psychology

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125. The Undoing Project

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Michael Lewis

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Psychology, Biography, Economics, History, Public Policy

362 pages, published December 6, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Undoing Project highlights the research performed by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky which focused on undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind systematically erred when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, and led to a new approach to government regulation. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

 

Quotes

“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice.”

 

“The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.”

 

“Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things.”

 

“Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.”

 

“It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Amos said. “The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”

 

“It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what’s in them must be invented.”

 

“It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”

 

“Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”

 

“The way it feels to me,’ he said, ‘is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think.  And now I can think them.”

 

“Wall Street trading desks at the end of each year offer a flavor of the problem. If a Wall Street trader expects to be paid a bonus of one million dollars and he’s given only half a million, he feels himself to be, and behaves as if he is, in the domain of losses. His reference point is an expectation of what he would receive. That expectation isn’t a stable number; it can be changed in all sorts of ways. A trader who expects to be given a million-dollar bonus, and who further expects everyone else on his trading desk to be given million-dollar bonuses, will not maintain the same reference point if he learns that everyone else just received two million dollars. If he is then paid a million dollars, he is back in the domain of losses. Danny would later use the same point to explain the behavior of apes in experiments researchers had conducted on bonobos. “If both my neighbor in the next cage and I get a cucumber for doing a great job, that’s great. But if he gets a banana and I get a cucumber, I will throw the cucumber at the experimenter’s face.” The moment one ape got a banana, it became the ape next door’s reference point. The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person’s reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described.”

 

“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

 

“There was what people called “present bias”—the tendency, when making a decision, to undervalue the future in relation to the present. There was “hindsight bias”—which he thought of as the tendency for people to look at some outcome and assume it was predictable all along.”

 

“Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don’t even realize it is happening,” he said. A scout would settle on an opinion about a player and then arrange the evidence to support that opinion.”

 

““He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”

My Take

I am a fan of Michael Lewis, having read Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, Coach, The Big Short, and The Blind Side as well as many of his blog entries on Slate.  I really enjoyed his writing and was therefore looking forward to The Undoing Project which focused on Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Israeli behavioral psychologists who studied how and why we make certain decisions.  While the book was interesting at times, there was a lot of meandering that was less than compelling.  It was definitely not a page turner.  I don’t regret reading it, but am reluctant to give it a big recommendation.

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90. Ego is the Enemy

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Ryan Holiday

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Psychology, Self-Improvement

226 pages, published June 14, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In his book Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday demonstrates how the primary obstruction to a full, successful life is not the outside world, but rather our ego.   In addition to being an author, Holiday is a media strategist, the former Director of Marketing for American Apparel and a media columnist and editor-at-large for the New York Observer.  In Ego is the Enemy, he provides a selection of stories and examples, from literature to philosophy to history to highlight the role that ego plays in our success.  His profiles include historical figures such as Howard Hughes, Katharine Graham, Bill Belichick, and Eleanor Roosevelt and shows how they reached the highest levels of power and success by conquering their own egos.

 

Quotes

“ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors. It is Scylla and Charybdis.”

 

“Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.”

 

“Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”

 

“Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way. It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.”

 

“And that’s what is so insidious about talk. Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Most people are decent at hype and sales. So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.”

 

“It’s a temptation that exists for everyone—for talk and hype to replace action.”

 

“Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more “Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.” It’s rarely the truth: “I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.”

 

“When success begins to slip from your fingers—for whatever reason—the response isn’t to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It’s to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.”

 

“Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.”

 

“It’s not that he was wrong to have great ambitions. Alexander just never grasped Aristotle’s “golden mean”—that is, the middle ground. Repeatedly, Aristotle speaks of virtue and excellence as points along a spectrum. Courage, for instance, lies between cowardice on one end and recklessness on the other. Generosity, which we all admire, must stop short of either profligacy and parsimony in order to be of any use. Where the line—this golden mean—is can be difficult to tell, but without finding it, we risk dangerous extremes. This is why it is so hard to be excellent, Aristotle wrote. “In each case, it is hard work to find the intermediate; for instance, not everyone, but only one who knows, finds the midpoint in a circle.”

 

“People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.”

 

“One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible. And certainly ego makes it difficult every step of the way. It is certainly more pleasurable to focus on our talents and strengths, but where does that get us? Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. So does fantasy and “vision.”

 

“The only real failure is abandoning your principles. Killing what you love because you can’t bear to part from it is selfish and stupid. If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.”

 

“Take inventory for a second. What do you dislike? Whose name fills you with revulsion and rage? Now ask: Have these strong feelings really helped you accomplish anything? Take an even wider inventory. Where has hatred and rage ever really gotten anyone? Especially because almost universally, the traits or behaviors that have pissed us off in other people—their dishonesty, their selfishness, their laziness—are hardly going to work out well for them in the end. Their ego and shortsightedness contains its own punishment. The question we must ask for ourselves is: Are we going to be miserable just because other people are?”

 

“In failure or adversity, it’s so easy to hate. Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible. It’s a distraction too; we don’t do much else when we’re busy getting revenge or investigating the wrongs that have supposedly been done to us.”

 

“Pride blunts the very instrument we need to own in order to succeed: our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride.”

 

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. —RICHARD FEYNMAN”

 

“And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice! —EURIPIDES”

 

“The world can show you the truth, but no one can force you to accept it.”

 

“Why do you think that great leaders and thinkers throughout history have “gone out into the wilderness” and come back with inspiration, with a plan, with an experience that puts them on a course that changes the world? It’s because in doing so they found perspective, they understood the larger picture in a way that wasn’t possible in the bustle of everyday life. Silencing the noise around them, they could finally hear the quiet voice they needed to listen to. Creativity”

 

“Imagine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them, something you could do for them? And you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you. The cumulative effect this would have over time would be profound: You’d learn a great deal by solving diverse problems. You’d develop a reputation for being indispensable. You’d have countless new relationships. You’d have an enormous bank of favors to call upon down the road. That’s what the canvas strategy is about—helping yourself by helping others.”

My Take

There are many pearls of wisdom in the slim volume Ego is the Enemy, which is what I like to call a “thinker book.”  Holiday made me think about the role that complacency and pride play in my life and also consider the pointlessness of anger.  It’s worth checking out.

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87. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Walter Mischel

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Psychology, Self-Improvement

336 pages, published September 23, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

A child is presented with a marshmallow and given a choice:  eat this one now, or wait and enjoy two later.  What will she do?  And what are the implications for her behavior later in life?  Walter Mischel, the world’s leading expert on self-control, has proven that the ability to delay gratification is critical for a successful life, predicting higher SAT scores, better social and cognitive functioning, a healthier lifestyle and a greater sense of self-worth. But is willpower prewired, or can it be taught?  Mischel explains how self-control can be mastered and applied to challenges in everyday life—from weight control to quitting smoking, overcoming heartbreak, making major decisions, and planning for retirement.  

 

Quotes

“What we do, and how well we control our attention in the service of our goals, becomes part of the environment that we help create and that in turn influences us. This mutual influence shapes who and what we become, from our physical and mental health to the quality and length of our life.”

 

“Self-control is crucial for the successful pursuit of long-term goals. It is equally essential for developing the self-restraint and empathy needed to build caring and mutually supportive relationships.”

 

“This is encouraging evidence of the power of the environment to influence characteristics like intelligence. Even if traits like intelligence have large genetic determinants, they are still substantially malleable.”

 

“Frances Champagne, a leader in research on how environments influence gene expression, is convinced that it is time to drop the nature versus nurture debate about which is more important and ask instead, What do genes actually do? What is the environment doing that changes what the genes do?”

 

“most predispositions are prewired to some degree, but they are also flexible, with plasticity and potential for change. Identifying the conditions and mechanisms that enable the change is the challenge.”

 

“the ability to delay immediate gratification for the sake of future consequences is an acquirable cognitive skill.”

 

“James Watson summarizes the conclusion: “A predisposition does not a predetermination make.”

 

“The idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us.”

“In the human body, each of approximately a trillion cells holds within its nucleus a complete and identical sequence of DNA. That is about 1.5 gigabytes of genetic information, and it would fill two CD-ROMs, yet the DNA sequence itself would fit on the point of a well-sharpened pencil.”

 

“The depressives, far from seeing themselves through dark lenses as we had presumed, were cursed by twenty-twenty vision: compared with other groups, their self-ratings of positive qualities most closely matched how the observers rated them. In contrast, both the nondepressed psychiatric patients and the control group had inflated self-ratings, seeing themselves more positively than the observers saw them. The depressive patients simply did not see themselves through the rose-colored glasses that the others used when evaluating themselves.”

My Take

While I had previously heard about the marshmallow test and was familiar with the connection between the ability to delay gratification and life success, it was interesting to go more in depth. The Marshmallow Test is an encouraging read in that researcher Mischel demonstrates that our genes are not our destiny and we can develop an ability to delay gratification.  This book is a good companion piece to Better than Before which focuses on habit formation and why positive habits are so important to our well-being.

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85. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Brené Brown

Genre:  Non-Fiction. Self-Help, Psychology

287 pages, published September 11, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Brené Brown begins Daring Greatly with the following quote from Theodore Roosevelt:  “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”   This famous quote captures the theme of Brown’s self-improvement tome. She encourages the reader to dare greatly by being vulnerable, having courage and engaging with our whole hearts.

 

Quotes

“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”

 

“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”

 

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.”

 

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”

 

“If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.”

 

“Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The power that connection holds in our lives was confirmed when the main concern about connection emerged as the fear of disconnection; the fear that something we have done or failed to do, something about who we are or where we come from, has made us unlovable and unworthy of connection.”

 

“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”

 

“The real questions for parents should be: “Are you engaged? Are you paying attention?” If so, plan to make lots of mistakes and bad decisions. Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time. The mandate is not to be perfect and raise happy children. Perfection doesn’t exist, and I’ve found what makes children happy doesn’t always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.”

 

“Wholeheartedness. There are many tenets of Wholeheartedness, but at its very core is vulnerability and worthiness; facing uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks, and knowing that I am enough.”

 

“Spirituality emerged as a fundamental guidepost in Wholeheartedness. Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves–a force grounded in love and compassion. For some of us that’s God, for others it’s nature, art, or even human soulfulness. I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits.”

 

“Those who feel lovable, who love, and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging. I often say that Wholeheartedness is like the North Star: We never really arrive, but we certainly know if we’re headed in the right direction.”

 

“Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.”

 

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of. …Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack. …This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.”

My Take

While there are some ideas expressed in Daring Greatly that I agreed with and was inspired by, as a whole the book didn’t have a huge impact on me.  However, I did appreciate Brown’s focus on the importance of vulnerability and wholeheartedness and concur that they are both important parts of having a meaningful and courageous life.

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