When learning a language, nothing beats complete immersion.

The idea behind immersion is to intertwine studying with daily occupations.

A problem I find with focus studying is that while it allows you to get in the zone and concentrate your efforts on, say, vocabulary, reading, grammar, etc., you will eventually get “out” of the zone, back to your “normal” life.

This context switching signals your brain that studying is an extra activity that doesn’t connect directly to your survival (a bit dramatic, I know). In other words, it is less relevant than other occupations.

When I arrived in Japan 15 years ago, I decided that improving my Japanese ability was my number one priority, and I removed every possible “escape” from total immersion.

• Computer (no smartphones at the time) set to Japanese
• Listen only to Japanese radio and TV
• Chat only in Japanese on forums and Mixi (懐かしい！)
• Never use my native language except when I called my parents (not nearly frequently enough. Sorry, mom!)
• Didn’t make any new non-Japanese friends

In retrospect, I probably went a bit too far, especially the last point, and I experienced a few lonely moments. But I’m convinced that the “no escape” mindset helped me tremendously.

The “no escape” mindset

Without going as Spartan as I did, here are a few simple things you could to implement the no escape approach:

• Set the default language of your smartphone and computer to Japanese
• If you play games on your smartphone, try to play them in Japanese
• Watch anime (or any other Japanese show you like) without English subtitles <= if you can have Japanese subtitles, even better!
• Use Amazon, Rakuten, or Pizza Hut (no affiliation :p) in Japanese

In short, try to “Japanize” your natural environment.

I understand that your productivity might drop a bit after setting your computer to Japanese. And that the last thing you want after a long day of work is more cognitive strain. But telling your brain that it has no escape really makes a difference.

We have to make our brain believe that our survival depends on it. And to some extent, it does a bit.

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It can be hard to find contents that perfectly match your current proficiency level in Japanese and still be “interesting” to read. Educational material is limited (and expensive) and not always entertaining. Children’s books are either too easy to read or utterly irrelevant to daily life.

Looking up in a dictionary every time you encounter a new word can be exhausting and discouraging. You spend more time jumping back and forth between your reading material and the dictionary than doing the actual reading.

Solution: read what you know, ignore the rest

Do you remember when you first learned reading in your own language? I don’t either. But if you look attentively at how children read, you’ll notice that they focus on the words they recognize and ignore the words they don’t (or wait for an adult to read them out loud).

Pick any text (book, article, manga) and practice reading the words you already know so that they become effortless to read. Acknowledge the words you don’t know WITHOUT looking them up in the dictionary and move on.

It will make reading less cognitively straining and build your confidence over time. Eventually, the words you know will be so effortless to read they’ll feel as if they were in the background, quiet and supportive. The energy saved will enable you to focus on the words you don’t know when you decide to practice understanding.

It will also train your predictive capabilities. Our brains are prediction machines. When we read or listen to a conversation, we are not passively waiting for the next word to come. We are actively predicting the story. Every time a new word arrives, our brain compares it to what it had anticipated. If it’s a match, a feedback loop will be strengthened, and we will relax a little bit. If it’s a miss, the brain will become more attentive, and we’ll get a bit tenser.

Have you experienced this weird phenomenon when after learning a new word, people “start” using it around you? It occurs because when you listen to a conversation, your brain fills the gaps in your understanding by predicting its meaning. If you focused on each word, it would be impossible to follow the conversation.

Read without understanding

The key to practicing your reading skill is to focus on reading and not understanding. It is okay if you don’t understand what you are reading. If it feels awkward, you can always imagine (predict) its meaning.

It’s a little bit like karaoke. You’re not really trying to understand the lyrics, but that’s not stopping you from having fun. In fact, karaoke has been a tremendous help for me to practice effortless (and fast) reading. Plus, it improved my popularity during memorable all-nighters in Shibuya … but I digress.

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The more we learn, the easier it gets to understand new things, but the longer it takes to stick. We start feeling that we’re not progressing anymore and lose the motivation to keep learning.

Why: survival of the fittest & feedback loop

As adults, we learn by association. The more things we know, the more associations we can create between new and already learned concepts, making understanding easier.

But our memory is selective, akin to the evolution process: survival of the fittest. The statistical relevance of a newly acquired word will be inversely proportional to the total number of words we know. Words not deemed relevant will have a hard time making their way to our long-term memory.

When we start learning a new language, we begin with the basics, i.e., its most commonly used words. Unsurprisingly, we will encounter these words daily because casual conversations rarely use more than a few hundred different words.

Once we reach an intermediary level, the new words we learn appear less frequently in daily conversations.

Eventually, the feedback loop between the acquisition of a new word and reencountering it in a conversation becomes too wide to produce dopamine;

• Learning new words feel less “immediately” rewarding
• We feel like we are wasting our time or worse, that we suck at learning

If you’re interested in this topic, I talk about it in more detail in this thread: https://twitter.com/ghansali/status/1477494844767547392

Solution: the “see you in 6 months” mindset

This is more a mind trick than an actual memorizing technique, but every time you learn a new word, tell yourself: “alright new word, nice making your acquaintance. See you again in 6 months.”

Why 6 months?

Feedback loop: 6 months from now, you should have encountered the word or concept a few times and given enough time for your brain to process it to long-term memory.

Survival of the fittest: If you haven’t encountered it again after 6 months, it probably wasn’t really relevant to your daily reality. Maybe it will someday, but in the meantime, give yourself some slack and move on. There’s so much to learn!

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This story is about how he succeeded in his conquest of Odawara, then occupied by the Hōjō’s clan, and what we can learn from it.

The undefeated castle

Odawara Castle had been said to be impregnable for centuries. Rising proudly on the top of a hill with natural defenses, it had been a symbol of the Hōjō’s resistance to submission.

When Hideyoshi arrived with his army, it wasn’t the first time someone tried to siege Odawara. The Hōjō were always prepared with several months of food reserves.

At the first sign of invasion, they set fire to the rice fields surrounding the castle so that invaders wouldn’t feed themselves from the local yields. Bringing food to the battlefield is a burden, and history has witnessed many assailants running out of food within a few weeks and giving up out of starvation.

Years in the making

But this time was different. Hideyoshi came prepared. In hindsight, years of preparation were in the making.

He first imposed a standard measuring unit system across Japan to ensure homogeneous and reliable taxation. More tax revenue meant richer and more obedient officials, which led to a highly efficient administration.

Hideyoshi had also spent considerable efforts to modernize transportation logistics and infrastructure. Never before had it been easier to transport provisions and ammunitions to a battlefield.

Hideyoshi even had devised a vacation system for his warlords to spend time with their families during the siege to keep their spirits high.

To Hōjō’s despair, after three months of siege, Hideyoshi’s troops were still surrounding the castle and not showing any sign of capitulation. The starvation strategy hadn’t worked, and Hōjō’s provisions were becoming scarce.

“Overnight” castle

And then, the coup de grace. Unbeknownst to the Hōjō, Hideyoshi had secretly been building a castle on the hills facing Odawara. Once completed, he ordered his troops to cut all trees surrounding the newly built castle during the night.

The following day, the sudden apparition of a castle seemingly “built overnight” broke Hōjō’s spirit, and they surrendered immediately.

What can we learn from this masterpiece of strategy?

1) Overnight success is an illusion that hides years of hard work

2) Innovation often happens at the intersection of more mundane improvements

3) Previous successes don’t warrant future outcomes

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If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. How do we know it’s not broken if we don’t understand how it works?

One of my goals with this blog is to share my neophyte understanding of topics I care about in a way that doesn’t require the reader to spend the same amount of time it took me to write it.

I am by no means targeting expert audiences (my articles wouldn’t survive their scrutiny). If I can get a few readers interested in these sometimes obscure or intimidating topics and maybe even compelled to dig deeper on their own, I would have accomplished my personal mission.

This article’s topic would have been the most painful and head-scratching one I had the self-inflicted pleasure to go through so far. Today, we’re talking about Capitalism (bummer), a tacitly accepted economic model that is hard to discuss without becoming political.

Why Capitalism? Because it implicitly dictates many aspects of our lives, but at the same time, most of us only have a limited understanding of it (maybe I’m just projecting my own ignorance and secretly hoping that I wasn’t alone in my cluelessness).

When I started digging on the subject, I fell into a rabbit hole so deep that for a moment, I feared I wouldn’t be able to get out of it. I was even terrorized to start writing about it, paralyzed by the most intense impostor syndrome I have ever felt.

Then, I remembered that I was allowed to be an impostor, and so here we are!

Why should you listen to someone with absolutely no authority on the subject? Because I’d like to believe that we don’t need to be experts to have a candid conversation. Besides, writing is part of my learning process; it helps me consolidate my thoughts. In a way, by writing, I’m not sharing what I know, I’m sharing what I don’t.

A little bit of history

No ideas are born in a vacuum. Context is important.

To understand how Capitalism came to play, it is worth having a quick look at where it’s coming from. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll take shortcuts and make huge assumptions and unreasonable interpretations. Reader’s discretion advised.

Let’s rewind the clock a little bit.

We used to be hunters and gatherers for a very long time. We lived in small tribes, which allowed us to spend our time more efficiently by sharing the burden of food procurement and child care and look after each other’s wellbeing.

At one point, we started getting quite savvy about the habits of certain types of plants and animals.

All this changed about 10,000 years ago when Sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulate the lives of a few animal and plant species. — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

It is commonly known as the Agricultural Revolution. In exchange for a less varied diet, more prone to diseases and drought, we could produce calories more predictably.

Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially. — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

While hunting was still an essential source of nutrition, most of our calories were coming from wheat, and because wheat fields cannot move, we became sedentary.

Then something incredible happened: surplus. For the first time, we produced more food than we needed to survive. We could store the surplus, and even better: some of us could eat without working for it. This was the birth of social classes.

Food surpluses made possible the development of a social elite who were not otherwise engaged in agriculture, industry or commerce, but dominated their communities by other means and monopolized decision-making — Neolithic Revolution

As populations were exponentially increasing around the most fertile areas, cities started to form. Now entirely sedentary and with too many people to feed to go back to hunting and gathering, wheat fields and production surplus had to be protected from thieves and ill-intended neighbors. Armies were born.

Something to remember is that while our species was being successful in terms of growth, the vast majority of the population was engaged in daylong back-breaking activities necessary to cultivate wheat.

But a few did enjoy the benefits. Privileged members of the elite class who didn’t have to work could spend their time more creatively. Art, entertainment, philosophy, science, and ultimately technology (at the service of the elites, of course) emerged. Civilizations were born.

It’s all about growth

Until more recent technological breakthroughs, there always was a limit to how much resources could be produced within a given area. The simplest way to keep growing was to increase its size. To protect their status and grow their power, cities conquered other cities and grew into a nationwide network under the influence of a very exclusive aristocracy. Feudal systems were formed.

When you can’t grow within your borders anymore, grow outside. Or steal from your neighbors. I won’t mention the thousands of years of conquests, empires, and other warfare activities.

There was a point when a power equilibrium was reached in Western Europe, and countries such as England, France, or Portugal stopped trying to steal from each other directly. However, they did realize that technology hadn’t evolved uniformly across the globe, so instead, they started stealing from less advanced civilizations far abroad. In the process, they also realized they could exploit these weaker territories without any accountability. Colonialism was the name of the game.

The first capitalistic enterprises are much older than we may think. Corporations would be formed, borrow money from banks, invest in a ship, buy equipment, and hire a crew. That ship would then be used to bring back home spices, precious metals, and slaves, making a generous profit in the process. Mercantilism was the big business of its time.

However, advances in technology, particularly with the invention of the steam engine, induced a paradigm shift in productivity and subsequent wealth creation. Market power shifted from mercantilist Capitalism (driven by colonialism) to industrial Capitalism. We had finally found a way to produce more wealth without stealing from our neighbors. This was the Industrial Revolution.

In the mid-18th century a group of economic theorists, led by David Hume (1711 – 1776)[52] and Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), challenged fundamental mercantilist doctrines – such as the belief that the world’s wealth remained constant and that a state could only increase its wealth at the expense of another state. — Capitalism

Of course, that didn’t stop us from continuing to exploit colonies in the meantime. With the constant evolution in logistics and transportation technologies, these colonies were eventually industrialized and became an important source of cheap labor. Globalization wasn’t inspired by Western civilization; it was pretty much forced upon.

Industrialization allowed cheap production of household items using economies of scale while rapid population growth created sustained demand for commodities. Globalization in this period was decisively shaped by 19th-century imperialism . — History of globalization

The final step was to abandon protectionism policies and lower import tariffs to promote free trade. Corporations became global entities, and Capitalism had no frontier anymore.

A lot has happened since then (a couple of World Wars and Great Depressions, abandonment of the Gold standard, market deregulation, etc.) but the backbone of Capitalism hasn’t changed much.

Capitalism in a nutshell

After this fascinating and totally unbiased historical introduction, it may be a good time to define what we call Capitalism.

I usually prefer to avoid quoting Wikipedia, but I couldn’t find a more straightforward definition.

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit

This definition illustrates the contrast with feudal systems and other authoritarian regimes where the means of production are controlled by a monarch, usually the sole beneficiary (along with a few close friends) of the wealth produced.

It also states unequivocally that it is primarily motivated by profit and not some humanitarian aspirations.

There have been many forms of Capitalism practiced in different parts of the world, but they usually have the following characteristics in common.

• They allow capital accumulation, which means the State doesn’t have the power to redistribute capital as it sees fit
• They provide competitive markets, with pricing mechanism based on supply and demand (and not defined by the State)
• They recognize private property, voluntary exchange, and voluntary wage labor

In any capitalist economy, markets may be more or less regulated, and taxation more or less progressive, but anybody is entitled to buy and sell anything (as long as it is legal), accumulate resources, and invest one’s capital for the sole purpose of enriching oneself.

The Good

So we know what it is. What is it believed to be good for?

Freedom of choice

“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” ― Milton Friedman

Freedom of choice is a fundamental pillar of democracy.

In a free society, people should have the freedom to choose where they live, where they work, and what they buy.

By allowing the private ownership of the means of production, a society frees itself from a State’s monopoly on production, lifting off restrictions in terms of what gets produced and how, and distancing itself from political forces.

Resources are finite, and as long as scarcity exists, there will be competition. If the State had the power to decide how to distribute resources, there would be a risk of favoritism and corruption. Even if the State were elected democratically, there would still be competition between politicians.

Competitive markets independent from the State provide the products, services, and opportunities to choose from and a “fair”, uncorrupted mechanism to compete for scarce resources.

Innovation through competition

Throughout history, many innovations, particularly in sciences and technology, have been driven by some form of competition. For the longest time, that competition was mainly the result of adversity between tribes, cities, nations, and even empires. Competition’s intensity would culminate when the competing parties were at war; no wonder why war is sadly credited as one of the most significant sources of innovation.

Capitalism has offered new battling grounds for corporations to compete with free markets, resulting in a fair amount of innovation and way fewer casualties (ok, maybe debatable).

The constant competition has forced corporations to outsmart each other by improving their products and services and lowering production costs in the process.

Growing demand (particularly during the 20th century) encouraged continuous investment in better machinery and larger factories, which resulted in more affordable products through economy of scale.

More affordable products created even more demand, allowing industries to grow exponentially. These growing industries generated a higher demand for skilled labor. More people were earning more money, resulting in more demand, etc.

In rich countries, this virtuous circle arguably pulled the majority of their population out of poverty.

Corporations with the right mission have the power to improve lives by making commodities more affordable. A good example is the mission of Panasonic, announced in 1932 by its founder, Kounosuke Matsushita, popularly known as the “tap water philosophy”:

Even though water from a tap is a processed product with a price, no one objects if a passerby drinks from a roadside tap.

That is because the supply of water is plentiful and its price is low.

The mission of a manufacturer is to create material abundance by providing goods as plentiful and inexpensive as tap water.

This is how we can banish poverty, bring happiness to people’s lives and make this world into a paradise.

The Bad

Inefficient use of resources

There is a fundamental difference between productivity and efficiency.

Productivity can be seen as output vs. input, and efficiency as how little waste is generated.

We have become extremely good at reducing the cost of producing goods through innovation, technology, and economies of scale (and the exploitation of cheap labor overseas).

Corporations have an economic incentive (profit) to increase their productivity and to minimize waste. But the relationship between waste minimizing and cost efficiency is much more complicated than we would like to think.

Economies of scale are often achieved by buying bigger machines and larger volumes of raw material at a discount price, even if that means that a significant percentage of the resources will be discarded; it can be cheaper to produce more and not sell everything than the other way around. Sadly, it is also often cheaper to dispose of unneeded resources than to recycle them or even give them away (transportation, logistics, depreciation, etc.)
I won’t mention planned obsolescence and the waste generated by consumers in the name of product novelty.

There is also another way to look at efficiency.

We can define resource distribution efficiency by asking the question: assuming that there is enough of a specific resource to fulfill a given population’s needs, is anyone left behind?

In a world where more than 30% of all the food produced ends up thrown away, and where hundreds of millions of people still can’t eat as much as they need, there is clearly a resource distribution efficiency problem. The question becomes: what is causing it?

Systemic inequalities

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” – John Maynard Keynes

While it can be argued that capitalistic economies have lifted billions of people out of poverty, it has created considerable inequalities as well.

Increases in productivity have translated to improvements in wages up to the late 70s.

From there, the gain in productivity has directly contributed to more profit for corporations – that profit being distributed between the shareholders, as a pro-rata of how many shares of the corporation they own.

To invest in the stock market and buy shares of a corporation, people need disposable income, that is, money remaining after all basic necessities are covered. People with less disposable income have therefore less capital to invest and will generate less interest from their capital.

Economic growth, especially in financial markets, will benefit most those with the largest capital, thus increasing inequalities.

Capitalism ≠ Meritocracy

There is a die-hard belief that success and wealth are meritocratic.

That belief is kept alive by moving stories of self-made men, mostly anomalies of the system, that make us entertain the illusion that anyone willing to work hard can make it. This is of course a severe case of survivorship bias; we only see the few lucky winners but dismiss the innumerable losers entirely.

In reality, the vast majority of the capital is inherited through various forms, such as financial assets or real estate.

One study shows that in the United States 43.35% of the people in the Forbes magazine “400 richest individuals” list were already rich enough at birth to qualify. — Criticism of Capitalism

Another interesting notion is what is commonly called economic rents.

A simple example is Silicon Valley. There are many reasons why technology giants choose to locate their headquarters there – access to a highly qualified workforce, proximity to world-class universities, international connectivity, good weather.

As a result, real estate is prohibitively expensive, and average salaries comparatively higher than anywhere else. Are these houses fundamentally worth more than any other house across the country? Can the difference in pay be explained in any other way than location? Not really. That’s an example of economic rent.

The productivity of the metropolis depends upon public goods that have been provided by the entire nation, such as the rule of law and past investments in the infrastructure for connectivity – Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism, p.147

But this is rarely factored in when attempting to explain the success of a corporation. Many previous investments from the public sector have likely contributed to that success, but only the capital owners rip the benefits (especially after tax cuts).

Modern slavery

We’ve all heard about sweatshops. They are very real and a black and white example of what modern slavery looks like. But they are an extreme case, often used in the media to show how western countries’ working conditions are far better. However, everything is relative. A Walmart employee paid $10/hour is a more subtle form of slavery called “wage slavery”.

In the absence of regulations, wages are determined by supply and demand. As long as the unemployment rate is not zero, the balance of power will always tilt toward the employers, especially for low-skilled labor.

Not earning enough to put money aside, low-skilled workers don’t have the luxury to renegotiate their working conditions or look for another job that would pay more, restricting upward mobility and reinforcing social stratification.

Capitalists made profits through exploitation of resources, slavery, trade and finance. Only industrialization created a demand for labor. Since free laborers were cheaper than slaves in the long run, as they carry all risks, take care of their subsistence and can be easily replaced, slavery gave way to wage-labor— Capitalism and Inequality

The Ugly

Growth and GDP

GDP has become the de-facto standard to measure economic growth. Many policies are directly motivated by a desire to keep its year-to-year growth rate above a specific number.

While GDP is an indicator of how much value has been produced, it doesn’t take into account wellbeing or inequalities.

GDP fully endorses the capitalist theory of value: it views market transactions as the only drivers of development, as opposed to non-market exchanges; it considers as positive all forms of production and consumption, regardless of their impact on economic welfare; and it neglects social and environmental impacts — Why Capitalism win and how a simple accounting move can defeat it

GDP also sets an absolute metric globally for the perception of value and growth without considering geopolitical realities.

For example, despite the evident misuse of a scarce skill, global GDP rises if a Sudanese doctor moves to Britain and works as a taxi driver – Paul Collier, Future of Capitalism, p.203

As long as GDP stays the prime indicator of economic success, Capitalism will always win economic arguments.

Capitalism ≠ Democracy

While Capitalism has been an essential contributor to the propagation of democracy, it is by no mean a democratic system. Quite the opposite.

For one thing, there aren’t that many people who qualify as capitalists, meaning people who can make a living off the profit from their investments (or interests from the money they lend). They have the power to invest money where they see fit and the luxury to take financial risks to generate even more capital potentially.

Capitalism as a system benefits them the most. But how many are they?

Some estimations go as low as 0.07% of the world population (yes, 1 out of 1400)

The majority of millionaires does not qualify as capitalists. It is safe to draw the statistical dividing line between capitalists and individuals who own some wealth at around five million US Dollars in the global North and at around one million US Dollars in the poorer countries of the global South. This leaves us with around 0.07 percent of the world population as potential capitalists (Stierli et alii, 2015: 27). — Capitalism and Inequality

Another reason is that there is one thing that deeply affects our lives and is not governed by a democratic process: work.

Adults spend the majority of their awake time at work, and their livelihood usually depends on it.

But corporations are not democracies. They are controlled by their shareholders, who usually have a voting power equivalent to their shares. While some employees may own a few shares of the company they are working for, the vast majority of the shares belong to a very exclusive club of large shareholders.

With most voting power, it is reasonable to assume that consequential decisions will be made with their interests in mind.

They may, for instance, decide to reduce cost by laying off employees to increase the profit margin and pay themselves dividends.

The Market doesn’t solve everything

A common belief from the supporters of Capitalism is that any “worthwhile” problem can be solved by the market without government intervention. In “The Future of Business” (ビジネスの未来）, Shu Yamaguchi proposes a simple concept that explains why he doesn’t believe in the almightiness of the Market.

He suggests that any problem can be categorized within two axes; universality and difficulty.

Universality is how common the problem is, which translates to the market’s potential size for a solution.

Difficulty is how hard (in terms of innovation, technology, etc.) or how costly (in terms of resources) the problem is to solve.

Corporations driven by profit and economic growth will focus first on universal and easy to solve problems, then tackle easier but more niche problems, and finally harder but more universal ones (order not relevant here). However, they will rarely give a go at problems that are both very hard to solve and would have a very limited market.

Yamaguchi represents that limitation by something he calls the curve of economic rationality limit (経済合理的性限界曲線). His motion is that a free market will not solve problems that are outside the curve.

Providing shelter to the homeless is a good example. There is literally no economic incentive for a corporation to develop a solution (unless it owns the entire area). And if a corporation were to be mandated by the State to create one, any profit it could make would be paid by the taxpayers, which would evoke ethical concerns.

How do we usually solve that? Charity, which by definition means to relinquish self-interests (and thus profit) out of a sense of obligation or duty, and is the polar opposite of Capitalism.

So if we assume that an advanced society should strive to solve the problems it faces, but that free markets can’t be expected to solve them all, where do we draw the line, and what should be the societal role of these free markets?

Weakened Communities

Capitalism’s success stories have created higher expectations in terms of living standards, and the market has provided career opportunities for the skilled who were willing to move where these opportunities were.

Many extended families ended up geographically scattered, and local communities weakened in the process.

The extended ethical family gave way to the nuclear dynastic family — Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism, pp.109–110

This phenomenon has been exacerbated by the globalization of the highly skilled workforce.

Societies are built on mutual obligations. Because there is no such thing as a global society, people still live in nations. Without emotional attachment or feelings of obligation toward their nation and their fellow countrymen, the wealthier will always be opposed to higher taxation, sometimes ready to expatriate to another country with lower taxes.

The end result? A less compassionate society.

Yet for one person to have a right , someone else must have an obligation — Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism, p.52

Where does that leave us?

There is no question that Capitalism and more specifically free markets had a critical role in making our lives better, providing us with food, shelter, and entertainment.

But at what cost? Alarming inequalities, inefficient distribution of resources, scattered families and weakened communities, etc.

Since the early '80s, GDP growth has resulted in an overall increase of wealth, but hasn’t significantly improved average living standards in rich countries; the wealthy has simply become wealthier.

That concentration of wealth is not sustainable in an economic model that expects continuous growth for a very simple reason: resources are finite because our planet is finite.

Today, the GDP growth rate is still the only metric for economic growth that is acknowledged across the board. But how much growth is enough? And what for, if it doesn’t leave everybody better off?

And wealth is just one part of the equation. As obvious as it can sound, people at the top of the food chain have no interest in a fair competitive system based on merit.

The enemy of competition is vested interests — Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism, p.93

Because even a democratic process needs money (politicians do need to make a living while they are running for office), inequalities in wealth distribution always translate into inequalities in power distribution, which can put the whole process in jeopardy.

The relationship between Capitalism and democracy looks a little bit like the Stockholm Syndrome; Capitalism has taken democracy hostage, but democracy can’t seem to be able to live without it.

When people feel that both wealth distribution and the democratic process are unfair, they are less willing to participate in the system because they believe it to be rigged (which it kind of is). Or they revolt.

Being disconnected from weakening communities and disfranchised by a democratic system perceived to be unfair, people lose their sense of mutual obligation. The result is a less compassionate society that is the perfect playground for identity politics.

Instead, the vacuum created by the implosion of social democracy was filled by political movements that offered voters a bypass to effort. Pragmatism has two enemies: ideologies and populism, and each seized its opportunity — Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism, p.207

And as we’ve seen earlier, there are also many challenges that just cannot be solved by the market, because they are not marketable; they are outside the curve of the economic rationality limit. Capitalism cannot solve them.

Only mutual obligation can.

But that sense of mutual obligation can exist only if we feel strongly connected to our communities. If we can’t put a face on a problem, it just becomes a number, and numbers don’t move us.

“If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” – Joseph Stalin

What I’ve learned

Capitalism has become an umbrella term for a mix of concepts such as free markets, the pursuit of profit, wealth inequalities, etc.

The vagueness of its definition makes any interpretation political, which makes discussions much harder.

It is often said that Capitalism is the best system we’ve got and that we’ve tried other alternatives without much success.

But something to remember is that we didn’t invent Capitalism. Economists and great thinkers of their time didn’t gather in a room to brainstorm for a few weeks and draft a proposal to be submitted to the different governments of the world.

Capitalism just happened as a somewhat logical, maybe even inevitable (in hindsight, of course) consequence of historical events and market forces.

It’s one of the largest social experiments in human history, and it was completely unplanned.

While it has arguably been an engine for innovation and economic growth, and possibly a stepping stone toward a better system, can we truly say that’s the best we can do?

What’s the alternative, you may ask. Capitalists like to point at the Soviet regime as an example of why socialism can’t work and why Capitalism is superior in every way. But was the economic model the only issue? Could there have been other historical and cultural reasons that could have explained its demise? And even if the economic model was the issue, can’t we learn from its successes while not reiterating its failures?

We won’t know if there is a better model until we try something else at large scale, and that can’t happen overnight. Capitalism has built such momentum that it would take an unimaginable amount of energy to replace it. Change can happen only with tiny iterations.

But to decide what these iterations should be, we need to know where we want to go and what would a better system look like.

We may be powerless individually, but I believe that we still have a responsibility to contribute in any way or form to the global conversation. And that starts with actively improving our awareness and taking ownership of the situation we have inherited; nobody has any obligation to think on our behalf.

Today, in a capitalistic market, you can outsource pretty much anything. But you can’t outsource thinking. And even if you could, you probably shouldn’t.

References

• Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari: https://www.ynharari.com/book/sapiens-2/
• The Future of Capitalism, Paul Collier: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Capitalism-Facing-New-Anxieties/dp/0062748653
• ビジネスの未来, 山口周 (The Future of Business, Shu Yamaguchi): https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/%E5%B1%B1%E5%8F%A3-%E5%91%A8/dp/4833423936/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&qid=1619253042&s=books&sr=1-3
• Capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
• Criticism of Capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism
• Capitalism and Inequality: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-69922020000300695
• Neolithic Revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

You’re not getting enough sleep. That is a fact. But that’s not what this article is about.

As you may have realized by now, most of my articles are usually inspired by books that have left a strong impression on me. This article is no exception. I read “Why we sleep” from Matthew Walker more than a year ago, and I always wanted to write something about it one day.

As of today, we still don’t fully understand this incredible narcotic phenomenon that knocks us out of consciousness every night.

In his book, Walker demystifies sleep in a very simple jargon and clarifies many popular myths and misconceptions about our chronic temporary coma.

Having enjoyed writing my previous article, I thought I would try something similar but in a slightly different format.

This time, we will be exploring a few interesting concepts about sleep while following the story of Greg, a senior sales representative working in a promotion agency in Tokyo.

Day 0

Greg just couldn’t make his mind. His job had accustomed him to make decisions daily in a professional setting, but this was too personal. “Just sleep on it,” his boss Steve had told him, seeing his indecisive expression.

Sleeping on it was, however, a luxury Greg wouldn’t have in the coming days. He was scheduled to fly to New York the following day to pitch a proposal to a client prospect. The pandemic had financially hit Greg’s firm, and getting that new client on board would be a huge blessing.

Adding to the pressure of closing the deal, Greg usually gets anxious the day before he flies somewhere. The fact that he procrastinated until the last minute before getting his bags packed didn’t help. Between the polishing of a couple of PowerPoint slides, the search for his passport, and the realization that he hadn’t ironed his shirts, he wasn’t in bed until 2:00 am. That night, he dreamt that he was running in an endless airport, hearing his name called over and over as the embarkation gates were closing for departure. Calls were getting louder and louder and were now complemented with an increasingly strident beeping: beep, beep.

Greg was brutally taken out of sleep by his alarm setting off at 6:00 am. We all have experienced feeling nauseous from sleep deprivation, and that’s exactly how he felt. But that wasn’t only because of a lack of sleep. He’s never been an early bird, and 6:00 am was quite early for him. He’s constantly been told that it was due to bad sleeping habits and a lack of self-discipline and came to believe that, often feeling guilty about it.

He didn’t know that he was part of the 30% of the population that we call night owls, and if anything were to blame, that would be his genetics.

Early birds and night owls

Humans have lived in tribes for thousands of generations. Having members with different sleeping patterns, namely early birds and night owls, allowed for a shorter period of complete vulnerability during the night; with early birds sleeping between 10:00 pm and 6:00 am and night owls between 2:00 am and 10:00 am, the vulnerable period when everybody is asleep was just 4 hours per night.

Because well-balanced tribes were more likely to survive, and because families used to live generation after generation within the same tribes passing on their genes, we have kept an even distribution until today.

After a quick shower and a large cup of coffee, Greg was alert enough to make sure he didn’t forget anything. A brisk tapping on the chest pocket of his jacket confirmed he had his passport on him. He locked the door and was on his way to the airport.

Unlike in his dream, the boarding process was uneventful, and his plane took off on time. With 14 hours ahead of him, Greg thought he could try to get a couple of hours of sleep back, but the second coffee he had at the airport was starting to kick-off, and his eyes wouldn’t stay close.

Browsing through the movie selection, Greg stumbled upon a documentary on the sleeping habits of different animal species. Amused by the irony of the situation, he started watching and was stunned by how little he knew about sleep’s inner workings.

REM or NREM?

Sleep consists of different neural activity stages that form a cycle of roughly 90 minutes, repeating itself until we wake up. The two most important are the NREM phase, more commonly called deep sleep, and the REM phase, which we associate with dreaming.

REM stands for rapid eye movement, from the observation that during that phase, our eyes move intensively under our closed eyelids. NREM simply stands for Non-rapid eye movement. As Matthew Walker says it himself in his book, sleep scientists are not very creative with naming.

During NREM sleep, our consciousness is completely disconnected while our brain does a lot of data processing. Consciousness comes back online during REM sleep, and our brain becomes super active; we regain awareness and the notion of time, and we can literally feel and think as if we were awake.

As the virtual world created by our mind is indistinguishable from reality in terms of perception (our senses are all connected to our brain, after all), our muscles are deactivated so that we don’t act out our dream experiences.

Do all animals share the same sleeping mechanisms? Not quite.

Birds don’t have REM sleep, most likely so that they don’t fall off a tree from muscle paralysis. Dolphins, too, despite being mammals, do not enjoy the pleasure of dreaming, as they need to keep swimming to breathe. How can they sleep at all, you may ask? Half their brain at a time! Yes, they have developed the ability to have half of their brain asleep while the other half is still active. How cool is that? Just imagine how convenient that would be!

How about apes? They do have REM sleep, but in smaller proportions compared to humans. Scientists believe that this evolution resulted from humans leaving the trees to live on the plain instead. Sleeping firmly on the ground would have made it safer for us to dream for more extended periods.

Day 1

Greg woke up shaken by the plane touching the ground. He had barely slept. “It’s going to be a long day,” he told himself, grabbing his bag and leaving the plane. Indeed, a long day it would be. When Greg left the airport, en route to the local office, it was barely 9:00 am New York’s time, but his internal clock was approaching bedtime.

Melatonin and adenosine

When it comes to sleep, we often hear about melatonin. It’s a hormone produced by the pineal gland in response to darkness. It reduces our awareness, thus facilitating sleep. It also helps with the calibration of our circadian rhythm to make sure we feel sleepy at the right time of the day.

But melatonin is not alone in the sleep facilitating division. We also produce a molecule called adenosine as a byproduct of energy consumption throughout the day. The more active we are, the more adenosine gets produced. When its concentration in our bloodstream reaches a certain threshold, it starts interacting with specific cell receptors, inhibiting neural activity and causing drowsiness. This drowsiness is commonly called sleep pressure.

There is a fundamental difference between melatonin and adenosine. Melatonin is produced only when it’s dark, so we stop making it during the day. Adenosine, on the other hand, needs to be processed. Otherwise, it stays in our bloodstream. And the only way to process it? You guessed well, sleep!

When we do an all-nighter, we do produce melatonin during the night, which makes us sleepy, but once the sun is up again the following day, its effects are suppressed. Adenosine, however, would have been building up during the night on top of what we would have produced the day before. That “sleep pressure” is what makes us feel miserable the day after an all-nighter.

Caffeine to-the-rescue

How do you keep awake after a sleepless night? Coffee, of course! Coffee contains high concentrations of caffeine, a molecule that seems to have many stimulant properties on us, most notably, its ability to keep us awake. How does it do that? Well, it very conveniently attaches itself to the same cell receptors that adenosine interacts with, blocking its effects as a result.

It is just temporary, however. Caffeine doesn’t remove adenosine from our bloodstream, so once it wears off, adenosine will kickback even more strongly, as its concentration would have increased in the meantime.

Back to Greg. A series of preparation meetings with the local team and copious amounts of coffee kept him awake throughout the day.

The first meeting with the client went more or less as planned, and despite a few sleepiness attacks, Greg’s delivery of the presentation was flawless. While most of the audience seemed enthusiastic about what had been presented to them, one person, the CEO, seemed unimpressed. He asked a few unexpected questions about numbers to which Greg wasn’t able to answer. The client agreed to have a follow-up meeting the next day.

Greg called the local team and shared with them the questions from the CEO. They offered him to do a meeting right away, but Greg felt it wouldn’t have been very productive in his current state of sleep deprivation. They agreed to go over the numbers together the following morning.

Jet lagged

Checking in his hotel, Greg only had one thing in mind: crashing into the bed and giving in to sleep pressure. However, while unpacking his belongings, he weirdly started to feel more alert. It was 7 pm in New York, but his circadian rhythm was telling him something different. 9 am, to be exact.

Our circadian rhythm is quite a piece of clockwork. It can be recalibrated, but only in very smalls steps.

For every day you are in a different time zone, your suprachiasmatic nucleus can only readjust by about one hour

It would take almost two full weeks to be fully recalibrated to New York’s time!

After spending 40 minutes lying down on the bed with his eyes wide open, Greg decided to call some friends in town.

A few drinks lead to more drinking, and Greg was back to the hotel well after 1 am, conservatively drunk. Alcohol did help to put him to sleep, and he was pretty much knocked out instantly after falling in his bed.

Day 2

After three alarm snoozes, Greg was finally woken up from a dreamless night by Steve’s call. “Hey, I hope I’m not waking you up. How’s the outlook?” After a few seconds of near mouth paralysis due to brain numbness, Greg replied, “Actually … you just woke me up. Thanks for that. Alarm didn’t cut it. Hum … outlook. Right. Yes! Quite positive I’d say. They asked for more detailed projections. I’m on it. I’m pretty confident.”

“Happy to hear that! Let me know if I can help in any way.”

“Before I forget,” Steve continued after a short blank, “have you made up your mind?”

Greg exhaled forcefully. “Sorry Steve, I need more time. I’d rather focus on the task at hand if you don’t mind.”

“All good, all good!” Steve replied in a reassuring voice. “I’m just eager to know. Anyways, keep me posted. And good luck with the presentation. We really need this business.”

Ending the call, Greg stared at the wall in front of him for a few minutes while his brain was rebooting, attempting to retrieve events from the day before. He could recollect many snippets of memory, but they were all disconnected and out of order.

Memory consolidation

One benefit of sleep is memory consolidation. We have a limited amount of conscious memory space that works a little bit like RAM in a computer. While we’re sleeping, our brain processes information stored in our conscious memory and decides if it should be kept there or archived in longer-term memory (or even deleted completely) to free up some space for new information. The bulk of this process seems to be happening during NREM sleep when we are the least active. Then, during REM sleep, we perform many simulations based on the recently processed information, which is a necessary step for memory consolidation.

Alcohol is a sedative, and it is known to be a powerful suppressor of REM sleep, which is why drunk nights are often dreamless nights. That also explains why too much drinking can result in memory loss the following day and why Greg struggled on his bed.

“Numbers! I need to crunch numbers,” he finally recalled, and threw himself on a chair, his computer on his laps before telling himself “coffee first!”

While he didn’t remember all the meeting details, he did remember a few important points he had felt strongly about and started working on them. He also had forgotten about the 9:00 am meeting with the local team and was surprised to see an email asking for his whereabouts. He apologized, and they reconvened the meeting online.

Last bet

Going over the numbers with the team helped boost his confidence. There were still a few hours until his second meeting with the client, and Greg decided to bet on a nap. There was a risk he would feel even more miserable after the nap, but he was convinced that a couple of extra hours of sleep could at least replenish his energy levels.

And he was right. His nap did even better than that; it helped consolidate the information he had just acquired a few hours earlier.

On his way to the client’s office, he felt rather serene. The meeting was a complete success, and the CEO nodded more than once. They thanked him for his responsiveness and told him they would be considering his proposal seriously.

Greg called the local team to congratulate them for their support while checking out from his hotel on his way to the airport.

He had done everything he could and wouldn’t have any regret even if the client were to decline the proposal.

His flight back was uneventful, but this time he did manage to sleep a few hours.

Arriving at Narita airport, he checked his emails while debarking the plane and saw one from Steve with a subject in uppercase letters saying, “THEY SIGNED! NICE WORK!”

He felt immediately relieved and headed back home with a smile on his face. “I can now sleep,” he told himself but then remembered that there was one more thing. “My decision. I need to decide.” This time, he was going to sleep on it.

Moment of truth

After a long-overdue night of sleep, Greg woke up a different man. He felt energized and optimistic as if good things were going to happen today. He also felt that something had changed within him. The anxiety that had been building up over the last few days was pretty much gone. He was ready to make a decision.

Breathing slowly and with confidence, he took his phone and, without hesitation, pressed the call button. “Steve? It’s Greg. I made my mind.”

“Oh, I’m glad to hear that. And what will it be?” Steve asked enthusiastically. Greg took a deep breath and answered, “I’ll take the blue one.”

“Good choice indeed!”

Two days later, Greg was woken up by the delivery man.

Half-awake, he ran down the stairs to get the package he had been dreaming about for the last few days.

And there it was: AKB48 new single special box, “BLUE” edition, with a blue penlight. Steve, who chose the red, and him were now fully equipped to enjoy to the fullest the next concert in Akihabara of their favorite idol unit.

— The end —

Moral of the story

What happened to Greg in this story happens to many people every day. As with many things in life, we don’t think much about sleep and take it for granted. Below are a few takeaways:

• There are still many things we don’t understand about sleep, and we’re not even sure why and how we came to snooze, but one thing is sure: we need a lot of it.
• Our unique ability to enjoy extended periods of REM sleep may have contributed to our advanced cognitive development compared to other species. We may not have been where we are today if we had stayed in the trees. (yes, we’d still be in the trees, I know)
• You are not lazy if you can’t wake up at 6:00 am. It might just be in your genes.
• You can’t produce melatonin in a bright room. Try to get your bedroom as dark as possible, and keep your phone out of it!
• Alcohol may help you fall asleep, but it also suppresses REM sleep. Moderation is the name of the game.
• A quick nap is often more beneficial than several cups of coffee. And coffee doesn’t help you with memory consolidation!
• Next time you have an important decision to make, sleep on it. Literally.

I hope you have enjoyed this experiment. I wanted to try something new and original, by disseminating informative content through a hopefully intriguing story.

If you’re wondering about Greg, he’s doing great, and he is now more conscious about sleep (although, he still does a few all-nighters with Steve from time to time when they miss their last train after an idol concert in Akihabara).

Are we witnessing a Renaissance of Greek philosophy? It seems that Stoicism has been gaining popularity in recent years.

Have our lives become so complicated that we are willing to search for words of wisdom that are thousands of years old? If so, what makes us believe that they can solve our modern problems?

Well, I’m willing to risk voicing the following idea. Societies were less complex and information scarcer back then. Philosophers could dedicate more time and cognitive focus to meditate about life, meaning, and human tendencies to succumb to hedonic motivations and self-indulgence. In short, they spent a great deal of time thinking about us, almost to the exclusion of anything else.

Following a friend’s recommendation, I recently read How to think like a Roman emperor by Donald Robertson. In his book, Robertson, a Stoicism practitioner himself, tells us the story of Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor and one of Stoicism’s most significant figures. He also illustrates many teachings and techniques of the Stoic philosophy and explains them with modern concepts mostly borrowed from cognitive behavioral phychology.

Inspired by the book, I thought it would interesting to try to apply these teachings in a business scenario, and I imagined Marcus living among us today. That’s how the story would go. I hope you’ll enjoy the absurdity of it.

2021, Marcus Aurelius, a successful business executive coach, twice The Time’s person of the year, and a regular columnist in Forbes magazine, is hired by a struggling organization. A life-long practitioner of Stoicism, Marcus is also the author of 2 best-selling books, “Stoicism in the workplace” and “Meditate, and get things done!”.

Stoicism, the elevator pitch

Every time Marcus begins a coaching engagement with a company, he invariably starts with the top: the board of directors.

He knows how busy directors can be and has developed over the years an elevator pitch that explains his approach in simple and direct terms.

“What is the biggest enemy of any business?” he asked Acme Associates’ board. And without leaving much time for the directors to respond, he answered himself: “Bad decisions.”

He had their attention.

“Where those bad decisions come from? Overconfidence, misguided intuition, lack of emotional control, self-interest over company’s interest, fear, etc..”

“Our approach is to reduce the number of bad decisions by applying Stoicism teachings to develop self-control, critical thinking, and a more acute sense of perception.”

Having helped hundreds of companies across many industries, Marcus is painfully aware of the symptoms of a struggling organization:

• High levels of stress and anxiety
• No communication or collaboration between divisions
• Leadership driven by greed and self-interest
• Decisions driven by emotions, fear, and risk aversion

Recognizing a few of these symptoms, a slightly anxious director asked Marcus how he suggested mitigating these challenges. Marcus’ approach consists of four steps:

1. Create a high-performing culture based on the four virtues of Stoicism
2. 1-on-1 coaching with senior management on critical thinking
3. Masterclass on stress management for all the staff
4. Workshop on self-improvement and routine building

Knowing he had the directors on-board with his plan (pun intended), it was time for Marcus to put it in motion with the first item on its agenda.

Virtues in the office

Highly performing organizations have one thing in common: a deeply ingrained culture that strives for excellence. Conversely, struggling organizations usually demonstrate weaker cultures, often due to a lack of higher purpose.

It didn’t take too long for Marcus to determine that Acme Associates was in the second category. After interviewing 2 executives and 1 senior manager, he had heard 3 different corporate missions, 12 different values (5 of them contradictory). Nobody seemed to agree on which human qualities were the most praised within the organization.

He organized a weekend retreat with all the executives and some of the most senior staff to increase their awareness of the situation, and have them involved in the cultural changes to come.

Marcus likes to kick-off the retreat by presenting his battle-tested framework to be used in the subsequent workshops.

“In order to strive for excellence as an organization, it is vital to establish a culture driven by human qualities that you value. In our Stoic Approach to Management or S.A.M©︎ for short, we propose a framework of 4 building blocks, or values, that we call the 4 Cardinal Virtues of Stoicism: Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Moderation”.

Acknowledging the puzzled look of a few executives, he illustrated the four virtues in more business terms:

Wisdom

• Seeing long-term, without being blinded by short-term profit
• Systematically learning from our mistakes and improve our processes
• Making people smarter around us by sharing knowledge and insights

Justice

• Practicing a fair business and embracing fair competition
• Providing equal opportunities to all the staff

Courage

• Perseverance during difficult times
• Courage to speak up and stand up against the wrong
• Courage to take risk and try new ideas

Moderation

• Not letting greed and profit being the only drivers of the business
• Restraining from excess
• Staying humble

Happy to see most of the crowd nodding of approval, Marcus instructed the executives to get started with the workshops.

Inspired by the presentation, ideas were flowing, and it didn’t take too long for the leadership team to come up with the values upon which the new culture will be built.

The rest of the retreat was enjoyed with a renewed sense of purpose and enthusiasm about the future.

Critical thinking

Having had the opportunity to discuss with many executives during the retreat, it came to Marcus’ attention that a few costly mistakes had been made in the last quarter; they resulted from poor decision-making from a couple of senior managers trying to keep up with their personal objectives. That seemed the perfect segway to Marcus’ next topic: critical thinking.

Marcus knows all too well that we are not born with a natural aptitude for rationality and that our emotions or biases can heavily influence our decisions.

For critical thinking to be effective, we must be able to describe any situation or problem as factually as possible, without any value judgment. Events are not good or bad, just or unjust; they just are. Stoics call this Objective Representation.

Business is all about problem-solving, and to find the right solutions, we need to make sure we are describing the problems as objectively as possible.

A second important mechanism is to realize that our judgment may have tainted our perception of reality and that we are not processing information as objectively as we would like to. We need to separate the perception of facts from our interpretation of the same facts, being aware that we are most likely applying some level of filtering in between. It’s like seeing the world through color lenses and be able to look at the lenses instead of through them.

This concept of separation is called Cognitive Distancing in modern cognitive-behavioral psychology and is commonly used in behavioral therapy.

When it comes to Objective Representation and Cognitive Distancing, Marcus favors 1-on-1s over group meetings, as everybody comes with a different set of biases and judgments. This part of the coaching activities takes the longest, but it also brings the most result in the long run in Marcus’ experience.

How to cope with stress and anxiety?

The next big event on the agenda was the masterclass on stress management.

In the area of stress management, no one has more experience than Epictetus. Born extremely poor, his life has been a long series of crippling misfortunes. Famous in the academic circles for his pioneering work on trauma management, he is often considered as one of the thought leaders of Stoicism. While Marcus has always had a more “hands-on” approach to Stoicism, he very often quotes Epictetus’ work during his presentations. So who better than Epictetus himself as the guest speaker at the masterclass!

Epictetus’s approach to stress and anxiety management revolves around two key axes: awareness and acceptance.

The first, awareness, is about realizing that things are not stressing us out, but we are letting ourselves be stressed by things.

It’s not things that upset us but our judgments about things — Epictetus

It’s a direct application of the concept of Cognitive Distancing introduced earlier.

The second axis, acceptance, is to consciously try not to be emotionally affected by things on which we don’t have control.

There is only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will — Epictetus, Discourses

No control? No problem!

“We all crave for control,” Epictetus continued. We like to believe that everything that happens to us is within our control and that we are in command of our destiny. But in reality, only very few things are actually under our control, and feeling strongly about something over which we have no control is irrational and a great source of emotional suffering.

“Consciously differentiating what’s under our control and what isn’t is what we call: Dichotomy of Control. I like to call it the Stoic Fork,” he added, with a nerdy smile. “And you’d be surprised to realize how much is not within our control. That includes:

• What people think and how they feel about us
• The actual outcome of our actions
• Our own health and wealth.”

“We may have good intentions, but that never guarantees a good outcome. We may be nice to people, but that never guarantees they’ll like us in return.”

Accepting to relinquish the notion of control, or to be more accurate, the illusion of control can liberate us from misguided expectations and unfounded entitlement, the two most significant sources of stress and frustration.

“We can now focus on doing things because they are right, not because we expect something in return.”

Do what you must, let happen what may – Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Worry Postponement

“From time to time, however, we may encounter a crisis,” said Epictetus, with a grave face. “During a crisis, anything can go wrong, and any unwise decision can worsen the situation even more. Panic is the last thing we want.”

Epictetus went on to introduce one of the techniques Stoics use on such occasions: Worry Postponement.

The concept is exactly how it sounds. When something of worrying nature occurs, try to consciously delay the worrying. Tell yourself: “Alright, something bad is happening. I’ll start worrying later. First, let’s have a clear description of what’s going on.”

Using Objective Representation, try to describe the situation as factually as possible, removing any emotional information. A nice trick is to describe everything, including yourself, at the third-person, to add even more emotional distance.

“Of course, it’s easier said than done, and it needs practice.” He added. “There is a category of people who are doing this daily: first responders.”

First responders are frequently confronted with life and death situations. They have been trained to “decatastrophize” any given situation and see death as one possible outcome of their future decisions. That emotional distancing allows them to stay cool-headed and weigh their decisions based only on facts.

“Think like a first responder, and over time, your stress levels will go down, because you’ll realize that there are very few things that actually deserve your worries.” Concluded Epictetus. Marcus encouraged a second round of applause and thanked the participants of the masterclass.

Let’s put into practice

After having focused mostly on theory, it was time to put things into practice. Unlike hard skills of which progress can often be measured, the soft skills promoted by the S.A.M can be difficult to monitor. That would be the key focus of his workshops on routine building.

Meditations

Marcus is a big believer in routines. Things that are important to us and that we want to develop shouldn’t be left to chance. Setting daily routines is the first step.

For Marcus, the two routines he has been following religiously are his morning and evening meditations (not to be confused with Buddhist meditations, although there might be similarities).

His morning meditations have for goal to prepare him for all the challenges and adversity he might encounter during the day. Robertson calls it “Premeditation of Adversity”.

Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial – Marcus Aurelius

It’s a little bit like doing a “premortem” of the day before it starts.

“Today, something wrong is going to happen on my project, and we are going to be late on the delivery and receive complaints from the client. My boss is not going to recognize all the hard work I’ve been doing for the company, and Tony, who hasn’t contributed at all to the project is going to be promoted. Alright, let’s do our best today as usual.”

Armed with this form of Cognitive Distancing, in combination with Objective Representation and Worry Postponement, we are mentally ready to deal with anything that may come our way.

If the morning meditations were the premortem, evening meditations are the post-mortem.

“It is vital to reflect on the day. That’s the only way to make sure we are on track with our aspirations.” Insisted Marcus.

“I usually ask myself:

• What did I do badly today?
• What did I do well?
• What could I have done differently?”

Marcus acknowledged that it could be challenging to analyze oneself objectively; we have many blind spots when it comes to our own shortcomings. He stressed the importance of feedback and mentorship.

Feedback and mentorship

“If our goal is to become a better person, we should constantly ask for feedback.” Said Marcus. “And we should always crave for unflattering feedback, hopefully from someone we trust and respect. Nothing beats having a mentor for that.”

If we desire to learn wisdom, we must be ready to listen to anyone we encounter and show gratitude “not to those who flatter us but to those who rebuke us” – Galen

For those who don’t have access to a physical mentor, Marcus recommends using an imaginary one.

“Imagine someone you respect and admire for their virtues. It could be anyone you fancy. We, Stoics, like to call him The Sage.”

“Now, visualize that mentor having unrestricted access to your thoughts and feelings and giving you (unsolicited) comments on them.” He said with an almost sadistic smile. “I often imagine having Socrates and Epictetus debating in my head about the pettiness of my thoughts.” He added, laughing openly.

“Put these tools into practice, and I guarantee that you’ll be a different person in no time!” Concluded Marcus, satisfied with the eager faces of the audience.

Keep up the good work!

It was time for Marcus to congratulate the staff for the amazing progress they had made within just a few weeks. They had achieved the hardest part of their journey: its first step; realizing what was going wrong, and deciding to do something about it.

Building a culture doesn’t happen overnight, and the pursue of virtues takes a lifetime, but Marcus was confident that they were on the right path.

In a warm closing speech, he reminded them that the most important thing was not to try to get everything right every time but to practice consistently and intentionally without losing sight of the ultimate goal: becoming better versions of ourselves. Perfection is the enemy of good. Or as Marcus best puts it:

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be; just be one – Meditations, 10.16.

What I’ve learned

I hope you enjoyed this piece and that it was as much fun for you to read as it was for me to write.

Stoicism teaches us a way to accept our lives as they are and live them to the fullest. These teachings are as relevant at home as they are at the office.

• We are not affected by reality itself but by our perception of it. Ultimately, our mindset will determine how we experience the workplace.
• Stoicism is all about the pursuit of virtues while navigating the vicissitudes of life, and these principles can apply to a business setting.
• Objective Representation and Cognitive Distancing are two powerful mechanisms that can increase our awareness and help us thinking and acting more critically.
• Embracing the fact that we have very limited control over our choices’ outcomes can liberate us and make us more creative and innovative.

We live in an ever-changing world, where time constantly renders the past obsolete and keep the future uncertain. No truth is everlasting. How we live and value our lives is entirely up to each and every one of us. Or, as Marcus said it best:

The universe is change, life is opinion – Marcus Aurelius

References

• How to think like a Roman emperor, Donald Robertson
• Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
• Discourses, Epictetus

Walking is an extremely hard skill to learn. Toddlers between 12 AND19 months practice more than 2000 steps per day and fall on average 17 times per hour. That’s about 100 falls per day and 3000 falls per month.

That’s an insane failing rate, but we don’t give up. We work it through.

But as we grow older, that incredible resilience wears away, and we become discouraged more easily.

Have you ever given up on learning a new skill? Maybe a new language or a musical instrument? I can’t count the number of hobbies I have given up on, from sport to martial arts, drawing, piano, the list goes on.
Why did you give up? Did you feel you were not progressing fast enough? That maybe you didn’t have any talent for it, or it wasn’t meant for you? Or you lost all your will after watching kids on YouTube shredding their guitars? (Note to self.)

Discovering a new hobby you’re passionate about and want to master doesn’t happen every day. I’m sure you remember how excited you felt when you encountered it. And that excitement and passion probably stayed around. For a little while, anyway.

But then you lost interest or found something else more exciting, and before you knew it, that little new hobby had been added to a long list of abandoned endeavors.

Welcome to the Valley of Disappointment. You’re not alone

“Valley of Disappointment” is a concept introduced by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits, which I previously referred to in my article about frictionless note-taking.

The idea is that progress usually doesn’t happen linearly but more exponentially. We get a fraction better at what we are doing over a certain period, with progress compounding over time. For example, if we were to get 1% better at playing the piano every week, that would be equal to multiplying our capability (whatever that quantifiably means) by 1.01. From there, 2 weeks would then be 1.01 * 1.01, a year would be (1.01)^52 = 1.68, two years would be (1.01)^104=2.8, etc.

I see the math guys coming for my head: “But if you start at zero, then 1% of zero is still zero!”. I know. Leave me alone. You get the point!

Exponential growth means that the longer we practice, the greater we progress, each week progressing a little more than the previous week.

Our problem, though, is that our expectations are linear. We expect steady progress from day one, which creates a gap between our actual progress and our expectations. That gap is what James calls the Valley of Disappointment, or “plateau of latent potential”.

The important part here is that eventually, the exponential curve will cross over the line of our expectations. But the time where the exponential curve is below the line is when we are most likely to give up on practicing something because our progress won’t match our expectations. Thus, the Valley of “Disappointment”.

If only we could keep practicing long enough to get over the line, most of us probably wouldn’t give up on our passions or hobbies, and we would feel more accomplished as a result.

Is there anything we can do to maximize our chances of escaping the Valley of disappointment?

Keeping our expectations in check

That’s probably going to sound very obvious, but the reason that the Valley exists in the first place is because of our inflated expectations. Lowering our expectations of progress is the first piece of the puzzle.

Why are our expectations so high to begin with?

Fallacy of linearity

As a survival mechanism, we have an innate capability of seeing straight lines between two points; that allows us to go from point A to point B using the minimum amount of calories necessary. We also seem to understand quantities and equivalence naturally. If one fish buys me two apples, I expect two fish to buy me four apples.

For the same reason, we naturally expect the same amount of effort to reward us with the same progress level.

We need to recognize that we are simply being victims of a linearity bias and accept that progress will be small and most likely inconsistent for a little while.

Misplaced comparisons

We are social animals (yes, you too), and we can’t help but compare ourselves with others.

While it can be helpful to gauge our progress in absolute terms, it is usually not very healthy (and probably not very encouraging) to compare ourselves with our peers and set expectations accordingly. I see three main reasons for that:

1. They may be naturally more talented or have some unfair advantage (like being the child of a piano teacher)
2. They may be practicing way more than they admit
3. Maybe they are failing at everything we can do, but that’s the one thing they have success with

In short, comparing ourselves to others puts us at risk of being victims of the Survivorship bias, where we only see the successful few and not the unsuccessful many.

Impostor syndrome

The more we know about something, the more we feel that we’re just scratching the surface. There is a neat analogy that I wrongly attribute to Neil deGrasse Tyson, which says that knowledge is like an expanding sphere, with its surface being the frontier between the known and the unknown. The bigger the sphere becomes, the larger its surface increases.

(Could that explain why ignorant people believe they know everything?)

This ever-increasing surface of the unknown can be overwhelming and make us believe that we know nothing, that we are “impostors” in our field. This syndrome can be extremely demotivating, especially if combined with a comparison with others.

Now that we have a good understanding of what is skewing our expectations, let’s look at how we can maximize progress.

Flow is the word

We’ve all heard about “flow” – this state of extreme focus when productivity goes through the roof. We feel “in the zone”, able to absorb anything we learn, like a dried sponge in a bucket of water.

To get the most bang (progress) for our bucks (efforts), we should aim at reaching a state of flow whenever possible. According to Friederike Fabritius and Hans W. Hagemann in The Leading Brain, there seems to be a recipe for it:

To achieve flow, you need a well-defined goal, an optimal challenge, and clear, immediate feedback. The goal supplies acetylcholine to help maintain your focus, the challenge triggers noradrenaline, and the feedback provides you with a rewarding burst of dopamine.

Optimal challenge

Having well-defined goals is a critical first step. We obviously want to set for ourselves goals that are achievable, otherwise, we won’t feel that we are progressing.

But at the same time, we need these goals to be somewhat challenging. Being slightly outside our comfort zone will release noradrenaline.

Noradrenaline is at an optimal level when you feel slightly overchallenged; it leads to a “this is tricky but I think I can handle it” feeling. It is also released when you push yourself to perform a difficult task better, faster, or with fewer resources.

Of course, optimal levels of challenge seem to vary from person to person.

There is no standard for optimal arousal

Some people can become quickly overwhelmed and anxious. In contrast, others need to have Mission Impossible’s BGM in the back of their head to get anything done (I’m unfortunately more of the latter).

Fabritius and Hagemann mention that there seems to be a correlation between the intensity of arousal needed and levels of testosterone, which can widely vary between genders and with age. People with higher testosterone levels will require more intense arousal; alternatively, they will also be less prone to anxiety and stress (they probably die younger too.)

As we’re all different, we’ll need to find the right amount of challenge for us. It may sound a bit laborious, but trial and error is probably the way to get a sense of that amount.

Now that we’ve covered noradrenaline let’s talk about the “Kim Kardashian” of hormones; dopamine.

My name is Guillaume, and I’m a dopamine addict

Dopamine is probably the most famous hormone or at least the most popular in productivity literature. It is also the most addictive. And there’s a good reason for that. Dopamine rewards us for all the efforts we make that are necessary for our survival, from finding food to learning new skills.

It also helps us focus on what needs to be done.

Dopamine is involved in your ability to update information in memory and also affects your ability to focus on the task at hand.

Every time we learn something or acquire a new skill, a neural pathway gets created, and dopamine is released as a reward. The amount of dopamine released depends on many factors, but one of them is novelty; we are incentivized to acquire new information and skills to increase our adaptability and improve our chances of survival.

Its effects are strongest when the stimulus that generates it is new. This explains in part the enthusiasm you may feel when you start a new project and why the thrill isn’t usually as strong after you’ve been working on it for a while.

Adding some form of novelty into any practice can help strengthen the action/reward feedback loop and keep us motivated and willing to learn more.

This being said, dopamine is a hormone focusing on short-term rewards; long-term goals won’t stimulate it. If our goal is to learn the piano, we need to breakdown that long-term goal into smaller achievable goals, like learning songs or practicing scales and make these goals progressively more challenging. That is our best chance to reach a state of flow.

Routine at the rescue

As a foreign language learner myself, I know how challenging and overwhelming an endeavor it is. I’ve been learning and practicing Japanese for close to 20 years now, and while it’s not something I spend conscious effort on anymore, there was a time when I would practice rigorously every day.

Now, “improving my Japanese” is not a measurable goal and not really achievable in the short-term. But practicing 30 minutes of vocabulary is.

For example, learning 10 new words per day is a good goal. It is easily trackable, slightly challenging; it involves novelty (new words!) and doesn’t require too much time to complete.

The perception that a goal is achievable within a reasonable amount of time is key. It will facilitate the production of dopamine, thus increasing our motivation and focus. It may even allow us to reach a state of flow.

Note: For those interested, I’m planning a future article about how I learned Japanese, or possibly even a series, so keep an eye out for that.

Now, did you get better by just learning 10 new words? Only slightly, yes. But over a month, that amounts to 300 words, and more than 3000 after a year.

Eventually, the number of words you can learn per day will increase. If not the number, the complexity of the words will.

That’s the power of a routine. Small steps add up to long distances over time.

When it comes to routines, I strongly recommend reading Atomic Habits, as mentioned earlier. I also introduce the concept of routine building in my article on note-taking (second shameless plug).

Trust the system

But remember our goal: avoid getting lost in the Valley of Disappointment.

Learning 10 words per day will not make you fluent. At least not in the beginning. Even after a few weeks, you’ll still feel that you’re not making much progress. The words you’ve learned do pop up in conversations from time to time, but you’re still not understanding 90% of what’s being discussed.

But eventually, as time goes, you’ll start understanding more and more, and it will become second nature. You need to trust the system. Don’t let you get discouraged by your unreasonable expectations.

When I was learning new vocabulary very actively, I would tell myself that the words I’m learning today will be mine in six months. I’m investing in my future self, and it will thank me for it.

I wasn’t expecting immediate returns because I knew that, eventually, I would rip these returns. I’m convinced that this mindset is what allowed me to keep learning, especially during plateaus.

The bright side

80% of people who started a Gym membership in January will be gone by May. They all probably had different motivations for starting their membership, but they all have one thing in common: they all gave up.

For the sake of this article, I’d like to think they got lost in the Valley of Disappointment. It’s hard to stick to a routine when our expectations don’t match what we can realistically accomplish.

Although I don’t have any statistics to back my claim, I’m convinced that we give up on 80% of our new endeavors. And that’s really sad.

But the flip side of this coin is much brighter. If you don’t give up, you’ll do better than the 80% who did. Perseverance sets you 80% ahead of the curve.

The great escape

Any time we start a new endeavor, sooner or later, we’ll walk into the Valley of Disappointment, and once we get lost in it, there is no easy way out.

So, here is my escape plan.

1. Decide how important this new endeavor is and how much time per week you are willing to invest in its practice.
2. Reflect on your expectations: Are you comparing yourself to others? How badly do you want to see results quickly? Acknowledge that the higher your expectations, the deeper the Valley will be.
3. Break down your practice into small, slightly challenging, but achievable goals, and create a routine of achieving them consistently; it is your best chance to reach a state of flow.
4. Remind yourself that you need to trust the system. You’re investing in your future, and your future self will thank you for it.
5. Remember that perseverance is the only difference between the quitters and the achievers. Which one are you?

Oh, and don’t forget to have fun in the process! That’s what learning should be. Fun.

What I’ve learned

• Getting good at anything takes time and perseverance.
• It is hard to persevere when we can’t see progress.
• Our expectation of progress is what demotivates us, not the absence of progress.
• We are all different and shouldn’t compare our progress to others.
• We each have our own “zone”, and there is no “one size fits all” recipe for reaching a state of flow. We need to find by trial and error the right amount of challenge that works for us.
• Setting a routine and trusting the system will evolve into perseverance.
• Not quitting sets us ahead of the curve.

I know that life is not a competition, but acquiring new skills can open doors for new possibilities. It can also help giving depth and maybe even meaning to our lives.

Ultimately, we are what we learn.

References

• The Leading Brain, Friederike Fabritius, Hans W. Hagemann
• Atomic Habits, James Clear
• The benefits of frictionless note-taking, yours truly

I have always considered myself a rational and logically grounded person. My views of the world are always unbiased, and my decisions are consistently based on reason. And when I make mistakes, I can comfort myself by reminding myself that my intentions were good.

The truth is, as a business leader, I have made hundreds of irrational decisions in my career, some benign, some not so. Most of the time, these decisions felt logical to me. They didn’t feel as if emotions drove them. I was very confident in my thought process and convinced I had all the elements I needed in hand to make the right call every time.

So how could I make so many irrational decisions while being convinced of their rationality? That is the theme I would like to explore in this piece.

We live in a society that expects us to be rational

To make sure we are talking about the same thing, let’s agree on what “being rational” means. According to the Oxford dictionary, the adjective rational means:

Based on or in accordance with reason or logic

What is reason, you may ask?

the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically

For ancient Greek philosophers, reason was considered a virtue. It was regarded as an ideal to strive for, not as a status quo of our human condition. Philosophers would dedicate their lives to its pursue, knowing that they would likely never quite master it.

But apparently, we came to implicitly agree as a society that we should expect each other to be rational and act logically daily. Letting one’s emotions being the primary driver of behaviors is perceived as acting juvenile. We expect adults to control their emotions and use reason when making decisions.

It’s even more striking in the world of business. Businesses used to be human enterprises, but they have evolved into cold, logical money-making machines. Many companies expect all their employees to have developed Greek philosopher levels of rational thinking. For these companies, there is no place for emotions in the workplace.

I find it quite paradoxical that we expect ordinary people to excel at things that even erudite scholars found hard to do.

Have we discovered the secret sauce to rational thinking in the last two thousand years? I have serious doubts.

But more importantly, why is rational thinking so hard in the first place? We are cognitively advanced sentient beings capable of inventing quantum physics, bitcoin, and curling. How hard could that be in comparison?

Who’s in charge? Emotions, intuition, and System 1

The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works — Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast, and Slow

The world is very complex, and doing a complete analysis of a situation before making any decision would overwhelm our brains and paralyze us. To alleviate this, we have developed over time powerful cognitive shortcuts that allow us to make quick decisions so we can at least feed ourselves and maintain a bare minimum of social interactions without using too much brainpower. We call them emotions.

The part of our brain dealing with emotion is called the Limbic System. It includes the hippocampus, the hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the thalamus (although experts disagree on what actually is in the Limbic System). You probably have heard about the amygdala and its role in processing emotional responses such as the fight or flight response.

We usually associate it with more primal emotions such as fear, anxiety, or aggression, and truth be told, it has kept us at arm’s length from dangerous situations.

But emotions can be much more complex, and so can be their corresponding responses. Unfortunately, our amygdala won’t give us any explanation when it triggers such a response. It’s not supposed to. It doesn’t have the time for that. When there is a Lion in front of you, you run, and you’ll thank your amygdala for the instant adrenaline kick.

Now, not every decision is a life or death situation. How can our emotions influence our decisions when there is no urgency?

Emotional tagging

In the Harvard Business Review’s article “Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions,” the authors mention a concept called emotional tagging.

Emotional tagging is the process by which emotional information attaches itself to the thoughts and experiences stored in our memories.

It is an extremely efficient decision processing mechanism. We recognize a particular pattern of information within our memory, and we tag that pattern with an emotion. Any time we encounter that same pattern, the corresponding tagged emotion gets triggered.

For example, I eat raw shrimp and get sick. An association gets created between raw shrimp and disgust. Next time I see a raw shrimp, I’ll probably feel nauseated.

As powerful as this mechanism is, it is susceptible to distortion. The article describes three common red flags:

• self-interest: we naturally place more emotional importance on information that interests us, making it easier for us to see the patterns we want to see
• emotional attachments: our judgment can be affected by our attachment to people, places, things, etc. And we’ll tend to favor the things to which we are attached
• misleading memories: memories of a particular event tend to change over time, sometimes quite significantly. We are, however, not conscious of such alteration

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory – Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

So emotions are sitting on the driver’s seat, but we are also capable of logical reasoning. How does it all tie together?

System 1 and System 2

In his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Dr. Daniel Kahneman, holder of a Nobel prize for his work on behavioral economics, proposes a compelling model to explain the duality of intuition and logical reasoning.

He suggests that we have two cognitive systems that he calls System 1 and System 2. These systems are not actual parts of our brains. They could be pictured as two independent circuits, working in parallel. System 1 is responsible for intuition and fast decision-making, and System 2 is in charge of more involved cognitive operations that rely on complex logic. For example, adding 2 + 2 or brushing your teeth can be managed by System 1, but multiplying 12 x 17 or reciting the alphabet backward requires System 2.

System 1 is fast, automatic, and effortless. System 2 is slow, intentional, and physically demanding. Scientific studies on subjects required to perform complex tasks involving their System 2 have shown similar observations: pupil dilation, higher blood pressure, and increased heart rate.

So as you can imagine, we will tend to rely on System 1 whenever possible. The vast majority of decisions we are making every day are taken care of by our beloved System 1. We popularly call that being in auto-pilot mode.

What we don’t realize is that because of its automatic nature, our System 1 is making a lot of the calls for us.

System 1 excels at pattern recognition, categorization, and simplification. Left unattended, it will happily convert complex problems into much simpler and more predictable patterns. Once System 1 identifies a specific pattern, it will instantly retrieve a solution from its database and call it a day. The better the match is, the stronger the conviction will be. And when System 1 is convinced it has solved the problem, it will bypass System 2. “No need to spend energy on this, I know what I’m doing!”.

That all sounds very convenient, what could possibly go wrong?

Heuristics and other cognitive illusions

Ultimately, decision-making is about evaluating the likelihood of something good or bad happening. We need mechanisms to assess the probability of uncertain events. Dr. Kahneman’s research highlighted how we tend to rely on a minimal number of heuristics to reduce such assessments’ complexity.
Without listing them all, below are some of my favorite.

Intuitive heuristic
Our System 1 likes to convert complex problems into simpler ones, of which it has a ready solution.

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Availability heuristic
You probably find planes scarier than cars, and you are probably more worried about terrorism than food poisoning. In both occurrences, you would be statistically wrong. We tend to allocate more likelihood to events of which more information is available to us.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory – and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media

Priming effect
Are you hungry? What do you want to eat for dinner? How about SO_P?
If I asked you to complete the word SO_P, you would most likely put a U in the empty slot. But if I had asked you instead when is the last time you had a shower, and what do you use to wash your body, you would probably have put an A. The fascinating phenomenon is called priming and takes place in many different forms and situations.

Anchoring effect
It occurs when we consider a value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity; our estimations of that quantity will be influenced (anchored) by that first value. That’s the reason why you always want to give your number first in a negotiation!

Hindsight and why we believe we are logical

Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight

We were not designed with a change log system. Every time we change our views about a particular topic or belief, we lose our ability to recall our views before changing our minds.

Because we can’t faithfully reconstruct our past beliefs, we underestimate how surprised or uncomfortable we may have been by past events. It creates a sentiment of inevitability; we knew it all along.

This phenomenon is called hindsight bias and explains why many things seem to make sense to us. It may also explain why we are convinced that some of our decisions were completely logical, even if they were purely emotionally driven.

Nah, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t fall for this.

You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond to nothing in your subjective experience. But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on

Alright, fine.

What can we do about it? Waking up our System 2

As we’ve seen, when it comes to rational thinking, we are not really set for success. Is there anything we can do to improve our odds?

Delaying decisions

When it comes to decision-making and how to reduce the influence of emotions, biases, heuristics, and other mischiefs of System 1, Kahneman offers a simple but powerful recommendation. Delay decisions. It sounds overly simplistic, but postponing when we make a decision is the most reliable way to make sure emotions didn’t dictate it.

Not expecting “simple” solutions

Looking for simple solutions and shortcuts is the playground of our System 1, and it will be happy to oblige on any occasion. If you find a very simple (and often elegant) solution to a problem, take a moment to play the devil’s advocate and try to find situations where your solution wouldn’t work. You would be surprised to see how hard it is to argue with your System 1 once it has made its mind!

Harder problems

A corollary to not expecting simple solutions is to make problems harder (or at least “look” harder) to engage our System 2 forcefully. A study showed that making the font harder to read on a problem significantly increased the chances of not falling into its trap; problems such as “if five machines can make five items in 5 minutes, how many items can 100 machines make in 100 minutes?”.

Self-reflection

Reflecting on our actions and how we feel about them is a challenging but powerful way of increasing our self-awareness. More specifically, we want to reflect on:

1. Realizing that we may have made decisions unconsciously
2. How we feel before and after a decision
3. How could our feelings have influenced the said decision? Yes, the process is as laborious as it sounds.

Soliciting feedback

It is much easier to spot inconsistencies in others’ judgment than in our own. The best way to get a full picture of a situation, including our blindspots, is to ask for feedback.

… two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness — Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast, and Slow

Creating an environment of safety

Our amygdala can’t make the difference between physical and psychological aggression. The more stressful our environment is, the more likely our emotions will take full control of our decision-making.

There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear — Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Promoting safety in our working environments can reduce perceived aggression and keep our amygdala at bay. Such settings are therefore more conducive to rational thinking.

But is it really what we want?

As we’ve seen, rational thinking is not an innate skill and requires both an acute awareness of how our emotions influence our decisions and a will to do something about it.

I agree that developing a capability to read our emotions and feelings is beneficial and can help us understand who we are and what is important to us. But I also think that there are times when letting our emotions decide for us may be preferable.

Creativity is one thing that comes to mind. Many creative decisions are inspired by intuition and driven by emotions. There is nothing rational about going somewhere you’ve never been before. Sure, expanding our horizons can be rationally explained as a survival mechanism, but why choose a specific direction over another?

Another one is empathy. We are social animals and need to feel that we belong to a group. We have developed a complex intuition framework that allows us to gauge in real-time how well integrated we are to our group. These intuitions prime on many of our daily behaviors and judgments. For example, we can’t really explain it, but we definitely “feel” it when someone is socially awkward.

Lastly, decisions purely driven by rational thinking are usually not the most humane. No need to look further to see why many companies alienate their people. Ironically, these businesses also expect their employees to be creative and innovative without letting them being human. Unfortunately, that’s not how we work. We are only human.

What I’ve learned

• Emotions have served us well for hundreds of thousands of years, but they haven’t had the time to adapt to the complexity of our social interactions and norms. The cognitive shortcuts that we call emotions, biases, and heuristics are now working against our sociological interests
• I’m severely biased, and simply being aware of my biases is not enough to protect myself from them
• Our brains haven’t developed any incentive mechanism for rational thinking. Being rigorously rational is a tiresome endeavor, and we’re not even hormonally rewarded for it
• Stressful environments are not conducive to rational thinking, let alone rational decision-making. We need to feel safe if we want to think straight
• Emotions make us human. Maybe our societies should be more emotional and less rational
• TL;DR: It’s not rational to expect others to be rational

References

• “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374275637/
• “Why good leaders make bad decisions”, HBR Review: https://hbr.org/2009/02/why-good-leaders-make-bad-decisions
• “Enlightenment Now”, Stephen Pinker: https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0143111388/
• “The Leading Brain”, Friederike Fabritius: https://www.amazon.com/Leading-Brain-Neuroscience-Smarter-Happier/dp/0143129368/
• “Heuristics and Cognitive Biases”: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-heuristic-2795235

Procrastination is the thief of time — Edward Young

I’m a curious and optimistic person, and I’m always on the lookup for new tools that would magically solve my clinical tendency for procrastination, which I prefer calling “unassumed perfectionism.”

A few months ago, I was randomly watching videos recommended by Youtube’s algorithm (as any creative mind does I assume), and I stumbled upon a video entitled “How I Organize My Life with Roam” from a Youtuber named Ali Abdaal. Ali has many videos on productivity on his channel, and Roam is what he calls a “glorified” note-taking app.

I strongly recommend watching the video, as I won’t do it any justice by summarizing it here, but suffice to say, I was immediately sold on the idea of tracking every element of my life in one tool and drawn to the simplicity of the user interface. I signed up for the one month trial and started using it right away.

I have been using Roam every day since, and while it hasn’t solved my unassumed perfectionism yet (bummer), it has had a profound impact on my creative process and how I record my thoughts and ideas, and how I consume them. My goal with this piece is not to offer a review of Roam — there are plenty out there — nor to try to convince you to use it. I want to share my self-reflection on why it had such a profound impact on me.

What are the benefits of taking notes?

Quick disclaimer: I have no expertise on the subjects I’m talking about, so please view this as my non-expert, non-authoritative opinion on the matter, although I do hope you’ll be able to relate to my thoughts and reflections.

Before I get into Roam's nuts and bolts and how it impacted me, I thought it might be useful to reflect on the benefits of taking notes in the first place.

Aside from keeping us awake at school or during boring weekly meetings, I believe that taking notes, either physically or digitally, can help us with the following:

Visualizing thoughts and ideas: Putting on paper (figuratively speaking) can literally help us visualize an idea with words or shapes, rather than a fuzzy, sometimes incoherent concept in our head.

Enhancing our thinking process: Although we may feel otherwise, our brains are not good at conceptualizing complex ideas. Writing down our thoughts allows us not to juggle in our head with several concepts at once and focus on what our brains do exceedingly well: finding patterns and connections between the words we wrote down.

Memorizing: Taking notes, in particular on paper, helps with memorization, and we all have sweet memories of wrist pain as a result of frantically writing over and over the same stuff on a piece of paper before an exam until it makes its way to our mid-term memory (or it doesn’t and we succumb to the pain)

Putting words to feelings and emotions: Our brains are incredibly efficient and ridiculously flawed at the same time. Somehow, the part of our brain that controls our emotions, the Limbic system, hasn’t been equipped with language capabilities. While emotions dictate the vast majority of our decisions and actions in life, we, however, can’t explain them with words (I’ve just given you the perfect excuse for when your significant other complains that you never say how you feel. You’re welcome). Self-reflection, journal writing, and other similar practices attempt to put words to these emotions by writing them down.

Unloading our brain: A personal favorite of mine. We have busy lives with many decisions and things to think about, some more important than others. This constant activity overloads our brain, which will thank us with a generous dose of anxiety and stress. Writing down ideas, thoughts, things we don’t want to forget, things we are concerned about, etc., can allow us to unload the poor fellow, facilitate focus, and ultimately lower anxiety and stress levels.

Making us smarter: Assuming we review our notes, the obvious upside of taking notes is that it allows us to build our personal knowledge base over time, helping us making (hopefully) more informed decisions.

I would love to discuss note-taking techniques, but I think it is outside of this piece’s scope, and I’m sure it would be a fascinating topic for a future article.

Why do we end up not taking notes? It’s not entirely our fault

With all the benefits mentioned above, how come many of us don’t take notes, or only sporadically? In my view, there are two main reasons.

We never learned how to take notes efficiently

Do you remember learning at school how to take notes? The only thing I remember was writing the fastest I could to catch as many words as possible from what the teacher was saying.

Do you remember learning at work how to take notes during a meeting? I just remember being told by my boss always to bring a notepad and a pen to a meeting so I could take notes, because … you never know!

Reflecting on how beneficial note-taking is, I’m actually baffled that note-taking techniques are not taught as part of compulsory education while calculus is (and don’t get me wrong, I was a math major, and I loved calculus).

We fail at building a habit of consistently taking notes

Assuming we understand the benefits of taking notes, what is stopping us from making it a habit?

James Clear, in his book “Atomic Habits,” explains that any habit, good or bad, is a feedback loop composed of four elements: cue, craving, response, and reward. “cue” is the trigger, “craving” is the appeal, “response” is the actual action we perform in response to the craving, and “reward” the end goal of the habit, what we craved for. Grossly simplifying, a habit is simply a pattern registered in our brain that recognizes a cue, associates it with a craving, and triggers a response to get a reward. For example:

• cue: I see a notification on Whatsapp
• craving: I want to know who contacted me and what for
• response: I open the app and read the message
• reward: my curiosity is satisfied, and I feel more connected (both dopamine and oxytocin are released)

My brain associates “notification on Whatsapp” with “feeling good.” If this pattern is recognized repeatedly, a powerful habit will be created (most likely unwillingly in this case).

Following the previous example, a note-taking habit could look like this:

• cue: I have an idea or thought
• craving: I want to write it down not to lose it because it might be useful in the future. It will reduce my anxiety too
• response: I write down the idea or thought
• reward: I feel good about it. I feel relieved of the burden of that thought and happy that I invested in my future

What if we actually wanted to create that habit? James proposes a framework to maximize our chances of success that he calls “the four laws of behavior change”: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.

We can see how the notification example fits the bill:

• Notifications are designed to be as obvious as possible.
• Satisfying our curiosity and feeling connected is very attractive.
• Opening the app and reading the message could hardly be made easier.
• The reward is, indeed, quite satisfying.

With such a level of fulfillment of the four laws of behavior change, no wonder we end up addicted to messaging apps.

Conversely, missing one or more of these laws would logically make it harder to form a new habit, even if we wanted it badly.

Let’s apply this logic to our note-taking habit example. The cue is relatively obvious, and the craving’s intensity will depend on how attractive the reward is, so our main concerns should be the response and the reward. And case in point, that is where we fall short.

First, the reward. I see two types of reward: a short-term reward, the relief of writing down the thought to free up our mind, and a long-term reward that corresponds to our investment’s future dividends.

While we can expect the short-term reward, the long-term reward won’t be felt immediately, as it will take time before we see the actual dividends of our past investments. Until we get to that point, we need to accept that our craving will be half as intense as we would like it to, at least for a little while.

And that brings us to the most crucial part in my view, the response. “Make it easy,” James says. Here, we are talking about ease to act, or in other words, low friction. If friction is too great, it will counteract the momentum of our already not so intense craving, and the reward won’t be enough for us to complete the action, failing to reinforce the feedback loop in the process.

Reducing friction is the key to our salvation

Friction kills ideas

As human beings, we all share something in common. We hate making decisions. It’s a stressful and tiresome process involving cognitive and emotional activity, and very often, we would rather put up with an uncomfortable situation than deciding to change it. I like to think that we wake up with a daily decision budget and that every decision we make consumes our budget until it gets depleted, and we lose the will power necessary to make any more decisions.

There is a famous principle in product design called “Don’t make me think.” It is a cornerstone of usability, and it means that products should be intuitive, that I shouldn’t need to have to think about how to use a product before using it. I personally think it should be renamed to “Don’t make me decide”; let me use this product without asking me to make any decisions before.

When responding to a craving, every decision needed until the action's completion will be additional friction. It is like having your notepad upstairs, and every decision is an extra set of stairs to climb.

What sort of decision am I talking about?

For analog note-taking, it could be:

• Which notepad to use?
• Should this be on a new page? How should I name the page?
• I had a similar idea a few days ago. Should I put this one next to it with a date? Where did I put that idea last time again? I can’t find the page …
• Is this idea really worth all the trouble?

For digital note-taking (which is more my thing), it may look like:

• Where should I put the note? Should I create a new document on Google Docs? How to name it?
• Is it the right folder for this document? I probably should structure the document properly for future similar ideas.
• It’s just a thought, maybe Evernote will be better. How should I name the note? Am I ever going to look for this note again in the future?
• Meh, it’s not a big deal anyway. I’ll write it down if it comes back to me again. Then, it will be meaningful.

Does it sound familiar? That’s pretty much the decision process I was going through every time I wanted to take notes, and I’m pretty sure that thousands of ideas never survived that process – thousands of small ideas and thoughts that could have evolved into bigger ideas, now gone forever. Friction kills ideas, a little bit like the Earth’s atmosphere disintegrates small celestial bodies trying to make their way into the stratosphere. Alright, maybe not the best analogy.

What’s unique about Roam?

First, Roam allows you to take notes without asking you any questions. It automatically creates a page every day with today’s date as the title. Of course, you can create as many pages as you want, but you don’t have to if you only want to write stuff down quickly.

Second, it may sound counter-intuitive, but Roam removes friction by removing editing options. The whole page is a bullet-list that supports indentation. You can write something, indent with the tab key, and write more stuff related to that first idea. Stylistically speaking, you can set a block as a heading, use bold, italic, underscore, and highlight. And that’s pretty much it – no decisions to make about the look of the page.

You can create pages afterward by simply selecting text and encapsulating it with two pairs of brackets like [[ cool new idea ]]. It will transform the selection into a hyperlink. Clicking the link will open the newly created page.

This one may sound a little nerdy, but Roam offers bi-directional linking. Remember the link created above? If you click on that link, you’ll see a reference to where you created the link at the bottom of the page. Roam will keep track of all the pages that reference the link. It also works the same with tags.

Any bullet point is considered a unique block, and it can be referenced from anywhere within Roam. That means you can connect ideas on a block level, and when looking at link references, it will show you from which block it was referenced, not only the page.

Alright, it’s starting to look like an app review, so I’ll stop right there!

How it changed me?

By reducing friction to near zero (I always have Roam opened somewhere on all my devices), I have increased by tenfold the number of notes I’m taking daily. The only friction left is the effort required to type the idea on my keyboard, which is pretty low because I type all day.

I don’t have to worry about the “worthiness” or quality of my thoughts because I know that selection will occur naturally, as the most important ideas will be referenced more often.

Being able to look back at the paper-trail of my life logs has been incredibly helpful for self-reflection. I’m also less anxious about forgetting things that are meaningful to me.

And last but not least, I’m discovering new connections between ideas that I didn’t know existed. Adding more content is always exciting because I feel the potential for more emergence of ideas and connections. This is my long-term reward.

What I’ve learned

• Our ideas are born frail and fragile, and we never really learn how to nurture them.
• It starts with writing them down, which is a skill, and as with any skill, we get better with practice.
• Being aware of the friction created by our environment and making a conscious effort to reduce it will increase our chances of successfully building a habit of note-taking, and it will pay off in the long run.

References

• Roam Research: https://roamresearch.com
• “How I organize my life with Roam,” Ali Abdaal: https://youtu.be/bpikCLhpIRY
• Atomic Habit, James Clear: https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits