fall.

• **Visualization: **Used in step 4, Visualization. This is when most of the challenges arise for data scientists, struggling to translate the results into something that is easy for the stakeholders to digest. This is when data science needs to persuade the decision-makers to implement changes that our data recommends.

**Recommended tools: **Tableau, PowerBI, Seaborn (add-on in Python) and Ploty (in R).

**Tips explained: **to go back to the beginning identifying the question, what does your audience want to know?; to limit the amount of text as little as possible; to keep objects distinct if there are more than one; each visual should answer a specific business question; don’t get too creative since most of the audience will be striving to read the smallest text; keep it simple and consistent (colors, fonts, etc); keep the right balance of information and visuals; add context (without context data is meaningless); tell a story (data is boring for most people).

5. Present your findings

*Insights need to be understood to be acted upon. Translate your findings into a language your audience will comprehend. *

Shorter attention spans in the digital age, non-technical audience and their money-related interests are among the major challenges for a data scientist. That’s why the ability to presents insights is essential and here it comes the importance of storytelling to engage the audience and to effectively communicate results. Knowing your audience, showing their pain points, stating the problem and show them the benefits and being prepared for hard questions while telling them a story is the key to an effective presentation.

Although I find every step of the data science process very interesting, Visualizing and Presenting findings is personally the most interesting part. Here below some examples of how cool presenting insights can get:

CLOSING

Gaps between business and technology are not new and closing them brings lots of challenges and opportunities in this new era of information and technology. Building the right teams, balancing the right technical and communication skills, enhancing teamwork and collaboration is the key to a successful data science project.

REFERENCES

The book: Confident Data Skills 

The Podcast: SuperDataScience Podcast

(1) Article: Data Science and the art of persuasion

(2) Article: Solving Multiarmed bandits problem

(3) Article: The best data science courses on the internet ranked by your reviews

Here I am sharing not only the main Principles described in the book but some personal thoughts and people I recalled to while reading this masterpiece. Let's dive right in:

1. Embrace Reality and Deal with It

There is nothing more important than understanding how reality works and how to deal with it. The state of mind you bring to this process makes all the difference. The main question to answer precisely here is "How does reality works?" in every particular situation and environment.

1.1 Be a hyperrealist

Understanding, accepting, and working with reality is both practical and beautiful. People who create great things aren't idle dreamers, they are totally grounded in reality. And in order to make a real impact, this takes Determination.

" Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life."

1.2 Truth—or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality —is the essential foundation for any good outcome.

Yet, none of us is born knowing what is true; we either have to discover what's true for ourselves or believe and follow others. So **learning **is an important process which requires to:

1.3 Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.

Learning is the product of a continuous real-time feedback loop in which we make decisions, see their outcomes and improve our understanding of reality. Being radically open-minded and **radically transparent **accelerates the learning process. Meanwhile, will bring more meaning work and more meaningful relationships.

1.4 Look to nature to learn how reality works.

Man's most distinctive quality is our singular ability to look down on reality from a higher perspective and synthesize an understanding of it (thanks our well-developed neo-cortex).

"Don’t get hung up on your views of how things “should” be ****because you will miss out on learning how they really are."

1.5 Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward.

It is instinctually that way, which is why most of us want to get better at things. The Reality is optimizing for the whole—not just for you. Think about the Natural Selection and Evolution processes which lead to better qualities being retained and passed along.

The adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable. And here a very interesting concept: There are three kinds of learning that foster evolution: 1)**Memory-based learning **(storing information that comes in through one's conscious mind so that we can recall it later) 2)**Subconscious learning (the one we take away from our experiences that never enters our conscious minds, though it affects our decision making) **and 3)The learning that **occurs without thinking at all **(such as changes in the DNA)

It's proved that Experimentation and Adaptation(#2), produces more rapid progress than the Memory-based one.

Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing —and decide what you want to be.

1.6 Understand nature’s practical lessons.

"When I began to look at reality through the perspective of figuring out how it really works, instead of thinking things should be different, I realized that most everything that at first seemed "bad" to me - like rainy days, weaknesses, and even death - was because I held preconceived notions of what I personally wanted."

It is a fundamental law of nature that in order to gain strength one has to push one’s limits, which is painful.

"Man needs difficulties. They are necessary for health" Carl Jung

Yet, most people instinctually avoid pain.

1.7 Pain + Reflection = Progress.

Believe it or not, you are lucky to feel that kind of pain if you approach it correctly, because it is a signal that you need to find solutions so you can progress. The** pain **is the signal! Develop a reflexive reaction to psychic pain that causes you to reflect on it rather than avoid it.

1.8 Weigh second- and third-order consequences.

First-order consequences (FOC) often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences (SOC), resulting in big mistakes in decision making. Think on doing the exercise where the pain and time spent doing it is undesirable (FOC) while the better health and more attractive appearance (SOC) are desirable. Similarly, food that tastes good is often bad for you and vice versa. And it's like this how nature sorts us by throwing us trick choices that have both types of consequences and penalizing those who make their decisions on the basis of the first-order consequences alone.

1.9 Own your outcomes.

“Whatever circumstances life brings you, you will be more likely to succeed and find happiness if you** take responsibility **for making your decisions well instead of complaining about things being beyond your control. Psychologists call this having "Internal locus of control" and studies show that people who have it outperform those who don't.

So don't worry about whether you like your situation or not. Life doesn't give a damn about what you like and it's up to you to connect what you want with what you need to do to get there.

1.10 Triangulate with others.

Because it is difficult to see oneself objectively, you need to rely on the input of others. Asking others who are strong in areas where you are weak to help you is a great skill that you should develop no matter what, as it will help you develop guardrails that will prevent you from doing what you shouldn’t be doing.

2. Use the 5-Step Process to Get What You Want Out of Life

This loop is iterative from each iteration mistakes come out. These mistakes are inevitable (don't expect life to be fair) and it's important to recognize and accept this fact of life. The good news is that every mistake you make can teach you something. What you do with this learning will impact your life and your "Personal Evolutionary Process".

2.1 Have clear goals.

Define what you are going after and **Prioritize - **while you *can have virtually anything *you want, you can’t have everything you want - Here is important to differentiate and don’t confuse goals (SOC) with desires (FOC).

Never rule out a goal because you think it’s unattainable - what you are capable of is a function of what you know at the moment. Don't set the bar too low as almost nothing can stop you from succeeding if you have a) flexibility and b) self-accountability.

2.2 Identify and don’t tolerate problems.

Remember:

Pain is the signal!

Don’t avoid confronting problems because they are rooted in harsh realities that are unpleasant to look at. Be specific in Identifying your problems and once you identify a problem, **don’t tolerate it. **Take action.

2.3 Diagnose problems to get at their root causes.

"What differentiate people who live up to their potential from those who don't is their willingness to look at themselves and others objectively and understand the root causes standing in their way"

Diagnosing takes around 15' to 60' and triangulating with relevant people can help. Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.” Is key to distinguish proximate causes from root causes.

2.4 Design a plan.

Too many people fail here, spending virtually no time on Designing because they are preoccupied with the execution. Yet, designing it is essential and it should be done broadly at first and then refined it, including granular details. Again, **Flexibility **and Adaptation play a key role.

2.5 Push through to completion.

Great planners who don’t execute their plans go nowhere. Execution requires self-discipline to follow your script and establish clear metrics to make certain that you are following your plan.

Here is where the FIUBA (School of Engineering of the University of Buenos Aires) made me so strong at this. Going through a never-ending-7-year-Engineering-course in a public university where the average time to get graduated is 10 years and where only 25% succeed on it, requires high self-discipline.

2.6 Remember that weaknesses don’t matter if you find solutions.

And exactly for this the 5-steps process previously described is helpful.

Goal setting requires to be good at high-level thinking like *visualization *and *prioritization. *Identifying and not tolerating problems requires you to be *perceptive *and good at synthesis and maintaining high standards; **Diagnosis **requires you to be logical and willing to have hard conversations with others (to triangulate). **Designing **requires visualization and *practicality *and Executing, requires self-discipline, good work habits and a results orientation.

Who do you know who has all those qualities? Probable no one! There is the thing, have humility to identify where you need to rely on others and to identify where you are weak and what you need to do to improve. Everyone has at least one big thing that stands in the way of their success; find yours and deal with it.

2.7 Understand your own and others’ mental maps and humility.

Some people are good at knowing what to do on their own, they have good mental maps. Some other people are more **humble and open-minded **than others. Humility can be even more valuable than having good mental maps if it leads you to seek out better answer than you could come up with your own. The idea is to find a good balance of both concepts - identify where you need to improve (design a plan and execute it).

3. Be Radically Open-Minded

3.1 Recognize your two barriers.

The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots.

• The ego barrier is rooted in the subliminal defense mechanism that make it hard for you to accept your mistakes and weaknesses - which is coming from our needs and fears (the need to be loved and the fear of losing love, the need to survive and the fear of not surviving, the need to be important and the fear of not mattering) and reside in primitive parts of your brain such as the amygdala. Because these areas of your brain are not accessible to your conscious awareness, it is virtually impossible for you to understand what they want and how they control you (meditation helps!).

• Blind spots are areas where your way of thinking prevents you from seeing things accurately. If you're like most people, you have no clue how other people see things and aren't good at seeking to understand what they are thinking. because you're too preoccupied with telling what you yourself think is correct.

These two barriers are fatal flaws that keep intelligent, hardworking people from living up to their potential.

3.2 Practice radical open-mindedness.

Radical open-mindedness is motivated by the genuine worry that you might not be seeing your choices optimally. It is the ability to effectively explore different points of view and different possibilities without letting your ego or your blind spots get in your way.

Decision making is a two-step process: First take in all the relevant information, then decide. And for this might be useful to triangulate with others to gain the perspective that comes from seeing things through another’s eyes. To do this effectively, you must suspend judgment for a time—only by empathizing can you properly evaluate another point of view.

Remember that you’re looking for the best answer, not simply the best answer that you can come up with yourself.

3.3 Appreciate the art of thoughtful disagreement.

The goal is not to convince the other party that you are right - it is to find out which view is true and decide **what to do **about it. Use questions rather than make statements. Great example here @Semjon!

Most of the disagreements aren't threats as much as opportunities for learning. People who change their minds because they learned something are the winners, whereas those who stubbornly refuse to learn are the losers. This doesn't mean that you should blindly accept others' conclusions. It's important to be open-minded and assertive at the same time.

Watch out for Closed-minded people (they don't want their ideas challenged, they are more likely to make statements than ask questions, they focus more on being understood that on understanding others, they block others from speaking and they lack a deep sense of humility)!

3.6 Understand how you can become radically open-minded.

Regularly use pain as your guide toward** quality reflection**. Make being open-minded a habit (the life you will live is most simply the results of habits you develop). Get to know your blind spots (record the circumstances in which you've consistently made bad decisions, analyze them and triangulate with others to help you with this). Meditate as it enhances open-mindedness, higher level thinking perspective, equanimity and creativity. Be evidence-based. Help others to be open-minded (being calm and reasonable will prevent the "fight-or-flight" animal/amygdala reaction in others).

Gaining open-mindedness doesn't mean losing assertiveness. In fact, because it increases one's odds of being right, it should increase one's confidence.

***Are you up to the challenge? ***Keep reading...

4. Understand That People Are Wired Very Differently

"Because of the different ways our brains are wired, we all experience reality in different ways and any single way is essentially distorted. This is something that we need to acknowledge and deal with. So if you want to know what is true & what to do about it, you must understand your own brain."

4.1 Understand the power that comes from knowing how you and others are wired.

Just as our physical attributes determine the limits of what we are able to do physically, our brains are innately different in ways that set the parameters of what we are able to do mentally.

Everyone is like a Lego set of attributes - all these pieces come together to determine what each person is like and by understanding this you'll have a pretty good idea of what you can expect from them.

4.3 Understand the great brain battles and how to control them to get what “you” want.

a) Realize that the conscious mind is in a battle with the subconscious mind.

Our subconscious fears and desires drive our motivations and actions through emotions such as love, fear, and inspirations. It's physiological. Being aware of the benefits of connecting with the subconscious is key (...many people only see the conscious mind and they believe that the way to accomplish more is to cram more into the conscious mind and make it work harder, but this is counterproductive). Relaxing - like when you take a shower or you meditate - helps to this connection with the subconscious and as a consequence gets you more creative for instance. Be aware of this connection and train it as it will help you to become happier and more effective.

b) Know that the most constant struggle is between feeling and thinking.

There are no greater battles than those between our feelings (most importantly controlled by our* amygdala*, which operates subconsciously) and our rational thinking (most importantly controlled by our prefrontal cortex, which operates consciously).

That damned amygdala, which is a little almond-shaped structure that lies deeply embedded in the cerebrum, is one of the most powerful parts of your brain. It controls your behavior, even though you’re not conscious of it. How does it work? When something upsets us—and that something could be a sound, a sight, or just a gut feeling—the amygdala sends notice to our bodies to prepare to fight or flee: the heartbeat speeds up, the blood pressure rises, and breathing quickens. During an argument, you’ll often notice a physical response similar to how you react to fear (for instance, rapid heartbeats and tensing muscles). Recognizing that, your conscious mind (which resides in the prefrontal cortex) can refuse to obey its instructions. Typically, these amygdala hijackings come on fast and dissipate quickly, except in rare cases, such as when a person develops post-traumatic stress disorder from a particularly horrible event or series of events. Knowing how these hijackings work, you know that if you allow yourself to react spontaneously, you will be prone to overreact. You can also comfort yourself with the knowledge that whatever psychological pain you are experiencing will go away before very long.

The biggest difference between people who guide their own personal evolution and achieve their goals and those who don't is that those who make progress reflect on what causes their amygdala hijackings.

c) Choose your habits well - Habit is probably the most powerful tool in your brain's toolbox. It's driven by the basal ganglia and it's so deep-seated and instinctual that we are not conscious of it, though it controls our actions. Creating good habits helps to put your brain in "automatic pilot" executing the activities without even thinking about them and helping you to get what you want to achieve.

d) Understand the differences between right-brained and left-brained thinking.

• The left hemisphere reasons sequentially, analyzes details, and excels at linear analysis. Linear thinkers who are analytically strong are often called bright.

• The right hemisphere thinks across categories, recognizes themes and synthesizes the big picture. Lateral thinkers with more street smarts are often called smart.

Left brain might see right brain people as “spacey” or “abstract” while right brain thinkers find left brain people “literal” or “narrow”

e) Understand how much the brain can and cannot change - can we change? Yes, and it's "Bran plasticity" what allows us to do it through its "soft-wiring" affecting our abilities to think and form memories. How? From physical exercise, studying, meditation can lead to these physical and physiological changes (e.g it's been demonstrated that mediation helps stimulate parts of the brain linked to improving learning, memory, self-awareness, compassion and introspection as well as decrease activity in the amygdala). This takes practice and requires operating in an environment that reinforces open-mindedness.

4.4 Find out what you and others are like.

Because of the biases with which we are wired, our self-assessments (and our assessments of others) tend to be** highly inaccurate**. Based on this principle, when it comes to the hiring process at Bridgewater (Dalio's company), they apply psychometric assessments rather than traditional interviews to better understand what people are like, their attributes, and preferences for thinking and action. Here below some of them explained:

(* Most of the terms below come from the following assessments: "Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, The Workplace Personality Inventory, The Team Dimensions Profile and Stratified Systems Theory")

• Introversion vs. extroversion: Introverts focus on their inner world and get their energy from ideas, memories, and experiences while extroverts are externally focused and get their energy from being with people.

• Intuiting vs. sensing: Some people see big pictures (forests) and others see details (trees) You can get an idea of people's preferences by observing what they focus on.

• *Thinking vs. feeling: *Some people make decisions based on logical analysis of objective facts. Others - who prefer feeling - focus on harmony between people. They are better suited to roles that require lots of empathy, interpersonal contact, and relationship building.

• Planning vs. perceiving: Planners like to focus on a plan and stick with it, while Perceivers are prone to focus on what's happening; they see things happening and work backwards to understand the cause and how to respond. Planners work from the inside out, first figuring out what they want to achieve and then how things should unfold. Planners and Perceivers have trouble appreciating each other.

• Creators vs. refiners vs. advancers vs. executors vs. flexors

1. Creators generate new ideas and original concepts. They prefer unstructured and abstract activities and thrive on innovation and unconventional practices.

2. Advancers communicate these new ideas and carry them forward. They relish feelings and relationships and manage the human factors. They are excellent at generating enthusiasm for work.

3. Refiners challenge ideas. They analyze projects for flaws, then refine them with a focus on objectivity and analysis. They love facts and theories and working with a systematic approach.

4. Executors can also be thought of as **Implementers. **They ensure that important activities are carried out and goals accomplished; they are focused on details and the bottom line.

5. Flexors are a combination of all four types. They can adapt their styles to fit certain needs and are able to look at a problem from a variety of perspectives.

Shapers are people who can go from visualization to actualization | Shaper = Visionary + Practical Thinker + Determined

"It does not matter what to do with your life, as long as you are doing what is consistent with your nature and your aspirations. Beyond a basic level, there is no correlation between happiness level and conventional makers of success"

4.5 Getting the right people in the right roles in support of your goal is the key to succeeding at whatever you choose to accomplish.

And here is when the assessments previously mentioned are so important. As a manager, manage yourself and orchestrate others to get what you want.

5. Learn How to Make Decisions Effectively

As mentioned, most of the processes that go into everyday decision making are subconscious and more complex than is widely understood. While there is no best way to make decisions, there are some **universal rules **for good decision making.

5.1 Recognize that 1) the biggest threat to good decision making is harmful emotions, and 2) decision making is a two-step process (first learning and then deciding).

Learning must come before deciding. What you know paints a true and rich picture of the realities that will affect your decision. That's why is important to be radically open-minded and to triangulate with others to learn what's true. Deciding comes after and it's important to weigh first-order consequences (FOC) against S/TOC.

5.2 Synthesize the situation at hand.

Don't get lost with unimportant things ("detail anxiety"). The key is having the higher-level perspective to make fast and accurate judgments on what the real risks are without getting bogged down in details.

5.3 Synthesize the situation through time.

To see how the dots connect through time you must collect, analyze, and sort different types of information. It's important to be analytical but not too much. Be imprecise understanding the concept "by-and-large" (good enough amount of information) and use approximations. Remember the 80/20 Rule and know what the key 20 percent is. Be an imperfectionist, just five to ten factors are typically enough when making a decision.

5.4 Navigate levels effectively.

Reality exists at different levels and each of them gives you different but valuable perspectives. It's important to keep all of them in mind as you synthesize and make decisions and to know how to navigate between them. (In the picture, letters represents main topics/levels relevant to the final goal and numbers represents each sub-level). To observe how well we do this in our own life, we need to pay attention to our conversations. We tend to move between levels when we talk.

5.5 Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.

Decisions need to be made based on evidence and logic - not as the majority of people following the lower-level brain path, leading to inferior decision making without realizing it.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate" Carl Jung

5.7 Prioritize by weighing the value of additional information against the cost of not deciding.

Here is the concept of "marginal cost" applied to decision making. The Marginal benefit of gathering more information against the marginal cost of waiting to decide. @Axel

Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities. People who can accurately sort probabilities from possibilities are generally strong at “practical thinking”; they’re the opposite of the “philosopher” types who tend to get lost in clouds of possibilities.

5.9 Use principles.

Get to understand your own ones. Slow down your thinking so you can note the criteria you are using to make your decisions. Write it down. Test it, assess it and refine it constantly.

5.10 Believability weight your decision making.

"I have found triangulating with highly believable people who are willing to have thoughtful disagreements has never failed to enhance my learning and sharpen the quality of my decision making" Ray Dalio

5.11 Convert your principles into algorithms and have the computer make decisions alongside you.

And for data scientists, here is the cool thing. Using the power of algorithms and computers, they developed a software to take the power of decision making to a whole other level by applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to this process. Computers are immune to the biases and consensus-driven thinking of crowds, they don't care if what they see is unpopular, and they don't panic.

The combination of man and machine is wonderful. The process of man's mind working with technology is what elevate us. It's for that reason that people who have common sense, imagination, and determination, who know what they value and what they want, and who also use computers, math and game theory, are the best decision makers there are.

Check out his TED talk to learn more about it.

LIFE PRINCIPLES: PUTTING IT ALTOGETHER

To acquire principles that work, it's essential that you **embrace reality and deal with it well (P.1). **Don't fall in the trap of wishing that reality worked differently than it does (P.1.9). After all, making the most of your circumstances is what life is all about. This includes being transparent with your thoughts and open-mindedly accepting feedback of others in order to learn. Along the journey, you'll experience painful failures. Remember that Pain is the signal and it fuels your personal evolution! (P.1.7)

The evolutionary process should follow a **5-Step Process **(P.2). Setting goals, identifying and not tolerating problems, diagnose problems coming up with design to get around them, and then going to tasks required. Our biggest barriers to doing this well are our ego and blind spots. (P.3.1) Practising thoughtful disagreement whit brilliant people who disagree with you in order to see things through their eyes and gain a deeper understanding of reality and raising your probability of making good decisions.

Finally, being **radically open-minded **(P.3) require you to have an accurate self-assessment of your own and others' strengths and weaknesses (psychometric assessments help here - P.4.4). To get the best results out of yourself and others, you must understand that **people are wired differently **(P.4).

"I hope these principles will help you struggle well and get all the joy you can out of life" Ray Dalio.

Thanks for so much wisdom!

Sources:

• The Book: Principles: Life and Work (worth reading it all)

• Ray Dalio's Facebook Page (for a more interactive experience, check out the videos explaining each Principle)

• Ray Dalio's Twitter account

Up until a few years ago, I never really thought much about the idea that people are either introverts or extroverts. Of course, I noticed that some people are more outgoing than others but I never really considered why exactly that is. After reading the book The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney, I learned that at least one out of four people prefers to avoid the limelight, tends to listen more than they speak, feels alone in large groups, and requires lots of private time to restore their energy. Something that I related quite a bit and these people are Introverts!

Living in an extroverted world and being an introvert is not easy (mainly true in Western cultures) and it can hold you back if you are not well aware of where you fall on the introvert/extrovert continuum and how to best use the introvert advantages in the right environments.

This book helped me not only to better understand my friends, relatives, and colleagues but to myself, and to embrace this part of my personality, leveraging those distinctive qualities and strengths of an introvert (like analytical skills, ability to think outside the box and strong powers of concentration) in order to align many aspects of my life with my temperament.

"Introverts have the power of persistence, the tenacity to solve complex problems, and the clear-sightedness to avoid pitfalls that trip others up. They enjoy freedom from the temptations of superficial prizes like money and status. Indeed, the biggest challenge may be to fully harness their strengths. But when they’re focused on a project that they care about, they find that their energy is boundless". Quiet, by Susan Cain.

The energy source

The main differentiating factor between introverts and extroverts is where we gain our energy. Extroverts get it from being out in the world, socializing, stimulating that brain reward center in big ways, and having those interactions. Introverts re-energize by being alone. Even better for us - being alone in nature.

Some misconceptions

Extroverts, being the majority (75% of the population), influence the entire cultural view of introversion. Extrovert’s verbal ease intimidates introverts, making it even easier for them to conclude that they should not speak. Since our society tends to place a great premium on verbal ability, courage, and candor, these “talkers” are perceived as influential and easily become role models. They appear confident and decisive. On the contrary, Introverts often exhibit the exact opposite qualities.

Having grown up with these misconceptions about introversion, it’s reasonable to conclude why most introverts struggle to understand their own temperament and they are often misread. So let’s polish up and correct that distorted lens:

Introversion is commonly confused and used interchangeably with being shy or antisocial. Shyness is tied to social anxiety, an extreme self-consciousness when one is around people. It is not an energy issue, it is a lack of confidence in social situations. It is a fear of what others think of you. Shyness is not who *you are *(like Introversion), it is what you think other people think you are, and therefore it is responsive to behavior change. Both introverts and extroverts can be shy (those shy extroverts who need to be with others to refuel can suffer greatly).

Introverts are commonly seen as “antisocials” but the truth is that they actually like to socialize a lot but in a different way. Introverts love relationships and talking with people (best in 1:1). They tend to have fewer connections, but deeper ones.

Attributes

Contrary to popular belief, many public personalities are introverts. Judged as ‘mentally disabled’, ‘not up to speed’ or ‘not good enough’, personalities like Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincon, Michael Jordan, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Clint Eastwood among others, are well known for their ‘innies’ temperaments. But these folks didn’t stick to any walls, instead, they managed to unlock their distinctive capabilities by understanding their own temperament and put them at use in a fitting environment.

While extroverts like to experience a lot, introverts like to know a lot about what they experience. Introverts focus on “richness” more than “muchness” of each experience.

Introverts have high perseverance, and the ability to think independently, they focus deeply and work creatively. They have the capability to observe and a propensity to think outside the box. They usually have the strengths to make unpopular decisions and the potential to slow down. They tend to be independent thinkers, perceptive, intuitive and observant. When in a conversation they dislike interrupting and don’t share ideas freely. They usually go more in-depth than the general level of the conversation and sometimes can get confusing for others.

Neurologically explained

Where does our temperament come from? It begins with genes.

All human beings have 99.9% of the same genetics prescription. Our individual differences come from 0.1% of our genetic material that is just us.

Damn, all the differences between you and me come from this 0.1%!

Our genetic inheritance includes a private reserve of about 150 brain chemicals to formulate our neurotransmitters. These neurotransmitters guide messages from cell to cell, directing all brain functions. The main ones are Dopamine, Serotonin, Noradrenaline, Acetylcholine, and Endorphins. Each has a different pathway in the brain and regulates how much blood it flows to different parts of it, activating/deactivating them. The route and quantity of blood flow influence what parts of the brain and central nervous centers are turned on.

**Dopamine for Extroverts. Acetylcholine for Introverts. **

One major difference between the brains of introverts and extroverts is the way we respond to the neurotransmitter dopamine Dopamine is the neurotransmitter released in the brain that provides the motivation to seek external rewards like earning money, climbing the social ladder, attracting a mate, or getting selected for a high-profile project at work. It’s not that introverts have less dopamine present in their brains than extroverts do.

Extroverts have a low sensitivity to Dopamine and yet require large amounts of it.

That explains why they need to be more active because they need their sympathetic nervous systems to release Dopamine into their brain and this is released with they have places to go and people to see.

On the contrary, Introverts have high sensitivity to Dopamine and too much of it and they feel overstimulated (2).

Instead, introverts use entirely another neurotransmitter on their more dominant brain pathway, called the **Acetylcholine. **Like dopamine, acetylcholine is also linked to pleasure; the difference is, acetylcholine makes us feel good when we turn inward. It powers our abilities to think deeply, reflect, and focus intensely on just one thing for a long period of time. It also helps explain why introverts like calm environments—it’s easier to turn inward when we’re not attending to external stimulation. This is a neurotransmitter that affects areas of the brain related to learning, attention and long term memory.

All this explains already quite a lot about such different behavior and capabilities extroverts and introverts tend to have and develop.

What follows is a graphic explanation of the different blood pathways in our brains. Each pathway requires a different neurotransmitter: Dopamine for Extroverts, and Acetylcholine for Introverts.

Shorter Extrovert Dopamine Pathway

The extroverted brain has less internal activity than the introverted brain. It scans the external world to gather stimulation to fuel the shorter, quicker dopamine pathway; the signals from the brain travel to the sympathetic nervous system that controls certain body functions and influences how extroverts behave.

Their system alerts the sympathetic nervous system, which is designed to take action without too much thinking. It releases adrenaline, blood (oxygen) to muscles and glucose, thus flooding the body with energy. The release of neurotransmitters from various organs enters the feedback loop, sending components back to the brain to make more dopamine. Dopamine and adrenaline release [hits of happiness] from the “feel good” center.

The dominance of the short dopamine pathway means that extroverts:

• Shoot from the hip, and talk more than they listen

• Have a good short-term memory that allows quick thinking

• Feel invigorated by discussion, novelty, experiences

• Make social chit chat easily and fluidly

The activation of the sympathetic nervous system means that extroverts:

• Act quickly under stress

• Enjoy moving their bodies and exercising

• Have high energy levels, not need to eat as often

• Be uncomfortable if they have nothing to do

Longer Introvert Acetylcholine Pathway

The introverted brain has a higher level of internal activity and thinking than the extroverted brain. It is dominated by the long, slow acetylcholine pathway. Acetylcholine also triggers the parasympathetic nervous system that controls certain body functions and influences how introverts behave. Acetylcholine triggers the hypothalamus to send messages to the parasympathetic nervous system to conserve energy. This system slows the body down, allowing introverts to contemplate and examine the situation. If a decision is made to take action, it will require conscious thought and energy to get the body moving. This explains why many introverts can sit for long periods while they are concentrating.

The dominance of the long acetylcholine pathway means introverts:

• Hesitate before speaking

• Have a good memory but take a long time to retrieve memories

• Not offer ideas freely; may need to be asked their opinion

• Are clearer about ideas, thoughts, and feelings after sleeping on them

• May not be aware of their thoughts unless they write or talk about them

The activation of the parasympathetic nervous system means that introverts:

• May have trouble getting motivated or moving; might appear lazy

• May be slow to react under stress

• May have a calm or reserved manner; may walk, talk, or eat slowly

Ever since I understand these principles I find it easier to recognize my boundaries, to identify my unique set of skills and capabilities and the right environment to put them at use to make a real change. I wish someone taught me this 10 years ago, but like for everyone, we need to go through hardship and thoughtful reflexion to learn and evolve.

25% chances are that you are an Introvert also, and if so, I hope this article helped to understand that's OK to be quiet and to think a lot. Put yourself in the right environment and you will easily make a difference.

Until next time :)

References

1. The book: The Introvert Advantage: How Quiet People Can Thrive in an Extrovert World

2. Why Introverts and Extroverts Are Different: The Science, by Jennifer Granneman

3. Some further notes on this bookhttps//musingsonmormonism.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/easily-the-most-fascintaing-and-illuminating-comparison-of-introversion-and-extroversion-ive-ever-seen/)

4. The Introvert Brain Explained

"Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy."

We get what we repeat. From brushing our teeth to going to the gym, to our dietary choices, to the time we spend on social media. Forming new habits and breaking old ones is tricky. What makes it even worse is that forming new good habits is hard, and falling victim to bad habits it's often very easy.

Why?

The answer lies in how our brain works and how it, if at all, has evolved. While the world has changed much in recent years, human nature has changed little. From the Paleolithic times, the human brain evolved in an **immediate-return environment **where most decisions had an immediate impact (responding to grave threats, securing the next meal, taking shelter from the storm) placing a high value on instant gratification. The distant future was less of a concern. Hence, our brains evolved to prefer quick payoffs to long-term ones.

But only recently - during the last 500 years or so - we live in a delayed-return environment where we take actions that deliver an impact in weeks, months, or years. This concept, called Evolutionary Mismatch, is one way for psychologists to study human behavior. “Our brains are wired for certain conditions, but our surroundings no longer match those conditions,” says Glenn Geher,

Smoking increases the risk of lung cancer in the long run. Unsafe sex can result in sexually transmitted diseases. Why would someone do any of that?

"The consequences of bad habits are delayed, while rewards are immediate and our brain evolved to prioritize instant rewards."

"But success in nearly every field requires you to ignore an immediate gratification in favor of a delayed reward."

The good news is that we can hack that Paleolithic brain to put it to work for us and not falling victim to it.

How?

The key is to understand some fundamental laws of behavior change and how to alter them to your specifications. To start, habits are created in 4 steps called The Neurological Feedback Loop:

We start by noticing a CUE that triggers a CRAVING to change the current state. As a result, we RESPOND by performing an action or thought (habit) and get a REWARD in exchange. Example: When we are answering emails, we begin to feel stressed and overwhelmed by work. We want to feel in control. As a result, we bite our nails and satisfy our craving to reduce stress. Biting our nails becomes associated with answering emails. Habit formed, that easy.

To get our habits under control and create new habits, we want to start by:

"Making the Cues Obvious, the Cravings Attractive, the Rewards Satisfying, and the Response as Easy as possible."

so it can reinforce the feedback loop to get it done and repeated. Here below made it simple:

Let's dive deep into each stage so we can decode the loop:

1.Make It Obvious

Awareness

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." Carl Jung

The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. Conductors of Japanese railway systems call out different signals every time they perform an action reducing errors up to 85% making it one of the safest systems in the world. This technique is called Pointing-and-Calling and raises the level of awareness from a non-conscious habit to a more conscious level by **verbalizing our actions. **

Implementation Intention

The two most powerful cues that trigger a habit are Time and Location. Setting an Implementation intention so we don't have to wait for an inspiration to strike.

“I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]."

Do I mediate this morning or at lunch? No room for doubt, we just simply follow the predetermined plan.

Habits Stacking

When we get a new shirt, we tend to feel that we need to upgrade our shoes or trousers. Why? The tendency for one purchase to lead to another is called the "Diderot Effect" and it's rooted in the fact that each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior. We can put this to our advantage by leveraging the natural momentum that comes from one behavior leading into the next one we want to build.

“After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”

The specificity is important.

**Architect the Environment **

Customers often buy products not because they want them but because they're presented to them.

"Out of 11 million sensory receptors we humans have, 10 millon are dedicated to sight. It's not strange that the most powerful of all human sensory abilities is vision and visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior."

9 out of 10 soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam eliminated their addiction nearly overnight when they got back to their homes, changing radically the environment. The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. Designing the right environment matters most than being extra motivated/disciplined. Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.

Our habits change depending on the room we are in and the cues in front of us, they're context-dependent. We want to be the architect of our environment and not the victim of it. We want to design our environment making the cues of good habits obvious and visible. Want to eat healthier? Get our fridge full of only healthy choices, and we'll make the best choice the most obvious, and the easiest.

2.Make it Attractive

Temptation Bundling

Pair an action you WANT to do with an action, you NEED to do.

The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) launched a new Thursday television show by branding it as "TGIT on ABC", encouraging viewers to make popcorn, drink red wine, and enjoy the evening while watching ABC. Masters at "Temptation Bundling" they associated what they NEEDed viewers to do (what their shows) with activities their viewers WANTed to do (relax, drink wine, and eat popcorn). That television show was a success.

"When a REWARD is associated with a CUE, the NEW HABIT becomes more ATTRACTIVE."

Belonging is Attractive, and it Shapes our Habits

"In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." Charles Darwin

One of our deepest desires is to belong and this exerts a powerful influence on our modern behavior. Two key insights here:

1. The reward of being accepted and belonging was key to our survival. As a result, in today's world, we'd rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.

2. We don't choose our habits, we imitate them from family, friends, the church or school, or society as a large who create invisible social norms and we tend to soak up the qualities and practices of those around us.

"Hence, one of the most effective things we can do to build better habits is to join a culture where our desired behavior is the normal behavior."

Want to read more? By joining a book club your identity becomes linked to those around you and you switch from "I am a reader" to "We are readers" reinforcing your personal identity and sustaining more higher levels of motivation.

3.Make It Easy

This is about Reducing Friction. Decreasing the number of steps between us and our good habits we want to form.

The Law of Least Effort

Europe, Asia, and the Middle East have their primary axis that runs East<>West, while Americas and Africa have it running North<>South. The difference in shape played a significant role in the spread of agriculture over centuries. As the climate does not vary much, farmers from France to China domesticated a few crops and from them along the entire stretch of the land. On the contrary, climate variation North<>South is much higher and represented many challenges. You can be the most talented farmer in the world but it won't help you grow Florida oranges in the Canadian winter. As a result, agriculture spread 2-3 times faster across Europe-Asia than it did up and down the Americas. More food, more people, stronger armies, better technologies, etc. The lesson? Prime the environment. Prepare your environment to make future actions easier.

Standardize before you can Optimize, and Scale

Want to form the habit of working out? Showing up at the gym five days in a row for just 2 minutes will help us cast votes for our new Identity. We aren't worried about getting in shape. We're focused on becoming the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. We want to standardize before we can optimize and scale. We rarely think about change in this way because everyone is consumed by the end goal (Outcomes)

Identity, Processes, and Outcomes

"Outcomes are about what we get. Processes are about what we do. Identity is about what we believe"

When our behaviour (Processes) and our Identity are fully aligned, we are no longer pursuing behaviour change. We are simply acting like the type of person we already believe ourselves to be.

Commitment Devices

Ulysses, the hero of The Odyssey, told his sailors to tie him to the mast of the ship so that he could hear the enchanting song of the Sirens but wouldn’t be able to steer the ship toward them and crash on the rocks. Ulysses realized the benefits of locking in your future actions while our mind is in the right place rather than waiting to see where our desires take us at the moment. This is known as the “Ulysses contract" or "Commitment devices".

Automatic time limits in our smartphones can help us get our phone usage under control. Removing the television from our bedroom can help us watch less and sleep better. Using email filters helps us clear up our inbox and be more productive. What "Commitment devices" could we implement in our life to get our habits under control and not to fall victim to temptation?

4.Make it Satisfying

"We are more likely to repeat a behaviour when the experience is satisfying."

Chewing gum had been sold since the 1800s, but it wasn't until Wrigley added flavors like Spearmint, making it tasty and advertising as "Refresh Your Mouth" as a pathway to a clean mouth that it revolutionized the industry and it became a worldwide habit. This is a powerful example of the fourth law of Behaviour Change. We are more likely to repeat a behaviour when the experience is satisfying. Pleasure teaches your brain that a behaviour is worth remembering and repeating. Use reinforcement. Give yourself an immediate reward when you complete your habit.

Never Miss Twice

The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident, missing twice is the start of a new habit. Never miss twice.

"It's about being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts."

Your Personality Influences Your Habits

"Boiling water will soften a potato but harden an egg. You can't control whether you're a potato or an egg, but you can decide to play a game where it's better to be hard or soft."

Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition, whether that's in sports or business. Habits are easy to perform and more satisfying to stick with when they align with your natural inclinations and abilities. We want to play the game where the odds are in our favor.

The obvious question is, "How do I figure out where the odds are in my favor? How do I identify the opportunities and habits that are right for me?" The first step is to understand your personality. James Clear recommends the "Big Five", a scientific analysis of personality measuring the different spectrum of behaviour like: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. I took it and it's highly accurate.

Another approach is simply Trial and Error. Google famously asks employees to spend 80% of the workweek on their official jobs and 20% on projects of their choice, which has led to the creation of blockbuster projects like Adwords and Gmail. Keep experimenting occasionally.

Reviewing your Habits

"Improvement is not only about learning habits, it's also about fine-tuning them."

Habits deliver numerous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into our previous patterns of thinking and acting—even when the world is shifting around us. Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so we need to periodically check in to see if our old habits and beliefs are still serving us. A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and Review are the antidotes.

Resources

• Atomic Habits - The Book

• **James Clear **- Website

• Sophia Colombo - Illustrations

• Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology - Article Cover

How we make decisions, how we judge people and situations, and how the biases we hold affect every decision and judgment we make, has always interested me. Reading this book has had a profound impact on my own worldview, and it has given me a new perspective on these behaviours and judgments. It is very scientific, all backed up with math and facts, yet simple to understand and I highly recommend it to everyone seeking to dig down deep in understanding how we make decisions and be ready to understand how vulnerable we are when making them.

Here I summarised the most important concepts explained in the book:

TWO SYSTEMS

Two Systems

Your behaviour is determined by 2 systems in your mind – one conscious and the other automatic.

• System 1 (Automatic system) operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

• System 2 (Effortful system) allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine—usually. When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment.

The division of labor between System 1 and System 2 is highly efficient: it minimizes effort and optimizes performance.

Ego Depletion

Controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs and you have a budget for it. Findings demonstrate that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you will be less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. This is the reason why you will be more likely to select a chocolate cake over a fruit salad after a cognitively loaded task.

Priming Effect

Thinks of the following two words: "bananas"; "vomit"

Our minds are wonderful associative machines, allowing us to associate words like these two and create a casual story in an automatic and unconscious way. Our actions and emotions can be primed by events of which we are not even aware. Because of this, we are susceptible to priming, in which a common association is invoked to move us in a particular direction or action. This is the basis for “nudges” and advertising using positive imagery.

E.g: reminding people of old age makes them walk more slowly, reminding them of money make them more independent and selfish.

“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”

Cognitive Ease

When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar. You are also likely to be relatively casual and superficial in your thinking. It turns out that even the repetition of falsehood can lead people to accept it, despite knowing it’s untrue since the concept becomes familiar and is cognitively easy to process. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

“We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let’s think it through again.”

When you feel strained, it mobilizes your system 2 and you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative than usual. Findings show that students perform better when the exams are written in a small or less legible font, as it induces cognitive strain and therefore less prone to logical errors.

“Let’s not dismiss their business plan just because the font makes it hard to read.”

The Halo Effect

We tend to like (or dislike) everything about a person overweighting first impressions. The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance and sometimes the subsequent information is mostly wasted.

“She knows nothing about this person’s management skills. All she is going by is the halo effect from a good presentation.”

“What You See Is All There Is” (WYSIATI)

System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions. It seeks the consistency of information, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.

"They made that big decision on the basis of a good report from one consultant. WYSIATI—what you see is all there is. They did not seem to realize how little information they had.”

Answering an Easier Question

When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. This is called heuristics.

• Hard question asked to a famous CIO: "Why did you invest in Ford stocks?"

• CIO's answer: "Boy, do they know how to make a car"

• The easier question that determined his choice "Do I like cars?"

“The question we face is whether this candidate can succeed. The question we seem to answer is whether she interviews well. Let’s not substitute.”

HEURISTICS AND BIASES

Law of Small Numbers

The strong bias toward believing that small samples closely resemble the population from which they are drawn is also part of a larger story: we are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see. We seek patterns, suppressing ambiguity, and constructing stories that are as coherent as possible. WYSIATI.

“The sample of observations is too small to make any inferences. Let’s not follow the law of small numbers.”

The Anchoring Effect

It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. Example: “Is the height of the tallest redwood more or less than x feet? What is your best guess about the height of the tallest redwood?” When x was 1200, the answer to the second question was 844; when x was 180, the answer was 282.

People adjust less (stay closer to the anchor) when their mental resources are depleted.

“Our aim in the negotiation is to get them anchored on this number.”

Availability Heuristic

It refers to the ease with which instances come to mind. The importance of an idea is often judged by the fluency, ease, and emotional charge with which that idea comes to mind. Example: A plane crash that attracts media coverage will temporarily alter your feelings about the safety of flying. Accidents are on your mind, for a while, after you see a car burning at the side of the road, and the world is for a while a more dangerous place. Availability effects help explain the pattern of insurance purchase and protective action after disasters.

“Because of the coincidence of two planes crashing last month, she now prefers to take the train. That’s silly. The risk hasn’t really changed; it is an availability bias.”

Representativeness

Representativeness is where we use stereotypes to help us judge probabilities. For example, “you see a person reading The New York Times on the subway. Which of the following is a better bet about the reading stranger? 1) She has a Ph.D. 2) She does not have a college degree.” The sin of representativeness is where we might pick the second answer, even though the probability of PhDs on the subway is far less than people without degrees. Though a simple example, one way to resist the temptation of representativeness is to consider the base rate (in this case, the rate of PhDs vs. non-PhDs) and make the judgment from that.

Regression to the Mean

Our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with“mere statistics.” Regression to the mean is the statistical fact that any sequence of trials will eventually converge to the expected value (i.e., the mean). Example: “Depressed children treated with an energy drink improve significantly over a three-month period.“

You will automatically infer that the energy drink caused an improvement, but this conclusion is completely unjustified. Depressed children are an extreme group, they are more depressed than most other children—and extreme groups regress to the mean over time. The improvement has nothing to do with the energy drink.

”Our screening procedure is good but not perfect, so we should anticipate regression. We shouldn’t be surprised that the very best candidates often fail to meet our expectations.”

OVERCONFIDENCE

The Illusion of Understanding & Validity

Our mind is a sense-making organ that tries to build the best possible story from the information available to us, and if it is a good story, we believe it. If it finds inconsistencies, it will reduce the ease of our thoughts and we tend to disbelieve (again, WYSIATI). Paradoxically, it's easier to construct a coherent story when you know little.

When validating an idea/belief, the amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs, we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs.

These two illusions foster the idea that we can understand the past which itself fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future. But the world and every event are highly unpredictable and high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy.

“She has a coherent story that explains all she knows, and the coherence makes her feel good"

Intuition Vs Formulas

We, humans, are incorrigibly inconsistent in making a summary judgment of complex information. When evaluating the same information twice, we frequently give different answers. This is explained by our humor, environment, and recent events before making the evaluation. Formulas do not suffer from such problems. Given the same input, they always return the same answer. Research conducted suggests that to maximize predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low-validity environments.

In our days, algorithms don´t have yet a good reputation, especially in the medical field. Experts argue strongly that it is unethical to rely on intuitive judgments for important decisions if an algorithm is available that will make fewer mistakes. Their rational argument is compelling, but it runs against a stubborn psychological reality: for most people, the cause of a mistake matters. The story of a child dying because an algorithm made a mistake is more poignant than the story of the same tragedy occurring as a result of human error, and the difference in emotional intensity is ready translated into a moral preference. A similar ethical debate is found in the public acceptance of Autonomous vehicles. Fortunately, the hostility to algorithms will probably soften as their role in everyday life continues to expand.

“Whenever we can replace human judgment with a formula, we should at least consider it.”

Optimism and Overconfidence

Both are manifestations of WYSIATI. Optimist and Overconfident people tend to be more cheerful, happy, resilient, even to have a stronger immune system making them live longer. They play a disproportionate role in shaping environments and their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. When action is needed, all this can be a good thing. But the evidence suggests that it can be costly as it fosters the illusion that outcomes are highly dependant on one's action while they often depend as much on the environment and its changes.

Confidence is valued over uncertainty. Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality, but this is not what people and organizations want. (e.g highly confident candidates for the presidency are preferred over more thoughtful ones).

A Premortem Session

A technique to overcome the bias of overconfident optimism when making important and risky decisions in a company.

It consists of a brief session with a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.”

The main virtue of this technique is that it legitimates doubts and avoid have them suppressed by overconfident supporters of an idea.

“We should conduct a premortem session. Someone may come up with a threat we have neglected.”

CHOICES

Loss Aversion

This principle explains that losses loom larger than gains and the loss aversion rate is on average 1.5 to 2.5 larger. What's the smallest gain that I need to balance an equal chance to lose $100? It's on average, between $150 and $250.

In understanding the impact in our own lives, “bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones".

Endowment Effect

It refers to an emotional bias that causes individuals to value an owned object higher, often irrationally, than its market value. You are much more likely to place a higher value on an object that you already own than the value you would place on that same object if you did not own it. This effect is powered by emotional or symbolic attachments to the given object.

THE LESSON

Kahneman shows us that we humans, as a product of evolution, are not best equipped to deal with rational and logical situations. Our fears and biases weigh more than our rational skills and therefore we are prone to repeat the same cognitive errors and we are easily manipulated.

In a reality that's dominated by science and statistics, "maintaining one’s vigilance against biases is a chore—but the chance to avoid a costly mistake is sometimes worth the effort."

**THE QUALITY OF YOUT THINKING DEPENDS ON THE MODELS THAT ARE IN YOUR HEAD. **

Think of a forest. When a botanist looks at it they may focus on the ecosystems, an environmentalist sees the impact of climate change, a forest engineer the state of the tree growth, a business person the value of the land. None of them are wrong, but neither are any of them able to describe the full scope of the forest. They use different mental models to interpret the forest. Learning the basics of the other disciplines (mental models) would lead to a more well-rounded understanding that would allow for better initial decisions about managing the forest.

This is the power of Mental Models.

Mental models describe the way the world works. Largely subconscious, they shape how we think, how we understand, and how we form beliefs.

Why it matters?

When you learn to see the world as it is, and not as you want it to be, everything changes. The solution to any problem becomes more apparent when you can view it through more than one lenses. You'll be able to spot opportunities you couldn't see before, avoid costly mistakes that may be holding you back, and being able to make meaningful progress in your life.

The trick is that not all lenses (or models) apply to all problems. They are not one-model-fits-all problems. Most problems are multidimensional, and this having more lenses often offers significant help in understanding the problems we are facing.

Yet, the biggest barrier to learning from Reality is ourselves. Why?

1. We have a hard time seeing any system we are in leading to a lack of perspective as a problem.

2. We invest too much in our opinions and we're afraid about what others will say about us resulting in failing to put our ideas/beliefs out there to get feedback from reality and upgrade accordingly.

3. The distance from the consequences of our decisions results in keeping our current views rather than update them.

Why is tough?

Because we're naturally inclined to be afraid to learn and admit when we don't know enough. This is the mindset that leads to poor decisions. They are the source of stress and anxiety and consume massive amounts of time.

As @jackbutcher put it:

The Great Mental Models Vol. 1 explains the following 9 Mental Models:

1. The Map is Not the Territory

Reality is messy and complicated and we tend to navigate it through some sort of abstraction. That's why we use Maps (or Models/Theories) every day.

From navigating a city to understanding the financial statements of a company to explain the movement of objects in the universe. Maps are reductions of what they represent but not the ultimate reality. We can use maps to guide us, but we must not let them prevent us from discovering new territory or updating our existing maps.

In When Mental Models Attack, Sahil Bloom explains:

"Imagine a successful investor evaluates a potential retail turnaround, believes in the story, invests in the business, and wins big. They have formed a mental model for retail turnarounds - they have seen it work, and now want to see it work again. The investor has become a hammer searching for a nail. The next time a retail turnaround opportunity comes across their desk, they are likely to see a nail - even if the opportunity is clearly different (a screw!). Treating it the same as the first option, they lose big. The map is not the territory!"

Maps/Models are great tools to simplify complexity and are useful when applied appropriately. Over-applying them, lead to failures.

2. Circle of Competence

Own your competencies, outsource the rest.*

Understanding your circle of competence is about knowing:

1. What you understand, so you are aware where you have an edge over others.

2. What you don't know, so you know where you can improve.

The first one is difficult but it's the easiest of the two. Building your circle of competence takes years of hard work and of making mistakes. Curiosity, desire to learn, monitoring, and feedback are essentials for it. The second one, it's the toughest because we have hard times being honest with ourselves, and our ego steps in the way of us understanding reality objectively. Seeking feedback from believable people we trust helps us get that outside perspective to understand where our skills and techniques are suboptimal.

3. First Principles Thinking

Nearly every decision we make in our life is based on assumptions or shared beliefs. Identifying First Principles is about reverse engineering what we assume is true to separate it from any assumption based on it. What remains are the essentials.

The idea is to ground yourself in the foundational truths and build up from there.

In First Principles Thinking, Sahil explains:

"When we encounter difficult problems, our tendency is to rely on base-level assumptions we have been told are true (or believe to be true). It's quick and easy to do so. But it also leads to unimaginative, linear solutions that closely resemble all that has been done before. This is called "reasoning by analogy" - it leads to solutions that are like something else. It can be a useful heuristic when speed is required and novel solutions are not the goal. But it falls short when dealing with complex problems in need of imaginative solutions."

Elon Musk turned to First Principles solving the problem of making it affordable to send humans to Mars. By not assuming the high cost of a rocket as true, he grounded his problem in first-principles understanding he could build his own rocket at a fraction of the cost using different materials and methods.

Socratic Questioning can be used to challenge our ideas and hit First Principles and it follows this process:

1. Clarifying your thinking and explaining the origin of your ideas (Why do I think this? What exactly do I think?)

2. Challenging Assumptions (How do I know this is true?)

3. Looking for Evidence (What are the sources?)

4. Considering Alternative Perspectives (What might others think? How do I know I am correct?)

5. Examining consequences and implications (What if I am wrong?)

6. Questioning the original questions (Why did I think that? What conclusions can I draw from the reasoning process?)

Reasoning from first principles allows us to validate if our assumptions are correct and ultimately if our decisions are supported by real truths. Often they aren't.

4. Thought Experiment

This one is about using our imagination to investigate possibilities that are not possible in real life but our brain allows us to explore them.

"If money were no object" or "if you had all the time in the world" or "if Y happened instead of X, what would the outcome have been?"

Though experiments are more than daydreaming. They require the same rigor as a traditional experiment in order to be useful. Much like a scientific method, a thought experiment generally has the following steps:

1. Ask a question

2. Conduct a background research

3. Construct hypothesis

4. Test with (thought) experiments

5. Analyze (new question, etc) outcomes and draw conclusions

6. Compare to hypothesis and adjust accordingly

5. Second-Order Thinking -** "And then what?"**

You can never merely do one thing. We operate in a world of multiple, overlapping connections, like a web, with many significant, yet obscure and unpredictable, relationships.

Second-Order Thinking requires us to think not only about our actions and their immediate effects but their subsequent effects as well, thinking farther ahead and holistically. The short term will be less spectacular, but the payoffs for the long term can be enormous. By delaying gratification now, you will save time in the future.

In Relationships**,** trust and trustworthiness are the results of multiple interactions in the long term. Second-order thinking in our relationships with others is critical to getting people's trust, and to enjoy the benefits of cooperation that comes with that.

When negotiating, arguments are more effective when we demonstrate that we have considered second-order effects.

In Second-Order Thinking 101, Sahil explains:

"Becoming a second-order thinker will provide you with asymmetric opportunities for success. It is critical to achieving non-linear outcomes. Why? It is hard to do, so very few people will do it. Think on a higher level. The air is thinner up there."

*Word of caution: *Find the balance to not fall in the analysis paralysis where we over-seek consequences and never make a decision (Slippery Slope Effect).

6. Probabilistic Thinking

In a world where each moment is determined by an indefinitely complex set of factors, probabilistic thinking helps us identify the most likely outcomes.

1. **Bayesian Thinking: **using relevant prior information (base rate) in making decisions. "Violent crime has doubled" but if the base rate was 0,01% is not worth worrying about.

2. **Fat-tailed curves: **Contrary to the known bell curves, fat-tailed curves' extremes are not predictable. The more extreme events that are possible, the higher the probability that one of them will occur. You'll never meet a man who is 10x the average man but you may regularly meet people who are 10x, 100x, or 10,000x wealthier than the average person. The lesson is not to sit down and imagine every possible scenario in the tail, but to position ourselves to survive or even benefit from wildly unpredictable future events. Whenever possible, try to create scenarios where randomness and uncertainty are your friends, not your enemies. Develop an Antifragile mindset.

3. **Asymmetries: **Our probabilities estimates are far more wrong on the "over-optimistic" side than the under-optimistic" side. You'll rarely read about an investor who aimed for a 25% annual return who subsequently earned 40%.

Successfully thinking in shades of probability means roughly identifying what matters, coming up with a sense of the odds, doing a check on our assumptions, and then making a decision.

7. Inversion

Forward, logical thinking can only take you so far. To solve certain problems, you have to think differently.*

This model is about approaching the opposite end of the natural starting point. Flipping the problem around and think backward. This one is best explained with the following example:

Back in 1920 smoking was a man-thing. Women were an untapped market that Lucky Strike wanted to conquer. They did not think "how do I sell more cigarettes to women?" but instead they inverted the problem saying "If women smoked, what else would have to be true? what would have to change to make smoking desirable to women and socially acceptable?" Convincing women that smoking would make them thinner, they mounted a large anti-sweet campaign promoting the replacement of desserts after dinner for cigarettes instead. It was not about selling cigarettes, it was reorganizing society to make cigarettes an inescapable part of the American woman's daily experience.

*In Invert, Always Invert, Sahil says:

"In investing, as in business and relationships Warren Buffet and Charlie Murguer have often evangelized the benefits of simply avoiding stupidity vs. seeking brilliance. How do you avoid losing money? If this project were to fail, why did it fail? How might we have avoided this failure? The pre-mortem analysis can be a very helpful exercise for cutting through the noise and making quick, effective decisions."

8. Occam's Razor

Simple explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones. Simple scenarios with fewer moving parts are less likely to be wrong and are more robust.

*

"We often spend lots of time coming up with very complicated narratives to explain what we see around us. Remove the noise and you are left with the signal."**

Modern doctors use a version of Occam’s razor, stating that they should look for the fewest possible causes to explain their patient’s multiple symptoms and give preference to the most likely causes. Making minimal diagnoses reduces the risk of over-treating a patient, causing panic, or causing dangerous interactions between different treatments. Interns are instructed, “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

Occam’s razor is not intended to be a substitute for critical thinking. It is merely a tool to help make that thinking more efficient.

9. Hanlon's Razor

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect.

“A simple mental model for cutting through negative noise. It says that of all possible motives behind an action, the ones that require the least amount of energy to execute (such as ignorance or laziness) are more likely to occur than ones that require active malice. This helps us avoid paranoia and ideology."*

Affected by Confirmation bias, we tend to pack in unrelated factors in they happened to occur in proximity to what we already believe. When we see something we don't like happened and which seems wrong, we assume it's intentional. But it's more likely that it's completely unintentional. This put us in a defensive mode instead of being open to opportunities. By not assuming the worst, Vasily Arkhipov single-handled avoided nuclear war with the Americans.

"A similar issue has occurred a number of times with YouTube content policies. When videos discussing LGBTQ matters were filtered on the restrictive viewing mode, many people took extreme offense at this. The reality is that again, this was an algorithm error and not a case of homophobia on the part of their programmers. Countless videos which do not discuss anything related to LGBTQ issues have also been filtered. This shows it to be a case of confirmation bias, wherein people see the malice they expect to see."

Like any mental model, Hanlon’s razor has its limitations and its validity has been contested. We must be sure to put it in context, taking into account logic, experience, and empirical evidence. Make it a part of your latticework of mental models, but do not be blind to behaviour which is intended to be harmful.

Sources

• The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts Vol 1

• Farnam Street Blog

• Sahil Bloom Substack

Building Wealth

• You are not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity - a piece of business - to gain financial freedom.

• Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. And when you are sleeping, your are not earning.

Specific Knowledge

• Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for and it is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.

• Play long term games with long term people - business relationships compound.

Leverage Three forms of Leverage:

• Labour: others working for you. Difficult to manage and to scale.

• Money: managing capital. It scales very well.

• Products with no marginal cost of replication: Books, media, code.

• For leverage workers, inputs do not match outputs. They are tracked on outputs, not hours spent. Earn with your mind, not with your time.

• The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely is to have disconnected inputs and outputs.

Priorities and Focus

• Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. If you can hire someone to do it for less than your hourly rate, hire them.

• You have to say no to everything and free up your time so you can solve the important problems.

• Make empty space (1-2 days/week) in your calendar. It is only after you are bored you have great ideas. It is never going to be when you are stressed.

• Spend more time making the big decisions. There are three: where you live, who you are with, and what you do.

Money and Evil Money is not the root of all evil. The lust for money is. If you love money, and you make it, there is never enough. It is a fallacy to think that it turns off at some number. The best way to stay away from this is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money.

Failures in check and Self esteem You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you. If you have many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourselves. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you do not love yourselves, who will? Be careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of, because they will damage you.

Criticism If you have a criticism of someone, then don’t criticise the person—criticise the general approach or criticise the class of activities. If you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who is the best example of what you’re praising and praise the person, specifically. Then people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you. They work for you.

Reading

• The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power. Make sure your reading foundation is very, very high quality.

• Read the greats in match, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.

Happiness is a choice

• The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgements. It’s your choice how you interpret it.

• A happy person is not someone who is happy all the time. It is someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they do not lose their innate peace.

• You want to learn the core skills set of flowing with life and accepting it in most cases.

Scorecards Buffett has a great example when he asks if you want to be the world´s best lover and known as the worst, or the world´s worst lover and known as the best? In reference to inner or external scorecards. All the real scorecards are internal.

Being yourself No one in the world is going to beat you at being you. Certainly, listen and absorb, but do not try to emulate.

Do not spend time making other people happy. This is their problem, not yours. If you are happy it makes other people happy.

**Saving Yourself **

• We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance. There’s a constant struggle to say no when your genes always want to say yes. Yes to sugar. Yes to staying in this relationship. Yes to alcohol. Yes to drugs. Yes, yes, yes.Our bodies don’t know how to say no.

• When it comes to medicine and nutrition, subtract before you add.