A meta post how to be better at being better
Shane Parrish on how to become better versions of ourselves
Hey,
Before we get to the post, a quick word. This is like a meta post for me personally as Shane is someone I follow quite keenly. He is the founder of the website ‘Farnam Street’ which states its mission as “Helping you master the best of what other people have already figured out.” Farnam Street covers topics such as making better decisions, mental models, better ways to learn, etc. and to no small extent, Seeking North is inspired by Farnam Street.
I hope you enjoy reading this post as much as I enjoyed typing it.
On to the post.
Cheers
Rohit
Why this post
This post is based on a podcast that Shane Parrish recorded in 2016 on the Science of Success podcast. The podcast is almost an hour long and while Shane covers a variety of topics on the podcast, all the knowledge can be approximated into 6-7 categories.
The reason I chose this podcast (over many other podcasts or written interviews of Shane Parrish) is that it has just the right amount of depth to get you interested in the science of getting better and it also has pragmatic advice on how to implement the meta-level advice.
The themes we will be covering are:
How do you learn and what to learn
Multidisciplinary world
Opportunity cost of time
Making better decisions using mental models
Productivity
Feedback loops
Decision Journals
Self-reflection
How do you learn and what to learn
We have to first acknowledge that we are not smart enough to figure out everything ourselves, so the question is how do we learn?
Of course, we learn a lot through reading. Reading gives us a cumulative advantage - knowledge that we can accumulate and apply that to problems
Instead of picking up every book on every new popular topic that pops up, there is merit in learning things that either change slowly over time or don't change at all
The things that don’t change or change slowly, imply that these concepts have been time-tested and stronger in their foundation than many other theories which burst on to the scene, only to be debunked later
But before you do that, you just need to be aware of when you're reading for entertainment and when you're reading for knowledge
When you are reading the news or 6 ways to get your team to be more productive, it doesn't end up being knowledge, so you end up spending your time, whether you believe it or not, you spend your time entertaining yourself
Do note that it is perfectly fine to read for entertainment. The critical point here is to know the difference between reading for accumulating knowledge and reading for entertainment. This will let you approach these two differently and lead to better learning outcomes
Another important aspect is to read things that do not align with your point of view. It enables to you have a larger understanding of the context/problems and makes your own opinion on the topic much more robust
The father of evolution theory, Charles Darwin, paid more attention to someone who disagreed with him than to someone who fully agreed with him
Multidisciplinary world
The world we live in is much more multidisciplinary that we understand.
Disciplines such as psychology, physics, anthropology, etc. have been around for a long time
It is important to synthesize the key big ideas from these disciplines when making sense of the world
This allows you to look at any problem from a three-dimensional point of view
Opportunity cost of time
If you are a worker, you trade time for money. If you are rich, you can also trade money for your time. In any scenario, there will always be an opportunity cost to your time
If you're reading something, you're not reading something else. And if somebody else is doing something that makes them better, more valuable, or more knowledgeable, eventually, over time, you're going to lose the edge
It is important to know what's valuable to you and knowing how it helps you achieve the goals to effectively utilize the opportunity cost of your time
For instance, if you are watching Netflix right now and someone else is utilizing this time to become better at mental models, it will not impact you in the short term. But over a period of time, they will become better than you at solving more complex problems
Making better decisions using mental models
When we encounter new information, you start mapping it to what you already know. So we try to fit the new information about the world in our existing mental models
Understanding the mental models helps in reducing our blind spots, which leads to a more complete knowledge of the situation, and that knowledge enables us to make better decisions
There are two types of mental models. One type is the psychological mental models, for instance, the heuristics and biases
The other type is like time simulations. These mental models help us understand how things play out over time and enable us to fast forward through time to see the most probable outcome when we're making a decision
The goal is to build a toolbox of potential models that you have kind of deeply internalized in a way that it's almost intuitive. For instance:
Circle of Competence is a very popular mental model
We have to make decisions outside of our circle of competence almost all the time. If you can recognize that you're outside of your circle of competence, you approach the decision in a different way
This ability to recognize where we are with reference to our circle of difference can become intuitive with the right set of training and tools
To start acquiring these different mental models, you can follow these steps:
Become more open-minded,
Read things that disagree with you
Admit to yourself you're wrong
Change the way you consume media. Instead of consuming media for opinion, consume media for facts and then use facts to create your own opinion
Productivity
Unlike rocket scientists or neurosurgeons, we are solving general business problems in our daily lives. And hence the real problem is to find out a way to solve these problems better and how to become better at your job than anything else
One of the least discussed ways to enhance productivity is to find out ways to make better decisions. Currently, we're spending so much time just fixing mistakes and all this time is a wasted opportunity. Due to this, there is pressure on us for the rest of the day to become more productive
Most people don't take the time to make good decisions. They are always in a hurry. To make better decisions you need to schedule a time to think about the decision
For instance, are you making decisions at the start of the day or at the end of the day?
Research shows that our mind is much more capable of attacking new problems at the beginning of the day than at the end of the day
However, we will still procrastinate on problems during our day till the day comes to an end and we can no longer delay the decision, and then with a weary mind, we make a sub-optimal decision. Hence just shifting decision making to the beginning of the day can make us more productive
Another way to make better decisions is to invert the problem when you can’t think of a possible solution.
This means that you need to think of all the outcomes which you want to avoid, which will help you in narrowing down to the outcomes which you want
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Back to the post now.
Decision Journals
Most people make decisions on a daily basis but they don't get better at making those decisions
We keep making the same mistake over and over again because we have not put in place a process to index our decisions and then learn from our mistakes. We don’t want to do it as we don’t want to be humiliated by our own actions.
Decision journals help you by putting in a process to calibrating yourself
How do you create a decision journal
You want to talk about the situation or context of the decision, the problem that you're facing, or what about it is different.
Why is it a problem? What are the variables that you think govern the situation
What are the factors that you're considering today as you're making the decisions? You want to talk about the alternatives that were considered and why you didn't choose them
You should write down the range of outcomes that you see possible in the situation and assign a probability to these outcomes so that later you can reflect on how closely you understand yourself
You should also highlight which is the most probable event in your view and if there is an intervening factor which can lead to a different outcome
It is important to note that while doing this, it is important to mention the reasoning behind the probability and why you think a specific event is most probable But you really want to talk about the reasoning behind it
You also want to keep track of things like the time of day you're making the decision, and the mood you're in when you're making the decision
You should review your decisions once every six months to check how did your decisions played out and then course-correct based on what you see
The real value of a decision journal to a corporation is when a CEO or somebody high up in the organization enables organizational learning through individual decision journals open for the community so that you are not only learning from yourself but from the accumulated wisdom of your peers
Feedback loops
Feedback loops are one of the most under-appreciated mechanisms for self-improvement
If you implement your feedback loops properly, the feedback compounds over time giving you an extra edge over everyone else
Feedback loops enable you to switch from the unconscious (autopilot mode) to conscious (deliberate mode). It is important o identify decisions which are leading you astray from the reality and then course-correct to be better aligned with reality
Feedback loop provides a check and balance system which ensures you remain on the right path. For instance, there are many occasions in decision making, when the decision you made turned out to be right but because of completely different reasons than you thought
Having a feedback loop in such situations enables you to know when you were right for the wrong reasons and factor it into your decision making next time
We cannot get better at anything without feedback
There is no compounding of skills without feedback
Self-reflection
Self-reflection is just about taking stock of your day. For instance:
Are you reading newspapers in the morning and matching your best time of the day to a task that may be a low value add for you?
What is the most productive use of my time at 7:00 a.m. in the morning
We usually get into this autopilot and that's how we live our lives, and then we wake up at the end and we recognize that maybe that wasn't the best approach
Being conscious about those decisions and inserting a moment in the day on a regular basis where you just do five minutes of self-reflection
I hope you found the pointers above interesting. You can listen to the full podcast here.
Cheers
Rohit
What is Seeking North 📈
Seeking North helps you to be the most interesting person in the room.
Throughout the week, I share the most interesting and insightful articles/videos/podcasts in 5 knowledge spaces:
Behavioral sciences
Mental models
Productivity
Better learning models
Brands
I share one link every weekday. In a world full of digital noise and garbled content, this is a place for focus (one link per day) and curation (personally hand-picked).
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