Self-examination and anxiety: Twitter post by Naval

I like the post below by Naval in Twitter. Naval has 826,000 Twitter followers including a number of people I follow such as Scott Adams, Mike Cernovich, Mark Manson, Sam Harris, and Jonathan Haidt.

Just like a low resting heart rate is the byproduct of intense exercise, low anxiety is the byproduct of intense self-examination.

The only thing I'd add is that it needs to be productive self-examination. By that I mean you're looking for ways to improve. I think some people believe they're examining themselves when they're indulging in self-doubt or self-recrimination. 

Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard - Review

The Heath brothers did it again. Earlier I reviewed their book Made To Stick dealing with how to create memorable messages. It stuck with me, becoming one of my favorites because the Heaths have the ability to condense their massive research into easy-to-remember principles. In Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard they’ve aimed their same approach at change. Specifically, how do we change things in our lives? Almost all of us have tried to change something in our lives. Losing weight. Getting into better shape. Not procrastinating. But many of us even if we change we often slip back into our former habits. Why? Is there a way we can follow to increase the stickiness of change? The Heath brothers say there is.

The Heaths observe: “All change efforts have something in common: For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently. … successful changes share a common pattern.”

Before getting into the details of this common pattern Chip and Dan first tackle the nature of the key element of change: our brains. They rely on the work of Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis (reviewed here). Haidt’s research lead him to conclude that the emotional side of our brain is like an Elephant while our rational side is similar to a Rider who tries to rein in the elephant and seems to be the leader. However the Rider’s ability to control the elephant is tenuous because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. The roots of our emotional mechanism are deep in our ancestry while the rational part of our brain evolved only recently in terms of our total history.

The Heaths go on to say the Elephant often wants a quick payoff with minimal effort while the Rider plans for the future. “When change efforts fail, it’s usually the Elephant’s fault, since the kinds of change we want typically involve short-term sacrifices for long-term payoffs.” This ties into their advice later in the book.

The Heaths’ reach three conclusions about trying to switch using sheer will power and self-control.

1. “Self-control is an exhaustible resource.” Meaning, our Elephant can wear out our limited supply of self-control.
2. “What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.” When we give up we might write it off as being just lazy when we’re really wearing ourselves out.
3. “What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.” If we don’t have a clearly defined and visualized end point we won’t know our ultimate goal.

These conclusions lead to their framework for change.

1. “Direct the Rider. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction.”
2. “Motivate the Elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. … So it’s critical that you engage people’s emotional side – get their Elephants on the path and cooperative.”
3. “Shape the Path. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. … When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what’s happening with the Rider and Elephant.”

For each of these parts of the framework Switch lays out advice on how to accomplish them. For instance, in directing the rider we can find the bright spots to help our motivation, script the critical moves to clearly define key steps and point to the destination. To motivate the elephant we find the feeling associated with our goals, find ways to shrink the change to make them less daunting and, for managers and leaders, help your people grow. (This ties into having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset.) To shape the path we can tweak our environment, build habits and rally the herd.

Once we follow the path laid out by the Heaths they tell us how the “keep the switch going.” They point out that we use a positive approach instead of punishment, citing the results of animal trainers who “set a behavioral destination and then use ‘approximations,’ meaning that they reward each tiny step toward the destination. … We need to be looking for bright spots – however tiny! – and rewarding them.”

Ultimately Switch shows that there is a lot more to changing than sheer will power and repeating positive affirmations. Change requires a variety of tools and techniques that help the Rider chart a course and keep the Elephant reasonably in line.

Bottom line: I highly recommend Switch. Following it advice will help make change easier when change is hard.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallager - Review

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life has a fairly simple premise that is revealed in the book’s subtitle: the quality of your life depends on what you pay attention to. Sounds pretty obvious, doesn't it? But there is more than meets the eye.

Gallager claims that: “Skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships.”

And,

If you could just stay focused on the right things, your life would stop feeling like a reaction to stuff that happens to you and become something that you create: not a series of accidents, but a work of art.

A hidden lies behind this approach. While you cannot control whether you’ll always be happy, due to circumstance beyond your control, you can choose to be focused, which Gallager says, “is the next best thing.”

Paying attention doesn’t mean just focusing on the external world but also to your internal world, in particular to positive emotions which “literally expands your world, while focusing on negative feelings shrinks it.”

Paying attention also doesn’t consist just of sitting “rapt” on nothing particular. Gallager incorporates the concept “flow”, originally identified by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, in which the challenge we tackle stretches us a bit. If the task is too easy we drift into boredom; too challenging and we start to feel anxiety. Csikszenmihalyi’s research into rock climbers, artists, etc. found that people found flow when they became absorbed in their work, losing sense of time and even of self.

To live a life filled with raptness Gallager recommends: “The antidote to leisure-time ennui is to pay as much attention to scheduling a productive evening or weekend as you do to your workday.”

Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life.

Recently I reviewed the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. I believe there is a natural connection between the two approaches. We can strive to be rapt as much as we want but I think our efforts will be thwarted if we have what Dweck calls a “fixed” mindset, the belief that we are saddled with innate talents with little room for development. I think this mindset will make it more difficult to slide into raptness because we’ll be too concerned about avoiding challenges, one of Dweck’s findings about the consequence of having a fixed mindset. People with a fixed mindset fear taking on challenges because should they fail it would reveal that maybe their innate talent isn’t as deep or as strong as they believe. And, having a fixed mindset means they can’t do anything about it!

A person with a growth mindset, on the other hand, believes they can improve and therefore will look for challenges that lead to raptness.

(Just this week I also picked up another book in the same vein: Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life by Todd Kashdan. It will be interesting to see how his ideas mesh with Gallager’s and Dweck’s. Stay tuned!)

Overall, I highly recommend Rapt. It deserves your focused attention.

The Pursuit of Unhappiness

A lot of my reading centers on well-being and living a good life. In this vein I just started reading The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being, by Daniel W. Haybron. He makes a distinction between the approach the ancient Greeks took toward happiness and well-being versus that of the Enlightenment that I have not encountered before. I feel it is worth highlighting this difference before finishing the book. I plan to write a review after reading it. Below are several key quotes from early in the book. (Note these quotes are not contiguous.)

The ancients apparently took it as a given that individuals are not, in general, authorities about their own welfare. Quite opposite: most ancient philosophers followed Socrates’ lead in distinguishing ‘the many’ and ‘the wise,’ with the former and much larger class being, basically dolts. Aristotle notoriously maintained that some of us are so ill-fitted for self-governance that we are better off enslaved, with masters to look after us.

The spirit of modernity is rather different. Inspired by Enlightenment optimism about the individual’s powers of reason and self-government, modern liberals tend to believe in one or another form of the sovereignty or authority of the individual in matters of personal welfare: by and large, people know what’s best for them, and tend to act rationally in the promotion of their interests.

But what if it turns out that people don’t have this kind of authority? What if they frequently and predictably make serious mistakes about what matters in life, act irrationally, or otherwise err in ways that undercut their prospects for well-being? What if, as a result, they tend to botch their lives at an alarmingly high rate, in many cases being unwitting pursuers of unhappiness?

The central thesis of this book is that people probably do not enjoy a high degree of authority or competence in matters of personal welfare.

I’m sure the rest of The Pursuit of Unhappiness will flesh out the empirical case for Haybron’s thesis. I’ve read other books that report results of various studies which reveal the inability of the average person to recognize the effects of genetics, temperament, and subjectivity on decision-making. To me these findings don’t prove it is impossible to be objective, just that it’s work. Sometimes it’s hard work!

In any case, I’ll write more on this interesting book when I’ve finished it. Wanted to throw out these quotes as thought provokers.