Digital Gems

FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us work smarter. Tommy Barav is the founder of Magical, a new way to manage your time using AI. It allows you to schedule meetings and take meeting notes directly from your browser tabs, and it’s fully integrated with Zoom, Notion, and Google, so you don’t have to worry about how to make the most of your time anymore. In this interview, we talked about their ambition to build a Time Operating System, how scheduling is just the tip of the time management iceberg, how to cut down on time-consuming context switching, how time connects to impact, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Tommy, thanks for agreeing to this interview. What’s wrong with the way we currently manage our time and schedule conversations? Excited to chat with you today! While most people could benefit from learning about better time management techniques, the great problem is that we’re all dealing with outdated productivity tools. These legacy tools were designed for a workforce and work culture that doesn’t exist any more. As such, we’re all using products that aren’t actually built for our regular daily workflows… and therefore, most of us aren’t nearly as productive as we should be. It’s the modern day equivalent of companies designing better horse carriages instead of trying to build automobiles. You’re on a mission to build the world’s first time operating system – what does that mean?  Our ambition is to build a Time Operating System for the modern worker. We want to revolutionize how we think about time. It’s our most valuable asset resource, and one that we all wish we knew how to spend more efficiently. We’re building a Time Operating System that keeps you focused and productive by being ubiquitous. Your time is everywhere, and your tools for time, such as your calendar, notes, and scheduling, should be everywhere as well. We’ll do this in two ways. First, like most companies, we’re going to deploy the latest AI to automate as many time tasks as possible. We think of AI as a digital intern; it should handle all of the remedial tasks so you can devote your energy and time to items that deliver the biggest impact. The second is to create an all-encompassing workspace where you can access your time whenever and wherever you need. Just imagine if you had Google Calendar, Notion, and Salesforce intertwined. That would be an incredible workflow! That’s what we’ll deliver in the long-term. Right now, we’ve begun this process by creating various “Time Templates” that let you design workflows to optimize your time tasks. Such an exciting plan! Right now, how does Magical work?  Magical empowers users to manage their meetings, scheduling, agendas, and notes directly from browser tabs. Users connect to Magical with their work Google account, and can access Magical with either our Chrome Extension, or our web app that works on all browsers. With Magical, you just open a new tab and can schedule meetings, join meetings, review your daily calendar, as well as take meeting notes. We have great integrations with Zoom and Google Meet so you can join those sessions straight from Magical. We also have a wonderful integration with Notion that lets you take meeting notes in Magical and sync them directly into your Notion account. Let’s say I would like to schedule a meeting with Magical. What would that look like?  Our scheduling functionality allows you to share your availability with a single link. You can share your general availability or share preferred meeting times. We have a unique feature called Dynamic availability that lets your invitees overlay their calendar and pick alternative meeting times if they’re not available during the preferred times you suggested. You can also create and edit your personalized scheduling templates. They provide the functionality I just listed, as well as various time protections to prevent people from scheduling last minute meetings, or meetings too far in advance. Finally, we have an AI scheduling feature called “AI Time Suggest” which will identify ideal meeting times based on your preferences and availability.  That does sound magical! Scheduling is not the only tedious aspect of meetings. How else can Magical help?  Scheduling is just the tip of the iceberg! We have amazing workflows around agendas and meetings notes. First, our AI Agenda feature lets you generate detailed and bullet-pointed agendas for all of your sessions. Just enter in your meeting topic and/or goals and it will automatically create agendas. Second, our AI Notetaker is an awesome tool for meeting notes. It’s easy to get distracted jotting down notes during meetings. AI Notetaker transcribes your session and then emails you a detailed summary immediately after your meeting ends. We also have two great calendar features called Day Peek and Time Peek. Day Peek lives inside Magical on the right of your screen. Using key commands, you can toggle on/off a daily view of your calendar, which is great for staying on top of your day. Time Peek works very similarly, except it shows up as a small tab on the side of your screen when you’re browsing on the web. Again, it’s an amazing way to have your time with you everywhere.  Still, the average knowledge worker uses countless apps and has many tabs open at any given time, which can make scheduling a bit of a nightmare. The great thing about Magical is that it lives with you in browser tabs. We’ve done an immense amount of research into how people spend their time at work and found that an extraordinary number of people will spend over half of their workday in their browser.  By having your time with you in the browser you’re able to cut down immensely on the context-switching that happens when you’re constantly switching between different apps and programs. With Magical, there is literally no need to switch because everything related to your time (scheduling, meetings, and notes) is with you in a single place.  Many could benefit from less context switching and more streamlined time management. What kind of people use Magical?  We have a diverse user base with people from a host industries and roles. I’d say the core of our users are tech savvy professionals who are time-hackers or productivity enthusiasts. They are people who demand tools and solutions that optimize their time. Perhaps I’m biased, but I like to think of them as the high-performers at their companies. They are people who want to create a large impact as efficiently as possible. They value their time more than most and want to optimize as much of their lives as possible. What about you, how do you use Magical?  As for me, I use Magical to manage my packed schedule. As the Founder and CEO of a young startup I have a million tasks to do every single day. I rely on Magical to keep me organized and focused. Right now my two favorite features are Time Peek and AI Notetaker. Time Peek is amazing as it lets me take my time everywhere. No matter what I’m doing, Time Peek lets me quickly see my upcoming meetings and sessions, and also jump directly into Zoom sessions as well. And AI Notetaker is just amazing. I’m a big advocate of meetings and religiously take them in every session I’m in. That can become problematic if someone is speaking and I’m constantly having to type while trying to process everything they’re saying. With AI Notetaker I literally don’t type in meetings anymore. I can devote my full focus towards the session because I know I’ll get a full summary sent to me right after it ends. The other great thing about Magical is that all of the key workflows and features can be accessed just by using key commands. This is a godsend for someone like me as I hate having to constantly switch between the keyboard and mouse.  So many great use cases. How do you recommend someone get started?  We recommend scheduling a meeting with Magical first to get a feel for the product. Thankfully, this is a breeze. Just connect your Google account to Magical and then click “Share Times”. From there, you can quickly schedule your first meeting. Our AI Agenda will create an automatic agenda based on your meeting’s topic, and you can then invite with preferred meeting times, or let our AI Time Suggest do it for you. Next, just copy your link and send it to your invitee. Not only is it a fast scheduling experience, it’s a better scheduling experience that will make sure you find the ideal meeting time for both you and your invitee. And finally… What’s next for Magical?  The future is bright for Magical. Without revealing too much, I can say that we’re working on more innovative features and integrations that we’ll roll out later in the spring. Some of these will be expansions and improvements on current workflows, while others will be brand new. We’re a community-driven product, which means we’re constantly learning from the incredibly engaged base of Magical users. Their communication and feedback drives our product development. As we like to say… we’re building the time tool of our members’ dreams! Thank you so much for your time, Tommy! Where can people learn more about Magical? Everyone can learn more on our website and follow our updates on Twitter. The post Schedule smarter and work faster with Tommy Barav, Founder of Magical appeared first on Ness Labs.

You have a deadline. You know you should get to work. But instead of focusing on what’s urgent and important, you spend your time on something else. Despite the inner voice telling us to get started and the rising anxiety, you keep on procrastinating. Humans have always struggled with procrastination. Thousands of years ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates asked how it is possible that, if one judges an action to be the best, one would do anything other than this action. Why we act against our better judgement? Still, as irrational as it sounds, we do procrastinate. And when it happens, no amount of rational thinking will help getting unstuck: that’s because we already know we should be doing the thing! So what can we do instead? Procrastination is an emotional process Procrastination arises from a fight between the limbic system — the ancient part of the brain influencing many our our automatic behaviours — and the prefrontal cortex, which is a newer part of the brain involved in cognition and higher-order thinking. Because of this fight, there are often several emotions at play when we procrastinate. The neuroscience of procrastination: A short primer Researchers found that procrastination is often associated with negative emotions such as anxiety and hopelessness, and could even lead to even depression. Considering how ashamed and stressed we feel when we procrastinate, it’s no wonder that we see procrastination as an enemy to get ourselves rid of. But a lot of the distress we experience when we procrastinate actually arises from our resistance to it. We feel ashamed that we procrastinate; we feel stressed about the fact that we procrastinate. Instead, we should treat procrastination as a source of information. Procrastination is your body and your brain trying to communicate a state of emotional struggle. Ignoring that message leads to more negative emotions, but embracing procrastination and trying to decipher the message can help you get unstuck while protecting your mental health. Making friends with procrastination There are many complex emotions underlying procrastination. While more organic forms of self-reflection such as free-flow journaling can help, it can also be useful to follow a more structured approach, especially if you are feeling paralyzed and don’t know where to start. Created by Graham Allcott, the founder of Think Productive and author of A Practical Guide to Productivity, DUST is a simple method to identify why you may be procrastinating. It stands for the four most common reasons why we procrastinate: Difficult, Unclear, Scary, and Tedious. Difficult. You may find the task too challenging, which may be caused by a lack of confidence, a lack of skills, or both. The solution is to move the starting point a bit earlier. For example, if you want to build an app but find it too difficult, you could take an online course that covers a very similar type of app. It’s important to not use an earlier starting point as a way to procrastinate even further. Clearly define what the first action step will entail, commit to it, and do not create an endless list of “pre-tasks” before you can get started with the main task. Unclear. Sometimes, we procrastinate because the task is not clearly defined. We often use vague one-word items in our to-do list, leaving our brains to fill in the blanks. In order to be productive, it’s important to have clearly defined actions. The solution is to make your tasks more detailed and to break them down into simple, actionable, clearly defined items. For example, “presentation prep” could be replaced by “record myself presenting the talk by Tuesday so I can get feedback from my manager on Wednesday.” Scary. Our fear of failure can get in the way of our productivity. The biggest changes we want to make and the most exciting projects we want to work are also the most daunting. Our brain is designed in a way to keep us safe. Comfort is good, risk is bad. Procrastination is a way to stay in your comfort zone. A solution is to create an even bigger fear to trump the original one. For example, announcing your deadline in public may trigger your fear of being judged, helping you overcome procrastination to avoid disappointing your peers. However, it’s better over the long term to embrace these fears, which are perfectly natural reactions to have when building something meaningful. Tedious. Some tasks are just boring. Need to copy-and-paste lots of numbers into a spreadsheet? Need to clean up some data? Need to write a hundred handwritten notes for an event? There’s no way to change the nature of the task itself—even though learning some automation tools can be useful in many cases—but you can change your environment. For example, you could listen to a podcast while doing copy-and-pasting work. Or you could create a reward for yourself when you get the task done in order to make it more exciting. To use the DUST model of procrastination, just grab a piece of paper, or open your notebook or note-taking app. Then, consider each emotion in the model to identify whether you’re procrastinating because the task is difficult, unclear, scary or tedious — it can be a combination of several emotions. Finally, apply the corresponding strategy in the model. If that strategy doesn’t work, it is also possible that the problem doesn’t come from the task itself and you need a break. The task isn’t difficult, unclear, scary or tedious, you’re just tired. Instead of feeling guilty about procrastinating, let it go for now and focus on resting and recharging your batteries. Procrastination is a way for our body and our mind to tell us we don’t feel comfortable with the way forward. It’s perfectly natural, and it’s okay at times to just go with it. But when procrastination becomes recurrent and prevents you from achieving your goals, it’s good to ask yourself why without beating yourself up in the process. You’ll avoid unnecessary distress and you’ll be able to get unstuck much quicker. The post Why we wait: Understanding the emotions behind procrastination appeared first on Ness Labs.

FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this new edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Chris Reinberg is the founder of Mindsera, an AI-powered journal designed to train your thinking skills. Mindsera makes thinking with mental models actionable with journaling templates that guide your thought process. In this interview, we talked about the power of thinking from first principles, building a personal board of advisors, writing as a thinking tool, using mental models to generate personal insights, why we should focus more on inducing quality decisions, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Chris, thanks for agreeing to this interview! You believe in the power of bringing together cognitive psychology with software and design. Can you tell us more? Thank you for having me. I believe the world’s most valuable skill is clarity of thought. When you start to think about it, thinking is the most powerful tool you can possibly have. Thinking makes you act effectively in the world. It helps you get what you want out of life. Whenever we want to accomplish something, there are obstacles in our way. Thinking is what sets humans apart as expert problem-solvers who can find solutions to overcome these obstacles. It’s all within our heads. Thinking made us go from fighting with sticks and stones to smartphones, artificial intelligence, and launching reusable rockets with the mission of becoming a space-faring civilization. That’s quite spectacular. My own background is kind of a peculiar one. I’ve been a professional mentalist for over ten years. Mentalism, in other words, is the art of getting inside people’s heads. It’s about how to use the biases in our minds to create seemingly impossible feats of mind reading. That got me obsessed about how the mind works in general. I went from mind reading to mind building and started investigating the thinking habits of geniuses and to what degree it’s possible to optimize the software in our heads. On one side, we have a mental health crisis; on the other hand, we need to reskill for the future. To succeed, we must become mentally fit, not just mentally healthy. When we look at various research about the essential work skills in the next decade, they all point to cognitive skills like critical thinking, decision-making, problem solving, creativity, self-leadership, mental resilience, and continuous learning. It’s no surprise that these are the same skills that underlie the success of the most accomplished, creative, and prolific people on earth. So I asked myself, how do you keep yourself mentally healthy and improve your cognitive skills? What would be this piece of software that you can build if you think about it from the first principles? And this is what inspired you to create an AI-powered journal. Exactly! Many people do not understand who they are, where they are, or where they are going. In consequence, instead of attempting those actions that would make their lives as valuable as possible, things just happen to them, and they’re often not good. The antidote to that is becoming thoughtful about your life, and you do that through journaling. Reflecting on your thoughts and feelings makes you understand yourself better, find uncovered self-knowledge, and improve your overall mental health & fitness. Also, the best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write. There is no difference between writing and thinking. Writing is a sophisticated form of thinking. If you make your thoughts visual with words, it becomes so much easier for your brain to organise information and make sense of things. Mindsera is kind of a supercharged journal. It analyses your mindset, helps you structure your thinking, and has an integrated AI mentor to explain things, brainstorm, and give actionable advice. It’s a copilot for thinking. While writing is helpful in and of itself, it can be hard to generate insights from journaling. How does Mindsera address this challenge? That is a problem a lot of people have. We all know journaling has massive benefits, but how do you do it? The act of sitting down to write can be daunting, and the blank page is a well-known trigger for writer’s block. Fortunately, there is a solution to that. The human mind is a problem-solving tool. To get the mental juices flowing, all you need to do is ask a question. Questions focus your thinking because every question is a little problem for your mind. Everyone is constantly trying to give you answers, but the reality is you don’t need better answers, you need better questions. The better the questions, the more insightful and robust the answers and possibilities created. So, where do you find good questions? We all have tried journaling prompts, but the problem with them is that they are too general and get repetitive very fast. This is where our curated list of mental models and frameworks becomes useful. Tiago Forte explained it well: “Our creativity thrives on examples. When we have a template to fill in, our ideas are channelled into useful forms instead of splattered around haphazardly. There are best practices and models for almost anything you want to create.”  But it’s one thing to read about mental models and another to apply them, so we turned the most useful mental models into journaling templates. They make thinking with mental models actionable by guiding your thought process. Have a long-term decision you need to make? Use the Regret Minimization frameworks from Jeff Bezos. Want to find purpose and meaning in life? Think with the Ikigai framework. Need to build habits and achieve goals? Well, there are frameworks that help you to do that. We have frameworks for almost every occasion used by the absolute top 1% to make better decisions, solve complex problems, and be more productive. Some famous people who are vocal about the benefits of clear thinking, mental models, and writing include Elon Musk, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Naval Ravikant, Jordan Peterson, and Paul Graham. You are in good company! That’s such a powerful feature. Mental models can be a great way to generate insights. Then, the next step in better thinking is to go from insights to decisions. I’ve always liked this concept of a personal board of advisors. Whenever I have an important decision to make, I tend to go to an imaginary meeting room in my mind. Around the table, there are Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Steve Jobs, and other great minds. I explain the situation to them and listen to what they have to say. It’s a way to trick myself into seeing things from new perspectives. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, you can actually talk with digital minds that imitate the thinking of those cognitive giants, past and present. Marcus Aurelius to develop stoic qualities. Elon Musk to build a start-up. Alan Watts to find purpose and meaning in life. Carl Jung to assist in personal growth, and so on. You can have your own personal board of advisors to explain things, brainstorm, and give actionable advice. Basically, you get the power of a personal coach without paying hundreds of dollars per hour. This makes it accessible to everyone, not just a selected few. Another exciting feature is “mindset analysis” – can you tell us more? This is something I’m personally very excited about. I have always thought, what would happen if you write all of your experiences and reasoning into a personal journal and then give it to the world’s top psychologists, entrepreneurs, and philosophers to assess? What insights could they distil for you, and how beneficial would that be? Now with AI, it’s possible. When you finish your journaling session on Mindsera, click analyse. The mindset analysis measures your emotional state, gives a percentage to each emotion, reflects on your personality, and provides you with a list of personalised suggestions. One of our user’s favourite features is the original artwork generated based on your journaling entry. I’m always excited to write my thoughts down because I want to see the visualisation of those thoughts. It’s a really great incentive for positive habit-building and kind of feels like magic. I find the act of creating generative art from personal thoughts gives meaning to the resulting images. It also makes journaling social, as you can share the artwork with your friends. So, each time you sit down to write, you build up a personal art gallery of your mind. Also, I want to stress that we are big believers in freedom and privacy of thought. We are an independent company and do not sell your data or see what you have written. With the latest privacy update from OpenAI, your data will also not be used to train future AI models, so Mindsera truly is a private space for your thoughts. What kind of people use Mindsera? Just like people who go to the gym care about their physical health and fitness, people who use Mindsera care about their mental health and cognitive fitness. They understand the importance of keeping their minds sharp and agile, just as athletes understand the importance of keeping their bodies in top shape. Most of our users tend to be some kind of makers – startup founders, solopreneurs, indie hackers, digital creators, and investors. The most important asset you have as an entrepreneur is your mind, so improving your cognitive skills is the single most powerful thing you can do. It makes you better at solving problems, navigating uncertainty, making decisions, managing stress, and staying focused and productive. What about you, how do you use Mindsera? Mindsera, for me, is all about staying in a state of clarity. It’s the most powerful thing. When you operate from a place of clarity and intention, your thoughts and actions have leverage. Success in life depends on your ability to make good decisions. The quality of your decisions depends on the quality of...

Despite the best intentions, a group of people make unwise decisions because of a collective desire to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions. In striving for conformity, there can be a loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. This phenomenon is called “groupthink”. Here is a personal example. When arranging to meet up with friends for dinner recently, everyone proclaimed to be happy to make a flexible and spontaneous restaurant choice on the night we met. With our party collectively agreeing to not make a reservation, on our arrival in the food quarter every restaurant was full, and we couldn’t find anywhere to eat. If one person had suggested that we make a table booking beforehand, this situation could have been avoided. But nobody said anything. This was not a big deal, but groupthink can lead to harmful business decisions, as well as impacting your personal life. Fortunately, this phenomenon can be managed with some simple strategies. The science of collective decisions The term groupthink was first coined in 1952 by William H. Whyte Jr, with most of the initial research carried out by Irving Janis, a research psychologist from Yale University. Theories of social conformity and social influence suggest that as humans, we are often averse to acting contrary to the trend of a group. Going against the grain can induce fear that our opinion might be wrong, or that we will incite conflict or even be rejected by the group. In 1998, researchers Marlene Turner and Anthony Pratkanis evaluated the research around groupthink theory. They found that it is most likely to occur within groups that are highly cohesive, especially if there is a strong leader, high levels of stress within the group, and low self-esteem within members. These conditions reduce the chance that a group will find a better solution to a problem than the one presented by influential group members. In another paper published by Turner and Pratkanis, it was highlighted that groupthink serves as an attempt to protect a collective identity by helping to maintain positive social characteristics. This may be especially true when the group feels under threat. Rather than share alternative views, the group effort is directed towards “maintaining a shared positive view of the functioning of the group”. This is achieved by ensuring consensus at all times, regardless of how sensible the decision is. However, as Dr Paul Hart argued, a group that’s caught up in groupthink may fail to notice important events, ignore serious threats, and disregard potential alternative actions. With a breakdown in group communication, and the desire for group harmony prioritized over rational decision making, dysfunctional outcomes can occur. According to Hart’s research, “groupthink, in short, is a recipe for policy fiascoes.” In short, groupthink can impact rational collective thinking, leading to poor decision making. The desire for a collective identity within the group can stifle independent thinking, with life-changing consequences. How to avoid groupthink When making collective decisions, there are some strategies that can be employed to avoid groupthink and its associated risks. Rather than accepting group conformity, it’s helpful to challenge the status quo. Assign one or two people in the group to play “devil’s advocate” and encourage them to interject with potential pitfalls and alternative solutions. Incorporating this specific role into the group will ensure other options are always raised and explored. When an idea is first raised, treat it as a transitional placeholder rather than a final decision. A group leader should refrain from offering ideas that may inadvertently sway others too early in the process. Instead, aim for the remaining group members to generate multiple ideas in the early stages of planning to avoid unnecessary conformity. It’s also helpful to proactively foster psychological safety during discussions. Irrational decisions based on the desire to conform can be avoided when group members have the freedom to think creatively without fear of ridicule. When individuals feel comfortable sharing unfiltered thoughts, a far greater breadth of ideas can be deliberated.  Ensure those who think innovatively are rewarded, even if another plan is eventually followed. Offering the opportunity to make suggestions anonymously can help contributors feel safer. Once a range of ideas has been voiced, encourage people to think critically and ask questions about the options. Invite an outsider to consider the possible options for objectivity and to mitigate the risk of the wrong decision being made due to group cohesion, low self-esteem or a strong leader. Groupthink can be responsible for collective decisions that are irrational, risky or even illegal. In a group setting in which cohesion and a positive social opinion of the group are highly valued, members put a lot of energy into ensuring harmony within the group. However, this form of mismanaged agreement is avoidable when group members can safely share their creativity, explore the pros and cons of various options, and seek objective opinions. If you’re in a position of leadership, make sure to encourage your group members to share their ideas — even if they don’t align with yours! The post Groupthink: when collective decisions go wrong appeared first on Ness Labs.

We are obsessed with optionality. Not sure what to do with your life? Get a degree. Not quite sure what to do with this degree? Go to grad school. Still not quite sure? Get a consulting role at a big firm so you can decide what kind of job you enjoy. And so on and so forth. We fall prey to the optionality fallacy. The problem is not with optionality itself. The problem is that we tend to assume optionality is built by keeping as many doors open for as long as possible. As Erik Torenberg puts it, it can be “like spending your whole life filling up the gas tank without ever driving.” The conventional path of accumulating optionality gives you reassuring but fragile options. In contrast, the best options — which involve lots of experimenting and tinkering — may feel riskier in the short term but will help you thrive through uncertainty. Optionality as convexity Traditional approaches to optionality assume a linear life curve, with a linear dependence on the parameters — if do this, you get that. People “follow safe paths that cap their downside, not realising that they also cap their upside,” says Torenberg. He adds: “Many ambitious people, even though they understand this intellectually, still prefer the more conventional paths of accumulating optionality.” It is often true that if all goes to plan, that is, if the actual parameters do end up looking highly similar to what they anticipated, following the traditional path will result for most people in a mostly predictable result. But the reality is, life’s curve is non-linear. There are few things more uncertain and complex than your life path. Each day brings its own unpredictable challenges and random events. Inject an adverse event, such as losing your job, or a lucky one, such as inheriting a large sum of money, and the pains or gains will often be amplified in a non-linear way. So, how can you design a life that embraces the random nature of reality? By having an approach to life which will result in larger gains than pains in a random environment. Functions with larger gains than pains are “nonlinear-convex”. The graph below shows the effect of a random event which causes more gain than pain. Things go well? Great upside. Not so well? Limited downside. The performance curves outwards, making it convex. And optionality is what gives it these crucial properties. Because you have options, you can discard the results when something doesn’t go well, thus limiting your losses. This allows you to experiment more, take more risks, and increase your chances of a big upside while capping the potential downsides. “It is in complex systems, ones in which we have little visibility of the chains of cause-consequences, that tinkering, bricolage, or similar variations of trial and error have been shown to vastly outperform the teleological* — it is nature’s modus operandi. But tinkering needs to be convex; it is imperative.” says Nassim Nicholas Taleb. “Critically we have the option, not the obligation to keep the result, which allows us to retain the upper bound and be unaffected by adverse outcomes.” *From the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “A teleologist attempts to understand the purpose of something by looking at its results. A teleological philosopher might argue that we should judge whether an act is good or bad by seeing if it produces a good or bad result, and a teleological explanation of evolutionary changes claims that all such changes occur for a definite purpose.” Taleb calls the difference between the results of trial and error in which gains and harm are equal (a linear function), and one in which pains and gains are asymmetric (a non-linear convex function) the “convexity bias” — the more convex the function (bigger difference between potential harm and benefits) and the more random the environment (higher volatility), the larger the bias. As humans tend to hate uncertainty, we have a propensity to miss the volatility property. In random, complex environments, convexity is easier to attain than knowledge. “Under some level of uncertainty, we benefit more from improving the payoff function than from knowledge about what exactly we are looking for,” says Taleb. In other words, when the future is uncertain, we benefit even more from performing experiments with a convexity bias that could lead to a big pay-off but have limited potential downside. Optionality through thoughtful tinkering Most ambitious people spend a lot of time and energy accumulating what feels like optionality by competing for a degree from a reputable university, then a prestigious work placement, and so on. Accumulating popular skills may feel like a path to more optionality, but the issue is: we don’t know what we don’t know. We cannot guess what skills will be helpful in the future, what random events (positive or negative) life will throw at us. In a complex system such as life, where you have limited visibility of the chains of cause and consequences, you are better off using trial and error. Tinkering and experimenting is a more efficient investment of your time than following a set path of learning which assumes an intrinsic value in specific skills and ignores the non-linear way life works. Experimenting does not mean giving something a quick try and abandoning it if you don’t see immediate results. Taleb gives the example of technologists in California who instead of investing based on narratives that look good on paper (assuming linearity), opportunistically switch or ratchet up their investments. This whole process takes many years of tinkering. “Typically people try six or seven technological ventures before getting to destination — note the failure in strategic planning to compete with convexity,” writes Taleb. To increase your optionality, apply the same to your life. It may mean taking a job in a new, unproven industry; investing in an emerging skill; learning an uncommon language; understanding a lesser-known culture; solving a hard problem few people are looking at. Rely on a series of experiments rather and avoid following a pre-defined narrative. Take these experiments seriously. Stay focused and give them your all. Go through a full cycle of deliberate experimentation before you decide whether you want to continue following this path, or if you would rather explore another path. And remember—you don’t only live once. One day you will be dead, but it takes about seven years to master something. If you live to be 88, after age 11, you have 11 opportunities to be great at something. Most people never let themselves die and cling onto that one life. But you can spend a life building things, another life writing poems, and another life looking for facts. You have many lives. Each of them is an opportunity to learn and grow. Live them. The post Unlocking the power of optionality appeared first on Ness Labs.

Children have an incredibly inquisitive mind. “Why?” they keep asking. They explore new things for no other reason except that they just want to know. Researchers tried to figure out how often kids ask questions. Turns out, a lot: on average, children ask 107 questions per hour! But it seems that as adults we tend to fall into fixed and convenient cognitive patterns. “Schools do not always, or even often, foster curiosity,” says Susan Engel, author and senior lecturer in psychology. Her research shows that what she calls “episodes of curiosity” — such as asking direct questions, manipulating objects, or intent and directed gazing — occurred 2.36 times in a two hour stretch in kindergarten, and only 0.48 times in a fifth grade classroom. So, what’s going on, and is it ever too late to rehabilitate your curiosity? Creativity gets unlearned When NASA was looking at hiring highly creative people, they hired Dr. George Land to devise a test that would accurately measure creative potential. Dr. Land collaborated with another researcher, Dr. Beth Jarman, to create a test which measured divergent thinking, or the ability to look at a particular problem and devise multiple solutions. The test worked well and is still a cornerstone of research around curiosity. But Dr. George Land, being curious (see what I’m doing), wanted to go further and understand the underlying mechanics of curiosity. Where does it come from? How does it evolve through our lives? To answer these questions, he led a large-scale observation study of 1,600 children. He got the kids to take the test at age 5, 10, and 15. The first time they took the test, 98% scored the highest possible score on the creativity test. The second time they took it, five years later, only 30% of the very same children scored well on the test. Even more depressing, the third time they took it — by now in high school — it was only 12% of kids that did well. What about adults? Well, it’s not getting any better. Based on a sample of 280,000 people, less than 2% of all adults are defined as creative based on their answer to this standardised test. Some evidence suggests that this dramatic decrease in curiosity could be caused by our increase in knowledge as we grow up. Once we feel like there’s no gap between what we know and what we want to know, we just stop being and acting curious. But why should we care? 3 surprising benefits of curiosity Based on the results above, it seems like most adults go about their lives without any effort to foster their curiosity. You might think, maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all. But curiosity has magical properties which have been extensively studied by scientists. Curiosity keeps you young: research shows that keeping a sense of wonder throughout life and as well as a novelty-seeking behaviour helps people to stay young. A study which followed aging individuals while tracking their curiosity levels found that those that showed high levels of curiosity were more likely to be alive five years later. Curiosity helps you learn: there is strong evidence that curiosity helps you better remember new information. The more curious you are about a topic, the more likely you are to remember it. Curiosity fosters better relationships: being genuinely interested in other people helps build more robust relationships, research shows. This means a greater feeling of intimacy and creating the foundation for meaningful relationships. Convinced you should do more to cultivate your curiosity? The good thing is that low levels of curiosity doesn’t mean your curiosity is just gone. In most adults, it’s mostly suppressed. In fact, every time you go to bed to sleep and you start dreaming, you let your curiosity run wild. How to cultivate your curiosity There are a few simple activities that will help you foster your curiosity and by extension increase your creativity. Try a few and see which ones feel most effective for you personally. Ask questions: randomly ask yourself questions like why? and how? when reading something or chatting with friends. You can even write down some of these questions to take the time to find the answers later. Read outside of your field: pick a type of book you would never naturally buy in a bookstore. Is it classic poetry? Non-fiction? A cookbook? Something about geology? Read it just for the sake of reading it, even if it doesn’t directly contribute to your work. Be inquisitive with people: choose someone in your entourage that you haven’t seen in a while, and invite them for coffee. Make it your goal to learn as much as possible about their interests. Take that approach any time you meet a new person. Practice saying less: this is linked to the previous one. Try to talk less and to listen more. Immerse yourself in a topic: select a topic that you find interesting, and push the limits of your curiosity by going deep. This means reading lots of articles, books, and research papers, watching TED talks, listening to podcasts. Write: take it to the next level by writing about this topic. This is exactly what I’m doing here. By committing to write on this blog, I get to explore new topics and cultivate my curiosity. Carry a notebook: it will make it easier to remember topics you’re curious about and want to either research or write about later. Learn about yourself: curiosity doesn’t need to only be outward. Explore your feelings, ask yourself about your goals and behaviours, or even research your past and family history. Slow down: productivity can be the enemy of creativity. Take the time to let your mind wander and let questions pop into your head. Hang out with a child: playing and talking with a child is probably one of the best reminders of our potential for curiosity. We were all born curious. As adults, it’s our choice to be curious or not. It does take some conscious effort, but it’s worth investing in our curiosity so we can make the most of the extended liminal space that is life. The post The science of curiosity: why we keep asking “why” appeared first on Ness Labs.

Although we would like to think we have a realistic perception of ourselves and the world around us, many of our thoughts are actually inaccurate representations. These so-called cognitive distortions can trick the mind, impacting our sense of self, our mental health, and even the integrity of our decision making. How can we learn to think more clearly? Binocular tricks of the mind A cognitive distortion is a mental phenomenon where we develop an inaccurate perception of reality. Cognitive distortions are often described as “pop-up” thoughts that quickly appear, but then start spiraling in a negative loop. They can be triggered by traumatic events such as difficult events in childhood.  The American psychiatrist Dr Aaron Beck worked with patients experiencing a wide range of mental health conditions, and discovered that distorted thinking patterns could impact the way we experience reality, which could in turn affect our mood. A collaborative study between psychologists in Australia and Brazil confirmed Beck’s findings. The research teams agreed that the distortion of facts leads to the maintenance of negative beliefs, which can lead to low mood or even depression. David D. Burns defines cognitive distortions as “a highly misleading way of thinking about yourself and the world”. He also describes the “binocular tricks” of magnification and minimization — two common forms of cognitive distortion. In magnification, our mistakes, fears and shortcomings become exaggerated, as if we are looking at them through a pair of binoculars. This can lead to catastrophizing, whereby small errors feel all-consuming or seem far more impactful than they truly are. Conversely, minimizing causes us to shrink the positive aspects of our lives down until they seem insignificant, barely worth noting, or even invisible. As if looking through a pair of binoculars backwards, you may minimize your own success or personal qualities so that you no longer recognize their value. You might also minimize others’ mistakes or imperfections, causing you to inaccurately believe that your peers are superior to you. The impact of magnification and minimization It is widely acknowledged that those who struggle with an intensely low mood are likely to show cognitive distortions. These errors of thinking contribute to the continuation of anxiety and depression, creating a vicious cycle. In addition to giving anxiety and depression stronger roots, cognitive distortions such as magnification and minimization can negatively impact your decision-making and overall well-being. Maximizing your mistakes, as if scrutinizing yourself through a pair of binoculars, can cause poor self-esteem, feelings of low self-worth and an unbalanced view of yourself.  For example, at work, you might make a small mistake, but due to cognitive distortion, maximize its potential impact. Seeing a small mistake magnified could lead you to ruminate on the potential for disciplinary action, dismissal, or the end of your career, even though this is far from likely. If you are interviewed for a role but are ultimately unsuccessful, you might go back through each interview question with a fine-tooth comb, and find holes or weaknesses in every one of your answers. You may start to believe that you are useless at interviews, and that you will never be successful in acquiring another job.  Conversely, minimizing your achievements will turn you into your harshest critic. If you pass an exam, are offered a new job, or receive a promotion, rather than seeing your success as being the result of your own hard work, you may downplay it as nothing more than luck. This belittles the effort you have put into succeeding, so that you do not recognize your own dedication or talent. Many of us also fall into a trap of minimizing compliments paid to us. By automatically rejecting someone else’s opinion that we are hard-working, talented, or creative, we do not leave space for positive self-belief to blossom. How to avoid binocular tricks It is important to investigate whether the beliefs you hold might be distorted, as beliefs that are strongly inaccurate can negatively influence one’s overall thinking and behavior. Fortunately, there are several strategies that you can follow to avoid magnification and minimization. Here is a simple exercise to reduce the impact of the binocular tricks your mind may play on you. For any situation you face, you can draw two columns and then document the relevant pros and cons, trying to keep the list of pros longer than the list of cons. For example, if you are unsuccessful at an interview, try to tease out the positives of the experience. This might include the recruitment process being beneficial for future applications, the interview being an opportunity to network with other professionals, or the chance to further narrow down your job search. By keeping the list more positive than negative, you can avoid setting up a vicious cycle. Whenever something good happens, or someone says something positive about you or your work, make a note of it. You can keep your notes in an app, in your journal, or even on small pieces of paper that you store in a jar. In collecting these memories, you create a resource that you can pull from whenever you next experience magnification or minimization. Finally, talk with your friends about your experiences and general mental health. Those close to us can often offer a far more balanced perspective, enabling them to point out when our perception may be positively or negatively exaggerated. Although it may feel natural to bat their compliments away, try to accept them and see yourself in the same light that others do. Binocular tricks of the mind can damage your mental health, propagating anxiety and depression, and even negatively impacting your decisions. Putting these strategies in place will help you focus on areas in which you have excelled, rather than dwelling on the things that have not gone as well as you hoped. Rather than harshly critiquing yourself, you can start to adopt a more self-compassionate mindset. The post Magnification and Minimization: Two “Binocular Tricks” of the Mind appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Rohan Gupta is the co-founder of QuillBot, a suite of AI-powered writing tools that include a paraphraser, a grammar checker, a summarizer, a translator, and more — all in one place. In this interview, we talked about the challenge of integrating every step of the writing process, how AI can unlock our creative potential, how technology can support English language learners, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Rohan, thanks for agreeing to this interview! You started building tech-enabled tools from a young age. What was driving you? As a child, I was fascinated by the endless possibilities that technology could offer and was eager to explore them. This interest in technology may have led me to experiment with coding and building software tools from a young age. It was amazing being able to exercise my creativity to build tools and products that people would genuinely use and love. And you were still a student when you launched QuillBot. Can you tell us about the early days? Yes, Jason and I were both students pursuing different startups at the time, and we met at a startup accelerator. The first version of QuillBot was quite janky. It was a single page web app, effectively a demo. It went live on Reddit and got great reception, even though the first version of our AI was not that good. People loved the concept and it was quite novel at the time. It was helpful to writers who used English as a second language in particular. QuillBot started going viral, and we had to figure out a way to cover the costs. So we built out a premium subscription and bootstrapped the business to over one million monthly active users before raising venture funding. QuillBot is now an advanced AI writing companion that provides everything from a paraphraser to a summarizer and a grammar checker. How does it work exactly? QuillBot is unique in that it caters to every writer’s needs, whether those are simple or more complex. It’s there for writers through every step of the writing process, which includes brainstorming, research, outlining, drafting, editing, and creating citations. Instead of focusing on a singular problem, QuillBot aims to alleviate every pain point a writer might face while writing.  However, if a writer needs specific help in just one area of the writing process, they can choose to use just a specific tool for their needs. For example, if a writer doesn’t have the best grammar, they can choose to write the paper on their own and run the final draft through our Grammar Checker. People complain about the proliferation of writing tools and how disjointed the writing process has become. How does QuillBot address this challenge? A good writing tool will simplify and ease the writing process, not make it more difficult or disjointed. Not all writing tools can achieve this. QuillBot prioritizes a streamlined experience, which is why you’ll never see an ad on the site. Every tool works with just the click of a button, which takes away any convoluted steps that might confuse our writers or eat up their time. QuillBot also offers an extension for both Google Chrome and Microsoft Word, ensuring that our users will be able to write well wherever they write. The extension allows for quick edits and suggestions without going on the website, making it easy for users to perfect their writing across the web. An exciting feature is the QuillBot Co-Writer – can you tell us more? At its core, the Co-Writer is a writing space that employs the features of the Paraphraser, Summarizer, and Citation Generator to correct and perfect the user’s work as they write. The “Suggest Text” button helps users who are experiencing writer’s block by recommending the next sentence based on existing text. The Co-Writer also includes online research capabilities, a space for note taking, and an outline generator, allowing the user to complete a paper from start to finish without ever leaving the tab they’re on. What kind of people use QuillBot? Our two largest demographics at QuillBot are students and English language learners (ELLs), and those groups have a tendency to overlap. Students are usually focused on the content of their essays, so they find the Citation Generator, Summarizer, and Grammar Checker particularly useful for automating tasks that would otherwise take them a lot of time, such as creating citations. Students are very busy people, so saving time on writing projects goes a long way for their overall success in school. ELLs find that tools such as the Paraphraser and the Grammar Checker are particularly useful when sending communication. For those who are still learning English, these tools help smooth out and correct their language so they are able to speak, or write, effectively. Now they are better equipped to integrate into their new community and improve their lives moving forward. However, QuillBot’s clientele is not limited to those two demographic groups. QuillBot users range from content creators to businesspeople to researchers, and beyond.  Users find the Summarizer to be helpful when conducting research, because it condenses any article or piece of text into its most important points, effectively cutting out all of the filler material.  The Paraphraser is great for online content creators, because it helps them write original content that will rank well on search engines. The seven writing Modes help narrow each piece of content down for its respective audience, ensuring that tone is consistent throughout the text. What about you, how do you use QuillBot? I do all of my writing with QuillBot. In particular, Compare Modes is a great feature found within our Paraphraser that allows a user to compare text that has gone through our different Modes, which change the tone and style of the text depending on which Mode is in use.  I like to use this feature to ensure that I’m coming across the right way in everything that I write, whether that be a company-wide message, private correspondence, or an interview such as this one. I find seeing all of the different outputs laid out next to each other helps me to weigh my options and pick the perfect Mode for any occasion.  This feature works hand-in-hand with Freeze words, which lets the user keep a word or phrase the same when paraphrasing. This is particularly handy when I’m writing something that includes a branded keyword or proper noun that cannot be changed or rephrased in any way. For example, QuillBot’s tagline is “Make writing painless.” That has to be frozen to ensure brand consistency and an understanding of our core mission and values.  How do you recommend someone get started? The best way to get to know QuillBot is to play around with all the tools. Grab a sample text and run it through the Paraphraser, using the different Modes to create different paraphrases. Run it through the Summarizer and go through all of the available settings and options. Our Co-Writer has tutorials available for all of the tools within the broader Co-Writer space, which includes the Paraphraser, Summarizer, Grammar Checker, and Citation Generator. It’s a great place to learn, play around, and create something new — or tweak something that already exists! Within that space, you can draft a new project, edit a work-in-progress, and work through every step of the writing process. It’s a great option for those new to QuillBot, because it showcases a number of our tools in an easy-to-use setting. In the future, what role do you think AI writing companions will play in the creative process? We’re already seeing AI improve people’s writing skills. With tools like the Grammar Checker and Summarizer, writers are able to produce content more efficiently than ever before, with little to no mistakes.  Other AI writing companions, like the Co-Writer, help users brainstorm and research. It’s easier than ever to create and expand upon an idea in order to bring it to fruition. The entire creative process is already being impacted positively by AI, and I don’t see that slowing down any time soon. And finally… What’s next for QuillBot? We are on a mission to better streamline writing and fundamentally redefine the writing process. We plan to do this by incorporating new generative AI tech, improving UX/UI, and building out multilingualism as part of the writing journey. There is a huge opportunity to redefine writing and we intend to capture it! Thank you so much for your time, Rohan! Where can people learn more about QuillBot? Everyone can go to QuillBot.com to learn more about our brand and product. You can also follow our journey on Twitter. The post Building the most powerful AI writing companion with Rohan Gupta, co-founder of QuillBot appeared first on Ness Labs.

If you add up the number of hours are your disposal during a given week, the total will be the same for every single living human being on the planet, whatever their occupation: 168 hours per week. Remove the weekends, and that’s 120 hours. Get some sleep, and you’re left with at most 90 hours of awake time during the weekdays. Eat, shower, and do all the basic things human beings need to do on a daily basis, and you get a maximum 80 hours per week to play with — that is, if you don’t have kids or other irreducible obligations. So little time, and yet, we waste a lot of energy on low-leverage tasks that leave us tired and dissatisfied. We confuse hard work for high-leverage work. These low-leverage tasks don’t meaningfully contribute to our success, and they certainly don’t contribute to our well-being. Instead, how can we focus our time and energy on high-leverage activities that are both productive and good for the mind? More than moving the needle Unnecessary paperwork, long meetings, chasing down deliverables, fixing typos in an article… What do all of these activities have in common? They are tedious, frustrating, and often avoidable. The expression “moving the needle” originating in the indicator of measuring instruments such as the speedometer. It has become one of these overused bits of business jargon you will hear in many organizations, used to describe work with a small yet noticeable impact. While it makes sense for a massive organisation to pursue many such “needle-moving” activities, it can be exhaustive and counterproductive for an individual to follow such a strategy. Moving the needle may imply a corresponding level of hard work; which is not the case with high-leverage activities. This is the basic principle of leverage: using a lever amplifies your input to provide a greater output. Good levers work as energy multipliers. Instead of moving the needle, you want to operate the most efficient levers. High-leverage activities are energy multipliers Based on skills, experience, network, and many other factors, everyone’s levers are different. What they have in common, when activated, is their ability to turn a relatively smaller amount of time and energy into outsized results. Not sure what such energy multipliers can look like? Here are ten examples of high-leverage activities you could experiment with: Automating part of your work Creating and publishing original content Joining a public speaking club Taking a writing workshop Mastering a critical tool Implementing metacognitive strategies Learning a new language (including how to code) Looking for a great coach or a great mentor Pushing back on unnecessary (-ly long) meetings Investing in personal and professional relationships You should obviously not aim to pursue all these activities at the same time, and many may not even be right for you. These are for illustration purposes — what a high-leverage activity is for someone may be a low-leverage activity for you. The main question to ask yourself is whether these activities have an outsized impact compared to the amount of effort they require, and whether they seem to provide you with more time and energy to focus on what really matters. By purposefully choosing which levers to activate in your life and work, you can reclaim your time and energy so you can achieve your goals without sacrificing your mental health. Clarifying your highest leverage activities As investor George Soros wrote in his book The Age of Fallibility: “It is much easier to put existing resources to better use, than to develop resources where they do not exist.” High-leverage activities are not about making more time or using more energy; instead, the aim is to better optimise your resources to focus on work that goes beyond moving the needle. In order to identify these high-leverage activities, you need to reflect on how to allocate your resources. Document your daily activities. The first step is to get an idea of the way you currently spend your time and energy. We very often overestimate or underestimate the time we spend on certain activities. Time seems to contract when we’re having fun, and to expand for boring tasks. But time perception doesn’t correlate with leverage. Spend a few days tracking how you spend your work days. You can even install a time-tracking app to help with accuracy. Highlight the tasks you feel best suited for. Better yet: focus on the tasks only you can do. Because of your unique set of skills, interests, and connections, some tasks will be both easier and more enjoyable to you than to somebody else — as well as better performed by you in some cases. For instance, someone on your team may be better suited to create and design a business presentation; another team member may be the strongest person for cold emailing and conducting initial meetings; but you may be the best person for the final negotiation. Choose your levers. First, be selective. While high-leverage activities lead to outsized results compared to the time and energy investment, you still only have a limited number of hours available to you. Ideally, try to keep your list of high-leverage activities to 2-3 items at most. Then, make sure to commit to these levers: let your team know about your focus areas; delegate tasks you are not the best suited for; automate repetitive and energy-draining activities; hire contractors for what cannot be automated. Remember: hard work is not necessarily high-leverage work. Do not measure your productivity based on time and energy—time in particular is not a measure of productivity. Focus on activities with oversized output compared to your input. Learn to delegate. Use your time to invest in yourself, your systems, and your relationships – these investments compound. While we all have an absolute limit on time, high-leverage activities can multiply our energy. The post High-leverage activities: how to identify your energy multipliers appeared first on Ness Labs.

New Things Under the Sun is a living literature review; as the state of the academic literature evolves, so do we. This post highlights some recent updates. Subscribe now Local Learning Last year I wrote a post called Remote Breakthroughs about the changing nature of innovation among remote collaborators. Part of that post discussed evidence that local interactions do a better job of exposing us to new ideas than remote interactions. I’ve now spun that discussion out into it’s own expanded article, specifically on that topic. This was mostly prompted by a new paper, van der Wouden and Youn (2023). Here’s an excerpt from that new article, titled Local Learning: In my experience, the internet can’t be beat for encountering a diversity of ideas. But often, that encounter is at a pretty surface level. You read a tweet; a headline; a blog post synthesizing some studies, etc. Nothing wrong with surface level engagement - you can’t engage in everything deeply. But pushing the innovation frontier increasingly requires deep engagement with at least some domain of knowledge. And there are reasons to think that offline/in-person interaction might be better for forging that kind of deep engagement with new ideas. To start, let’s look at van der Wouden and Youn (2023), which wants to see if in-person collaboration on academic projects more reliably leads to the transfer of knowledge between coauthors than remote collaboration. To answer that question, the authors gather data on 1.7mn academics who, at some point over the period 1975-2015, produce a sequence of three papers that exhibit a very specific pattern. In reverse order, they need: The last paper in the sequence to be solo-authored The second-to-last paper to be coauthored with at least one other author At least one more prior paper. They’re going to pull all that information from the Microsoft Academic Graph. Next, they want an estimate of what knowledge domains the academic is fluent enough in to publish an original research paper in. To get those, they leverage the 292 subdisciplines that the Microsoft Academic Graph tags papers with. By looking at the subdisciplines tagged to your work, they can get an idea about what you are an expert in, and also how your areas of expertise grow over time. Moreover, by focusing specifically on solo-authored work, they can be most sure that it’s really you who is the expert, and not one of your coauthors. The main idea of the paper is to figure out an academic’s areas of expertise based on all papers they’ve published, up to and including the first one in the sequence of three alluded to above. Next, they look to see if the second paper in the above sequence was conducted with local or remote collaborators. Finally, they look at the final paper in the sequence, which was solo-authored, and see if it is tagged with any new subdisciplines, relative to all your papers up-to-and-including the first one in the sequence. If so, they take that as evidence that the author gained expertise in a new subject in between the first and third paper, possibly via their interaction with their collaborators on the second paper. Lastly, they can see if this “learning” effect is more common when you work with local or remote coauthors. In the following figure, we can see how the probability of writing a solo-authored paper tagged with a new subdiscipline changes when you work with increasingly distant colleagues on your previous paper. van der Wouden and Youn call this the “learning rate.” If your collaborators were local (under 700m away, a 10 minute walk), then about 7.5% of the time, your next paper is on something you haven’t written about before. If your collaborators are out of town, say more than 25km, the probability drops to more like 4.5%. From van der Wouden and Youn (2023) This pattern is consistent across fields, though stronger in some fields than others. For example, the relative probability of pivoting to a new topic after a local collaboration compared to a distant one is generally higher in STEM fields than in non-STEM fields. Moreover, while the figure above is raw data, you get a similar effects when you toss in a bunch of additional control variables: the number of coauthors, the career stage of the academic, the ranking of the institution they are affiliated with, and so on. The post then goes on to discuss another paper, Duede et al. (2022), which was originally part of the Remote Breakthroughs article. It closes with some discussion of how these trends have changed over time, and ends up arguing these results are consistent with a theme I’ve argued elsewhere: that proximity is good for meeting new people outside your usual professional context, but not so necessary for productive collaboration once these relationships are formed. Read "Local Learning" A Bit Less Local Learning The article Planes, Trains, Automobiles, and Innovation is about a similar theme: how changing technology affects the ability to collaborate over a distance. The article originally covered three studies, each about how the expansion of transit options - new air routes, new train routes, or more local roads - facilitated more remote collaboration among scientists and inventors. I’ve added to this article a discussion of Koh, Li, and Xu (2022), which looks at the expansion of the Beijing subway system: Koh, Li, and Xu (2022) studies the impact of the dramatic expansion of the Beijing subway on private sector innovation. The subway system in Beijing grew pretty slowly until the 2000s, when the pace of expansion dramatically ramped up ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and as part of the government’s stimulus response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The number of subway stations went from 41 to 379 between 2000 and 2018, while the total track length grew from 54.1km to 655km over the same time frame. Koh, Li, and Xu cut Beijing up into 0.5km squares and look at what happens to the number of patents by distant collaborators residing in different 0.5km blocks. Across a lot of different approaches,1 they find a subway connection that reduces travel time between blocks by at least an hour leads to a 15-38% increase in patent applications filed. Change in number of patents between blocks after travel time is reduced by an hour or more. From Koh, Li, and Xu (2022) Now that this article also discusses subways, I could have changed the title to “Planes, Trains, Subways, Automobiles, and Innovation”, but since that is quite a mouthful I instead changed the title to Transportation and Innovation. Read "Transportation and Innovation" Long Distance Learning The article The “idea” of being an entrepreneur tries to argue that one important factor about whether people choose to become entrepreneurs or not is if they even conceive of entrepreneurship as an option. The piece argues this idea - that yes, even people like you can be an entrepreneur - is often spread by social contagion from people who are like ourselves but are also entrepreneurs. I’ve now added a new section to this article about the transmission of the “idea” of entrepreneurship via mass media. If transmitting the “idea” of entrepreneurship matters, then countries with mass media celebrating entrepreneurship might get more entrepreneurs, because people consuing this media diet are more likely to consider entrepreneurship a viable option. This is a tough hypothesis to test, since mass media tends to reflect the society it is targeting. In a society with lots of entrepreneurship and lots of mass media celebrating entrepreneurship, which caused which? Likely it’s a bit of both! Another reason it’s hard to test this hypothesis is because, ideally, you want to compare people exposed to one mass media diet to people exposed to another one, but who are otherwise identical. But most people have access to the same mass media (that’s what makes it mass!), and so if one group chooses not to consume it, it’s likely because they differ in some way. Slavtchev and Wyrwich (2023) identifies one peculiar instance in history that does permit testing this hypothesis. When Germany split into East and West, following the Second World War, most forms of entrepreneurship were banned in East Germany. From the 1960s on though, West Germany consciously crafted and broadcast TV programming into East Germany, as a matter of policy. Compared to East German television, West German television tended to celebrate individualism, business, entrepreneurship, and the like. This programming was popular, if you could get it: surveys indicate over 90% of people who could access the broadcasts tuned in at least several times per week. But not everyone could get it. A few regions that were far from the broadcast towers, or where signals were blocked by hills and mountains, could not easily access this programming, and surveys indicate many fewer people in these regions regularly watched West German programming: just 15% several times a week, and 68% never. Yet besides their geographic distance and different topography, the regions of East Germany with access to West German television don’t seem to have been much different from the (small number of) regions of East Germany without. Slavtchev and Wyrwich argue this is the kind of natural experiment we’re looking for: mass media promoting entrepreneurship in a society that is not already celebrating it (it was mostly outlawed!), and different levels of exposure to this mass media among groups that were otherwise similar. Lastly, after the collapse of the USSR, many forms of entrepreneurship became legal once again in East Germany, so Slavtchev and Wyrwich can actually see if this differential mass media exposure mattered: do parts of formerly East Germany with greater exposure to West German television end up with more entrepreneurship than those without?2 Yes. The figure below tracks the per capita number of new businesses and new self-employed indivi...

“You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” The traditional saying remains true even in modern society, and we’d like to think that when we perform a favor for someone else, they will return it in the future. But this is not always the case. Research shows that reciprocity has a very narrow window, and our desire to give back wanes rapidly before disappearing altogether. About three weeks ago, I met a friend for coffee. When she had to rush off, I happily covered our bill and assumed that next time, she would do the same. However, “reciprocity decay” forewarns me that, as three weeks have already passed, I should probably forget about that coffee ever being repaid. Understanding reciprocity decay can provide us with valuable insight into both our expectations of others and the way we collaborate with them. The science of reciprocity Reciprocity is a deeply rooted dynamic of human relationships. Reciprocity of both benefit-for-benefit as well as harm-for-harm was a cornerstone of relationships in ancient Greece. Extensive research has shown that the principle of “voluntary requital” was a form of transaction in a time when there was no formal system of trade. There is some evidence demonstrating that it’s not only humans who are capable of reciprocity. Rats have been shown to set up “food-exchange programs”, vampire bats partake in high levels of reciprocal grooming, and capuchin monkeys show reciprocal provision of food from food-rich to food-poor environments. These mechanisms enhance survival of the species. In recent years, cultural anthropologists have discovered that human relationships are based on a “web of indebtedness”. American researchers reported that reciprocity can include rewarding kind actions or punishing unkind actions. Researchers from the University of Zurich noted that reciprocity has powerful implications for economic domains. They found that reciprocal behavior can determine both the enforcement of contracts and social norms, as well as greatly enhancing collective action. Through reciprocity, sophisticated systems of aid and trade have become possible, bringing immense benefits to societies that utilize them. In professional circumstances, employees may work above and beyond their role to provide additional services, if they believe that they may later be reimbursed with praise, promotion, a pay rise or another benefit. In one’s personal life, reciprocity can be linked to the frequent exchange of favors between family or friends, the existence of customer loyalty, and the tradition of tipping in restaurants. Writing with Benedikt Herrmann, Simon Gächter summarized that the human web of indebtedness created through direct and indirect reciprocity is crucial to successful human cooperation. The impact of reciprocity decay As we’ve seen, reciprocity is essential for a modern society that functions well, and many of us are happy to give when we feel confident that, in the future, we will receive something in return. However, studies by Amanda Chuan, Judd Kessler and Katherine Milkman suggest that if reciprocity is not triggered within a specific timeframe, any sense of obligation can vanish, leaving the initial donor with nothing at all. The researchers examined data from a university hospital that had sent more than 18,000 donation requests to patients following hospital care. Patients were most likely to donate if the request was sent within 30 days of their visit, with a significant decline when it was sent between one and four months later. They concluded that economic behavior is time sensitive due to reciprocity decay. It is therefore important to capitalize on opportunities to receive payment for any “debt” promptly, rather than leaving it too long to ask. Reciprocity decay is likely due to the memory of a generous act fading in time. Something that was significant initially may not feel as valuable one week later. My friend who was grateful to avoid having to wait for the bill may now be consumed by a busy work schedule or a mountain of life admin. While making it to a meeting on time was important three weeks ago, this may no longer hold any significance. Furthermore, in the normal chaos of life, she may simply have forgotten about the bill. Older research agreed that reciprocal decay was likely due to the fading memory of a favor. However, this study also highlighted that the sense of obligation to repay a favor is likely to depend on how valuable the initial favor was. One coffee is of little consequence, whereas saving someone else’s life could “produce a sense of obligation that lasts a lifetime.” Fostering balanced cooperation By taking reciprocity decay into account, it’s possible to foster more balanced cooperation. When someone is indebted to you, avoid waiting too long to make a request for reciprocal action. If the repayment of a coffee had been very important to me, I could have messaged my friend the following day to arrange another catch up. Similarly, if you want customers to provide feedback on your service, make sure your request is timely. Asking for immediate feedback can be off-putting, while waiting too long may reduce your chance of a response. It is therefore advisable to wait a day or two before exploring reciprocity. Conversely, if you recognize that you have waited a long time for a favor to be repaid, make sure the first correspondence you send triggers the recipient’s recall of your past act of kindness. If you helped a colleague plan a workplace event, you can spark fond memories by gently reminding them of how enjoyable the day was. This may make them feel more inclined to help you out in return, despite the delay. Although in some cases, an equally weighted favor might be returned despite time passing, you will often need to accommodate for reciprocity decay. While hospital patients may be less likely to make financial donations many months after treatment, they may be willing to share a link to the hospital’s charitable causes on their social media instead. Finally, it’s important to recognize when you have missed the boat. If a long time has passed, draw a line in the sand and accept that a favor won’t be repaid once an individual no longer feels indebted. This may help to minimize any sense of disappointment you may feel around the favor you provided. For instance, buying a coffee for a friend is no big deal. Rather than feeling I have been fleeced or that my minor generosity went unnoticed, it’s better to forget it altogether. Reciprocity is an ancient phenomenon that is essential for the healthy functioning of society. Although we expect others to remember our kind deeds and repay them, as time passes it is likely that reciprocity decay will occur. Fortunately, we can foster more balanced cooperation by not waiting too long to request that a favor is repaid, making allowances for the other party when some time has passed, and knowing when to accept that it is time to simply let go. The post Reciprocity decay: How our desire to give back wanes over time appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Nils Janse is the founder of Delibr, a Stockholm-based startup helping product managers harness the potential of AI. In this interview, we talked about the main traps product teams fall prey to, the key qualities of great product managers, the power of dynamic templates for product requirements documents, writing out potentially controversial decisions as explicit questions, reconciling information across product management platforms, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Nils, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Let’s start with a big question: what do you think makes a great product manager? Great product managers succeed at thinking about the things that will really have an impact. They take a big enough step back to start from a holistic, end-to-end perspective, understanding both the business and the user perspective. They then find the things that really matter across this scope and then drill down to get those things right, not fearing to get their hands dirty with details, whether it is UX copy or key tech aspects. And they are efficient or savvy enough to not get bogged down handling all the other details. Together this lets them come up with a sharp, insightful point of view for how to build something that can actually move the needle. AI-powered assistants are everywhere. Why did you decide to focus on helping product managers specifically? Our focus on helping product managers (PM) stems from our extensive experience working with them. Over 500 PM interviews have given us a deep understanding of their challenges. We know many PMs spend a lot of time writing product requirements documents (PRD) and user stories, and that junior PMs struggle with doing this well. The latest generative AI technology is great for these types of challenges. How does Delibr tackle these challenges? Our solution leverages this latest generative AI technology both to give PMs guidance on what and how to write, and to speed up their writing process immensely, actually writing a draft for them, then giving feedback and suggesting edits. We are combining the power of the latest AI models with our knowledge of the domain to create the right prompts and integrate them deeply into the natural workflow of PMs. Can you tell us more about how Delibr helps product managers adhere to best practices? Our dynamic templates let PM start clean and still have the guidance of what topics they might want to address, depending on what they are working on, and we then provide best practice support across topics.  Many product teams fall into either the trap of providing a too detailed template, which makes writing a PRD feel like an administrative task and stifling creative thinking, or of providing little-to-no template, which leaves junior PMs struggling and the lack of consistency makes it hard for stakeholders to read them. Designing these dynamic templates was a close collaboration with our customers over several iterations, and with the latest AI they really get another boost. A challenge for many product managers is to manage feedback and revision. The work to detail out any new feature involves a lot of both minor and major decisions, and it is easy for PMs to trip up on facilitating all of these. That is why Delibr offers a unique way for facilitating decisions. It is based on writing out potentially controversial decisions as explicit questions. Each such question can then have several potential answers, with pros and cons, and even ratings, followed by a decision, that can be approved or poked. This allows PMs to move quickly and make decisions, while making their thinking transparent and inviting to a structured discussion. Saves them a crazy amount of headache. Beyond that we allow for normal comments and mentions, and also allow PMs to instantly turn any document into a presentation. And of course, if a PM is concerned about what feedback they might receive, they can preempt that feedback by asking the AI to provide feedback from different perspectives, e.g. support, marketing, or even CEO. Another use case I find exciting is using Delibr to streamline the writing process. How does that work? So the most obvious way we support the writing process, on top of the dynamic templates, is to just as the AI to write the entire PRD. And by working on that use case quite a bit, it is now actually surprisingly good.  But the first thing will always just be a draft, and in going from a draft, Delibr has a huge advantage in being an “outliner” — which is a special type of writing tool, originally used by authors. It structures the document into a tree of nested bullet list and allows the writer to quickly collapse, expand, zoom, break things apart, move them around, and merge back again. This in itself makes the writing process faster and more delightful.  But we have also found it is such a good fit with generative AI. We have added commands so that the user can ask the AI, anywhere in the tree, to e.g. draft a new section, or brainstorm some ideas, or research that topic, or add pros and cons. Or, the writer can select any branch of the tree and give the AI some input for how to revise it, continue writing, and more. All-in-all, this becomes a very dynamic and engaging experience of almost building, iterating and pulling together the different parts of the document together with the AI. And how does Delibr integrate with the overall product management lifecycle? Delibr streamlines the entire product management process, not just refinement of PRDs and user stories, but all the way from strategy to development. Its features and AI templates support PMs at every stage, including strategy with visual goal breakdown — for instance OKRs as well as templates business model canvas, competitor analysis, and more — and Product Hierarchy helps PMs process feedback. It also supports discovery with Opportunity Solution Trees to enable PMs to structure their discovery work, validation with experiment boards, prioritization with solution rating, RICE scoring, and timeline/now-next-later roadmaps, development with AI templates for user stories, acceptance criteria, and release notes, and rollout with AI templates for help center articles, marketing briefs, press releases, and more. With so many product management tools, people may worry about having to reconcile information across platforms. Delibr is designed to be the single-source-of-truth for PMs, and has integrations with e.g. Zapier and Jira. A main use case for the Zapier integration is to pull in feedback from other systems. The real-time two-way sync with Jira, ensures product documents and Jira tickets are always up-to-date and reflect the same information. With less juggling many different platforms, Delibr streamlines the product management process, freeing up time and enabling PMs to focus on creating impact. What about you, how do you use Delibr? At Delibr, we have an internal slogan: “We couldn’t have built Delibr without Delibr.” Circular references for the win! On a more serious note, we structure insights from interviews on Opportunity Solution Trees, that break down into solutions, that also live on boards, and that link with Jira. Beyond that, most of the team uses it for basically everything. Once people start using Delibr and get the hang of it, the combination of the structured documents with an AI boost that lives embedded in customizable process flows is kind of unbeatable. How do you recommend someone get started? Getting started with Delibr is simple. First, sign up and describe your next feature to the AI, to get the quick win of a draft PRD to revise, discuss, and then send to Jira. Early on, use Delibr for refining epics. To learn more, attend the Outcome-Driven Product Leader program at the Delibr Academy. Over time, use Delibr to streamline your entire product management process and move away from the feature factory. You’re based in Stockholm. How did building your company outside of Silicon Valley influence your work? Being based in Stockholm has been great for us. The city has a thriving startup scene and is home to a high density of successful tech companies. This strong ecosystem has been beneficial for us in terms of access to funding and talent. And we have always had a mix of Swedes and people from different backgrounds, making for a nice “Sweinternational” culture. However, as we haven’t had the experience of building our company in Silicon Valley, we cannot make a direct comparison. And finally… What’s next for Delibr? Right now, we feel like we have struck gold with helping product managers, and so we will continue for some time with digging where we stand, working to create this new level of clarity and flow for PMs, enabling them to ship more value. It is really exciting to be at this intersection of where we can use our deep functional expertise to inject AI into the main tool in their workflow. However, product managers are at the very frontier in terms of how they work, compared to other knowledge workers. Over a longer time horizon, we believe that the rest will want to emulate and pick up how product managers work, and then the solutions and approaches we develop will be sought after by a much wider market. Thank you so much for your time, Nils! Where can people learn more about Delibr? Thank you! You can read more about Delibr on our website and follow our journey on LinkedIn. The post Harness the power of AI to supercharge your productivity with Nils Janse, founder of Delibr appeared first on Ness Labs.

“What am I here for?” is one of the oldest questions humans have been grappling with. For millennia, religion has provided for many a source of meaning — the comforting idea that someone was in control and that, even if we didn’t have the ability to comprehend it all, the world ultimately made sense. With the advent of modern science came the realization that there may not be any master plan after all. The complexity of nature seems to have arisen spontaneously, without any kind of ultimate justice in an afterlife. Without the guidance of religion in a world that is blind to suffering, many are left to define their life purpose on their own. This quest to move beyond mere survival to a life of significance, which should in theory provide us with increased clarity and motivation, can unfortunately become a source of stress — especially when everyone around us seems to have it all figured out. This is purpose anxiety: the fear of not knowing your purpose in life. A “why” for living To understand purpose anxiety, we need to understand what purpose is. Patrick McKnight and Todd Kashdan, two psychologists from George Mason University, defined purpose as a “central, self-organizing life aim that organizes and stimulates goals, manages behaviors, and provides a sense of meaning.” They describe purpose as a compass that provides direction to life, with continual targets for one to aspire to. They explain that purpose is based on a higher order of cognitive processing by the cerebral cortex, which means that it’s not driven by a primal motivation such as food, pleasure, or safety. While these primal motivations provide us with a “how” to survive, purpose is a “why” for living. While the words “purpose” and “meaning” are often used interchangeably, they’re actually two different constructs. Meaning is oriented towards cognition, our ability to mentally process and connect ideas and make sense of our lives. In contrast, purpose is geared toward action rather than comprehension. Both meaning and purpose enable us to better live in the present moment, but meaning helps us make sense of our memories so we can understand our past, while purpose helps us to consciously project ourselves in the future. Having a strong sense of purpose in life has been linked to many psychological benefits, such as higher levels of well-being, life satisfaction, self-acceptance, self-esteem, sense of control, and optimism. Conversely, lack of purpose is associated with depression and self-derogation.  Purpose seems to be a net positive in and of itself. But when the future is uncertain, we may struggle to define what exactly our purpose is. When unfruitful, this search for purpose can lead to existential distress, which the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl called “noögenic neurosis” — also known as purpose anxiety. The rise of purpose anxiety Our search for purpose can be associated with psychological distress, such as worry, fear, stress, frustration, and even jealousy. This phenomenon, purpose anxiety, has been defined by Larissa Rainey as “the experience of negative emotions in direct relation to the search for purpose.” While human beings have been wondering about their purpose in life for a long time, purpose anxiety has become more prevalent in the past century. Several factors may be responsible, such as longer life spans and a greater fulfillment of basic needs. As we’ve become wealthier and safer, we’ve started seeking motivation through the fulfillment of higher order needs. And as we’re now living longer than ever before, questions about death have been pushed further away in our minds, replaced with questions about life. In the words of psychologist Corey Keyes: “Science has succeeded in putting death further at bay, leaving in its wake new questions for individuals regarding what to do with the added years of life and how to make that time meaningful.” Culture has also shifted, making people reconsider their definition of self from an institutional perspective to an individual perspective. Work doesn’t provide purpose in the way it used to. Instead of accepting the purpose offered by society, we feel a powerful need to discover our own purpose for ourselves. Life is full of opportunities, but because purpose has become a choice instead of a calling, we are no longer provided with a map outlining what it looks like to live “the good life”. Fortunately, while it is true that searching for one’s life purpose involves psychological anguish, it can ultimately be rewarding. Dealing with purpose anxiety There is no magic bullet to finding a purpose in life, but we can make the search a lot less excruciating by applying simple strategies to minimize purpose anxiety. Avoid social comparison. When searching for a purpose in life, it can be tempting to compare ourselves to others, especially if we’re surrounded with people who seem to have found their calling. However, social comparison may inflate negative emotions and lead to purpose anxiety. Instead, practice self-reflection to understand your intrinsic motivations and explore the inner questions that fuel your curiosity. As Roy Bennet puts it: “Live the life of your dreams according to your vision and purpose instead of the expectations and opinions of others.” Embrace the liminal. Our time between life and death is an extended liminal space. It can be scary to not know where we’re going, which may lead us to desperately cling to a ladder of linear goals, where each next step is clearly defined in order to achieve success. But this liminal space can also be seen as a playground, full of opportunities for growth and discovery. Enjoy the journey by exploring different paths and learning about yourself along the way. Practice deliberate experimentation. As we have seen, purpose is action-oriented. Even if you don’t know yet what your purpose in life is, you can take steps towards investigating potential sources of purpose. Just like a scientist, design short experiments where you try working on a new project, meeting new people, or learning a new skill. Use metacognitive strategies to document the process and how it makes you feel so you can keep on adapting your experiments until you find a direction that feels stimulating and fulfilling. In the beautiful words of psychiatrist David Viscott: “The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.” Finding your purpose is a lifelong journey. It can cause anxiety. But, if we let ourselves enjoy the search, it can also help us live life to the fullest. The post Purpose Anxiety: The Fear of not Knowing your Purpose in Life appeared first on Ness Labs.

Dear reader, As the number of articles I’ve written has grown, it’s become harder and harder to make sense of the New Things Under the Sun back catalog. That’s a shame, because I update those older posts as the literature evolves, to keep them close to the academic frontier. So today I am happy to announce the launch of a set of indices to help readers figure out what they might want to read on New Things Under the Sun. Just a picture, check out the real thing here There are nine different indices, each of which gathers together all the articles I’ve written related to a specific topic, such as “how science works (or doesn’t)”, “geography of innovation”, and “how innovation is changing.” Inside each index, I’ve listed all the relevant articles on the topic and written a 3-6 bullet point description of the article’s contents. My hope is this makes it easy to find what you want to find. Click the button below to check out the indices and see if there is an article on the site that you would have read but didn’t know existed! Visit the Site Index But what if you’ve looked and what you want isn’t there? In that case, my advice is to head over to the progress forum, where I am answering user-submitted questions for the next 48 hours, and ask away. Thanks everyone; back to your regularly scheduled programming next time! -Matt Subscribe now P.S. Special thanks to my unpaid semi-competent intern, chatGPT for assistance writing bullet point descriptions of New Things Under the Sun articles. You didn’t really make this project easy, but you did make it feasible. Keep at it kid and I know, someday, I won’t have to rewrite 50% of your work. P.P.S Happy Valentines Day everyone!

Our preferred sleeping patterns affect both our mental health and our productivity. To make the most of your time and your energy, it is therefore essential to understand your chronotype. Human chronotypes roughly fall into two broad categories: the early risers and the late risers. As someone who has always been a morning lark, I fall strongly into the early riser category. I enjoy waking up when the day is young and am at my most productive during the early morning hours. Night owls, on the other hand, tend to wake up later in the morning (or afternoon), and are much more energetic during the latter hours of the day. Common wisdom tells us that “the early bird catches the worm” — that people who wake up early are more likely to get what they want. Is it true? Is one really better than the other? Let’s have a look at the science of chronotypes. Our internal biological clock Chronotypes are studied in the field of chronobiology, the study of biological rhythms. Chronobiology examines both the effect of time on biological events, and our internal biological clocks. Franz Halberg of the University of Minnesota, who has coined the term circadian, is widely considered to be the father of American chronobiology. One of the key topics of study in chronobiology is how our chronotype is related to the circadian rhythm, a process that keeps our sleep-wake cycle roughly the same so that it can repeat every 24 hours. Put simply, the circadian rhythm helps us to stay awake during the day so that we sleep at night. While the circadian rhythm occurs naturally in health, external factors such as light and temperature can interrupt it. For example, those who live close to the north pole are known to be at risk of sleep disturbances including “midwinter insomnia” during dark periods of the year. Circadian rhythm disturbances have also been identified in some mood disorders including depression and seasonal affective disorder. Why we have different chronotypes “Morningness” and “eveningness” are alternative terms used to describe an individual’s chronotype and preferences for when one chooses to sleep. Those who lean towards morningness prefer to go to bed and wake earlier than those who lean towards eveningness. There is emerging evidence suggesting that our chronotype has a strong genetic component. Using chromosome information available in the UK Biobank cohort, researchers identified new genetic loci that could be related to core circadian rhythm and light-sensing pathways.  The variation between individuals could have evolved as a survival technique in hunter-gatherers, as it may have offered groups greater collective safety. While some people were sleeping, others could stay awake and protect the tribe. While your chronotype might be affected by genetics, there are other factors that can impact your preferred sleep pattern. Chronotype has been shown to vary with age. Kindergarten aged children are morning oriented, but by the teenage years, there has often been a shift to eveningness. Aged 17 to 20, the return to morningness may mark the end of adolescence. With increasing age in adulthood, one is likely to become even more morning oriented. Differences in sex are also present, with women tending to wake earlier and generally preferring morning activities when compared to men. The impact of sleep patterns Your sleep patterns can impact important areas of your life. Tristan Enright and Roberto Refinetti demonstrated that chronotype can impact academic achievement. Studying 207 university students, the researchers found some evidence that early birds may attain better grades than night owls, probably due to evening chronotypes “being more sleep deprived (…) as a result of the early schedule of most schools.” Christoph Randler and colleagues reviewed the evidence of multiple studies, and noted that morningness was related to greater extraversion, conscientiousness and agreeableness when compared to eveningness. However, there are plenty of positives associated with being a night owl. While morning types might have a slight academic advantage, eveningness correlates with an aptitude for creative thinking, including fluidity, flexibility and originality. Eveningness was also associated with being more open to new experiences. In addition, researchers Marina Giampietro and Guido Cavallera noted that those with an evening disposition had greater ability to apply divergent thinking strategies to visual content. This may make it easier to generate a variety of ideas or alternative solutions to problems. However, Giampietro and Cavallera found a higher risk of behavioral troubles, greater stress rates and more difficulties in social adaptation for night owls. Both chronotypes have advantages and limitations. The key is to understand your sleep patterns so you can use them to your advantage. How to make the most of your chronotype Determining your natural chronotype will allow you to make the most of it. Unlike students who are constrained by class times, many employers support flexible work hours which could empower you to work earlier or later to harness the benefits of your chronotype.  The easiest way to determine your chronotype is to put your alarm clock away and experiment with when you naturally want to go to bed and wake up. One’s chronotype is more of a spectrum than a binary measure, so you may find you fall somewhere between the early bird and the night owl. Once you have hidden your alarm clock, use a sleep tracking device on your watch or download an app to monitor your sleep patterns. This can help you understand how many hours you sleep for, how long it takes you to fall asleep, and during which part of the night you are getting restorative deep sleep. You may notice that your sleep quality or quantity is better following an early night, or when you go to bed later but have a lie in. Once you have a better idea of your chronotype, you will have a better idea of which sleep routine suits you. Adhering to this sleep schedule means you should be sleeping when your body is naturally ready to rest. For morning larks, this knowledge may help you avoid persevering with a task long after you should have gone to bed. For night owls, the pressure to wake up and work before you are ready should be eased. Once your sleep routine is in place, think about how best to manage your work demands. Schedule your creative work for when you are most alert  As an early bird, I know I am at my most creative before 11am. Where possible, this is therefore the time that I set aside for work that demands imagination, resourcefulness and innovation. In the afternoons, I know I can get the more straightforward admin work completed. Night owls can flip this schedule, first completing simple tasks, before creativity blossoms in the afternoon or evening. Chronotypes can impact important areas of your life, including academic achievement, creativity and thinking strategies. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that you can change your chronotype, as it is mostly determined by your age, sex and genetics. Recognizing your chronotype, and working out how to make the most of your biological rhythm, can help you work with your body’s needs, rather than against them. Maximizing your creativity and efficiency by working at times that suit your sleep pattern could help you feel better rested and able to work more productively. The post Chronotypes: Is it better to be a night owl or an early bird? appeared first on Ness Labs.

Introspection is considered an inherently human ability. While external observation allows us to understand the world around us, internal contemplation allows us to examine our own thoughts and feelings to foster self-reflection and self-discovery. The practice may be as old as humanity itself. Thousands of years ago, Plato asked: “Why should we not calmly and patiently review our own thoughts, and thoroughly examine and see what these appearances in us really are?” Most spiritual traditions throughout the ages and across the planet include some form of introspection, whether it is the nepsis (Greek for “sober introspection”) of Orthodox Christian theology, the pratikraman (Sanskrit for “introspection”) of Jainism, or the muḥāsaba (Arabic for “self-interrogation) of Islam. Today, journaling and other methods of introspection are commonly encouraged by mental health practitioners to help people manage their thoughts and emotions, better understand their actions, and make more deliberate decisions. Which bears the question: is introspection always good, and does more introspection automatically lead to increased well-being? Times of introspection Whether we want it or not, life is full of moments of introspection. Some are forced upon us, for instance when we encounter failure or when we lose a loved one. Our attention is violently pulled inward, towards our internal mental and emotional states, without much control over the process. The cadence of these forced moments of introspection is by definition uncontrollable. Other times, we decide to sit down and make space for introspection. It may be because we are considering an important choice or feel like we need to better understand an experience, or because we have committed to an artificial cadence of introspection. You could have a daily journaling practice, a weekly review, or conduct a year-end retrospective. All of these practices have in common that they follow a fixed frequency, where you commit to regularly reflect on your thoughts, your emotions, and your progress towards your goals. You would think that such a habitual practice would be good in and of itself. But, as often with psychological processes, the reality is a little bit more complicated than that. Research has shown that introspection, when not practiced properly, can lead to many unintended consequences. In one of the most famous studies on the consequences of introspection, psychologist Anthony Grant discovered that introspection was negatively correlated with insight. The more participants practiced self-reflection, the less self-knowledge they had. Their results suggest that you could spend an infinite amount of time in introspection without emerging with any more insight than before you started. What is happening here? This phenomenon is called the introspection trap. We basically think that introspection will automatically give us the answers we need, and we go for the most obvious answers — the ones that feel simple and plausible. This often results in confirmation bias, our natural tendency to interpret and remember information in a way that confirms our prior hypotheses or personal beliefs. Another way we tend to go for the easiest answers is by only considering the most recent information, a form of memory bias known as the recency effect. This is particularly the case when we practice self-reflection right after an event, instead of giving our mind some time to process the experience. For instance, let’s say that you had a fight with a colleague. You decide to grab your journal or to open your daily notes to write about the conversation and how it made you feel. In that scenario, you are likely to seek justifications for why your colleague was wrong, and to be influenced by the strong emotions you are still feeling after the fight that just happened. In contrast, if you wait until the next morning to practice self-reflection, you will create more distance between your present self who is journaling and your past self who went through the unpleasant event, which will allow you to consider your experience more objectively. As you can see, the crucial aspect of temporality when it comes to introspection is not about how often you sit down to contemplate your thoughts and emotions. It’s about when you do it. Turning introspection into insight The two main cognitive biases that can reduce the benefits of introspection are the confirmation bias and the memory bias. If you jump to conclusions, you will simply validate your existing beliefs and you won’t be able to find the actual answer to your questions. If you systematically turn to introspection without allowing enough time for unconscious processing to happen in your mind, you won’t be able to turn introspection into insight. It doesn’t matter how often you practice journal or proactively review your experiences if you let these cognitive biases get in the way of generating helpful insights. Fortunately, there are some simple principles you can apply to avoid falling into the introspection trap. Make space for unconscious processing. If you just experienced a difficult or puzzling event, wait for a while before grabbing your notebook. You’ve probably noticed that we often have “aha” moments while showering — which we aptly call shower thoughts. It’s because we often don’t try to do any hard thinking in the shower. Your brain is capable of processing lots of information in the background through diffused thinking, but it requires that you temporarily let go of the steering wheel. Practice second-level thinking. Avoid jumping to conclusions by exploring alternative explanations beyond the most likely one. A quick way to practice second-level thinking to make better decisions is to use the 10-10-10 questions: “How will I feel about it 10 minutes from now? How will I feel about it 10 months from now? How will I feel about it 10 years from now?” Experiment with structured introspection. To make sure you don’t fall prey to cognitive biases, you can try using a self-reflection template with questions that encourage you to dig deeper. This could be asking “why?” five times to get to the core of the problem, or it could be a personal template that includes some of your most common blindspots. For instance, if you know that you tend to fall prey to the recency effect, you could add a question asking how the most recent instance connects to past experiences. Embrace moments of forced introspection. There will be times where life will throw unexpected challenges at you that force you to consider your thoughts and emotions. It may be tempting to avoid these painful moments of introspection, but they can be an incredible source of personal growth. Instead of turning away, try to lean into the discomfort to expand your self-knowledge. Harness the power of collective intelligence. Finally, it may sound counterintuitive, but you don’t have to do it all alone. Researchers call “group-based dialogic introspection”, where participants first spend some time examining their thoughts and emotions on their own, then discuss them with the group. While it doesn’t have to be as formal as in a research setting, you could try the exercise with a trusted friend so you can add a layer of objectivity to your self-reflection process. Albert Camus once wrote: “In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion”. However, the way we engage with our inner world will affect how useful this process can be. Without care, we can easily fall prey to the introspection trap. Like any other tool, introspection can be misused. Increasing your cadence of introspection won’t help you unlock more insights. Rather, you need to make room for unconscious processing of your experiences and try to reduce the impact of cognitive biases. A structured format or reflecting as part of a small group can be helpful to turn introspection into insights. The post The Introspection Trap appeared first on Ness Labs.

Some experts say tooth-grinding is a behavior rather than a disorder, and the dentist’s chair isn’t the best place to address it.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help you think better and work smarter. Alex MacCaw is the founder of Reflect, a networked note-taking app designed so you never miss a note, idea or connection. Reflect makes it a joy to collect information and connect ideas. In this interview, we talked about the most important principles for a sustainable note-taking app, the limitations of collaboration for note-taking, how to build a CRM with backlinks notes, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Alex! Let’s state the obvious: there are already lots of note-taking apps out there. But Reflect seems to be different in that it’s built around strong core values. That’s for sure — there’s a lot of different apps out there which is indicative of the size of the problem and the nuances in all the different ways people think. When it comes to note-taking everyone has an opinion and different requirements. If you’re not careful you try to appeal to everyone, and then you end up making a kind of Frankenstein app that serves no-one. That’s why, when I started the company, I wrote down a set of product principles to be our north star. When people come and ask me “Is Reflect the tool for me?” I point them to those principles and ask if they resonate. Those principles are: speed, security, reliability, and simplicity. All we’re trying to build is a simple tool that just works and gets out the way. It’s got to be frictionless and fast, it’s got to work offline and quickly sync, and it’s got to be secure – your notes are probably the most personal data you own. And how do those values translate to how Reflect works? For speed and simplicity, notes are instantly synced across your devices. Speed is prioritized as new things are added in, so that things don’t become overly clunky and slow over time. And we apply the “less is more” principle — we’d rather hone existing features than add more. For security, notes are fully end-to-end encrypted — only you have access to them. We’ve also passed a security audit and follow best practices. When it comes to reliability, you can take your notes across all your devices, and have them sync instantly, even with offline work. You can import your notes from other existing notes tools, and easily export your notes if you decide to leave. Last but not least, we focus on sustained, profitable growth, and have no intention of raising venture capital. This increases the chances we’re always around. That sounds great. Another challenge with many note-taking apps is that your ideas end up living in a silo, making it hard or overwhelming to share your thoughts with others. Collaboration is great when you’re working out of a Google Doc or a Notion page for a project with your team. They you’re writing in the public domain — these aren’t your internal thoughts.  But when you know (or even suspect) that others might be seeing what you are writing, you become much more likely to self-censor. Your thoughts and ideas become less original. For something like your personal notes, this is problematic. Instead of focusing on how to give others access to your notes, thoughts and ideas, Reflect focuses on how to privately capture everything in a frictionless way. This might be saving snippets from your Kindle or browser, easily capturing an idea from mobile on the fly, or recording a voice recording directly into your notes. We want to eliminate that feeling of forgetting a brilliant idea before writing it down, or what your thoughts were on a pitch that was made weeks ago. When you are ready to share your ideas with the world, you can one-click publish to allow anyone to access that specific note. Another use case I find exciting is using Reflect as a CRM. How does that work? Most CRMs function like a digital rolodex. You put a contact in with some info, then shut it away until you need that specific person’s contact info. At best you can put additional details of the contact into the file. But this misses everything important that happens around that person (or place, or thing). The conversations and interactions you’ve had with the person, where your last conversation left off, and every other detail you learn and collect along the way is what really makes the difference. Not forgetting the details helps us build stronger relationships and connections. Take 1-to-1 meetings. Reflect pulls in your calendar appointments, and auto creates a backlinked note around the event with the subjects. When you have a 1-1 with someone on your team, you can instantly pull up the linked note and pick up right where you left off last time. This system is great for people like myself who have a ‘goldfish brain’. Instead of repeating someone’s name in your head over and over to try to internalize that small piece of information, just create a backlinked note.  What about you, how do you use Reflect? The way I use Reflect does evolve and change as I change, but generally speaking it goes like this… Everyday, Reflect automatically creates a new note dedicated to that day. I have a ‘journal’ template that contains things like ‘top of mind’, ‘grateful’, ‘habit checklist’, and what I worked on that day. Meetings go in my daily note too — they’re a one-click add with the calendar integration. In the evenings I like recording an audio journal. This then gets transcribed and uploaded into Reflect. That’s it! So simple! What’s the personal drive behind building Reflect? I have got different things out of the different companies I’ve started. My last one, Clearbit, got quite big and did the whole VC thing. It was a huge catalyst for personal growth and where I spent some formative years of my twenties. With Reflect, I’m really optimizing for having fun, and for me that means programming. If I get to sit down and build out some new features, maybe chat to our customers in Discord, well, that’s a good day for me. It’s also been nice building products for myself for a change. In many ways building a consumer company is a lot harder than building something for businesses, but one of the perks is that you are the customer. And you get to make it just the way you want it. That does sound like the perfect way to scratch your own itch. How do you recommend someone get started with Reflect? First head to our website and start a free trial. After signing up, read through our 4 page note-taking course. It will tell you how to use Reflect effectively, and will also give you some real-world examples and use cases to get you started. Create your first daily note by outlining your to-do list for the day and linking any names or places — if it starts with a name, link it. Keep building from there! Your notes will become more valuable over time as you connect things through backlinks and tags. And finally… What’s next for Reflect? We’ve got lots of fun stuff cooking. The most immediate of which is my favorite thing to work on: performance improvements. We’re about to launch a version of Reflect that uses less memory and starts twice as fast. Later this year we’ve got some things like an iPad app, advanced search, and a few more AI related things we’ll share more about soon. Thank you so much for your time, Alex! Where can people learn more about Reflect? Thank you! You can sign up and find more about the app on reflect.app. We also have a note-taking course on our Reflect Academy page, where people can learn how to take better notes. And of course they can follow @reflectnotes on Twitter. The post Unleashing the power of networked notes with Alex MacCaw, founder of Reflect appeared first on Ness Labs.

For decades, the metaphor that the brain is a machine has caused some confusion. However, even if the metaphor is incorrect from a biological standpoint, viewing the mind as a machine can be useful as a heuristic for everyday decision-making. Created by a cognitive scientist at Harvard University, the concept of “mindware” builds upon the computer analogy to encapsulate the mental knowledge and procedures we use to solve problems and make decisions. It’s a practical metaphor to help you decide what to “download” into your mind. What we download onto our mind The term “mindware” was coined by David Perkins in his 1996 book Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence, where he argues that there are three types of intelligence: neural, experiential, and reflective. Perkins describes neural intelligence as the “hard-wired, original equipment”, or the brain’s hardware that we have to work with initially. This form of intelligence might be genetically determined, and is the type that is often measured by traditional intelligence tests. Neural intelligence might assist you with pattern recognition, time series prediction, signal processes and anomaly detection. Experiential intelligence refers to context-specific knowledge that is accumulated through experience. The more stimulating the environment you are exposed to, the more experiential intelligence you might expect to acquire. Varied stimulation could therefore give you an intellectual advantage. The last type of intelligence according to Perkins is reflective intelligence. Reflective intelligence is what Perkins calls mindware; the ability to use and manipulate our cerebral skills to effectively utilize neural and experiential intelligence. Mindware represents the tools that we can “download” to our mind to broaden our thinking patterns and processes — it’s not too different from the most scientifically accepted concept of metacognition. Mindware as a practical metaphor Again, mindware is not a neurobiological aspect of the brain you could directly observe, but rather a useful metaphor for thinking about thinking. Whereas neural intelligence can be compared to the hardware that a computer is built with, reflective intelligence, or mindware, would be the figurative software. In his book, Perkins writes that “the programs you run in your mind […] enable you to do useful things with data stored in your memory”. Perkins argues that reflective intelligence is a form of intelligent behavior, and its development should therefore be fostered. As with computer software, the mindware that we might choose to download will depend on what we currently consume, our interests, and our goals for development. If you apply this metaphor, choosing to download useful mindware can be beneficial for everyday decision-making. Selecting the right mindware for your needs will help you make the best use of your mind in terms of knowledge, understanding, behavior and attitudes. With mindware supporting the development of your thinking, you can make better choices, decisions and judgments. With greater quality to your reasoning, you can select better mindware. It’s a virtuous cycle. In his book Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, Richard E. Nisbett explores how mindware can promote a powerful form of problem-solving. Mindware can help us frame common problems so that scientific and statistical principles can be applied to them. Nisbett argues that developing these tools needed for cognitive reasoning allows for the practical application when faced with personal or professional decisions. Just as with computer software, we should also remain alert to the risks of downloading “cognitive malware”. A  study by researchers led by Jala Rizeq argued that contamination with cognitive malware could cause unwarranted beliefs and attitudes, including conspiracy beliefs and anti-science attitudes. Without maintenance, our brains can become congested by malware. Learning how to clear the malware and make space for helpful mindware can help to protect us from negative thought processes or decisions. With practice, one can learn to better identify forms of malware so that it is not downloaded in the first place. This idea is similar to the concept of mind gardening, which encourages us to be mindful of the “seeds” we plant in our mind garden so it produces supportive, productive, creative thoughts. How to download useful mindware One of the first steps is to become more mindful of the content you consume. In the same way that you would not download random software onto your computer without checking if it is safe and genuine, downloading mindware to your brain requires the same process. Before you cognitively “download” anything new, think about whether you trust the source of the data, and if the information will benefit you. A common form of mindware is mental models. They can be used constructively in shaping our thoughts and behaviors. You may discover mental models that will work for you when reading a book, listening to a podcast, or having a conversation with a friend or colleague. If you encounter a useful mental model, add it to your note-taking app for later reference. Conversely, avoid downloading cognitive biases, a form of mindware that can lead you to incorrectly process and interpret information or to make inaccurate assumptions from your observations. This can negatively impact the way we think, or stop us from fully exploring the potential consequences of our decisions. Being aware of cognitive biases can help us ensure we intentionally act in ways that will support our personal or professional growth. The theory of learnable intelligence shows that by downloading mindware, we can take control of the tools we employ for thinking. To remain healthy, our minds need to be treated with care, including the mindware that we download to them. In the same way that you take care to protect your computer from malware, it’s important that you feel confident about the reliability, reputability, and safety of the information you consume. This will allow you to create a library of mindware that will support you in making well-thought-out decisions. That’s part of why the concept of mindware can be such a helpful metaphor. The post Mindware: A Theory of Learnable Intelligence appeared first on Ness Labs.

Like the rest of New Things Under the Sun, this article will be updated as the state of the academic literature evolves; you can read the latest version here. You can listen to this post above, or via most podcast apps here. Talent is spread equally over the planet, but opportunity is not. Today I want to look at some papers that try to quantify the costs to science and innovation from barriers to immigration. Specifically, let’s look at a set of papers on what happens to individuals with the potential to innovate when they immigrate versus when they do not. (See my post Importing Knowledge for some discussion on the impact of immigration on native scientists and inventors) All of these papers confront the same fundamental challenge: successfully immigrating is (usually) a matter of choice, selection, and luck. For the purposes of investigating the impact of immigration on innovation, that means we can’t simply compare immigrants to non-immigrants. For example, immigrants (usually) choose to migrate, and if they do so because they believe they will be more successful abroad, that signals something about their underlying level of ambition and risk tolerance. That, in turn, might mean they are more likely to be innovative scientists or inventors, even if they had not migrated. Compounding this problem, countries impose all sorts of rules about who is allowed to migrate and many of these rules make it easier to migrate if you can demonstrate some kind of aptitude and talent. That means successful immigrants are often going to be drawn from a pool of people more likely to have the talent to succeed in science and invention, even if they had not immigrated. These are challenges; but there is also a degree of capricious luck in immigration (and life in general). There are people - perhaps many people - who want to immigrate and have extraordinary talent, but who do not for all sorts of random reasons. Compared to otherwise identical people who do migrate, they might lack information, financial resources, or face higher barriers to legal immigration. Indeed, in many cases, immigration is literally handed out by lottery! The papers we’ll look at employ various strategies to try and find comparable groups of people who immigrate and people who do not, to infer the impact of immigration and place on innovation. Subscribe now Talented High Schoolers One way to deal with the selection effect is to try and measure the talent of a sample of both immigrants and non-immigrants and then compare immigrants and non-immigrants who appear to have similar underlying talent. Agrawal and Gaule (2020) and Agrawal et al. (2023) does this with the International Mathematical Olympiads. The International Mathematical Olympiads is a prominent math competition for high school students from around the world that’s been held annually for decades. Up to six representatives from each country are selected via regional and national competitions, and then travel to a common city and try to solve six different (presumably very hard) math problems. Because it’s an Olympiad, winners take home gold, silver and bronze medals. Agrawal and coauthors know the scores of all the competitors from 1981 to 2000 and then look to see what happens to the competitors later in life. In Agrawal and Gaule (2020) they show that scores on these math competitions strongly predicts later success as a mathematician. That in itself is surprising, given that the talents for doing creative mathematical research may, in principle, differ substantially from performance in a competition. From Agrawal and Gaule (2020) Their dataset also establishes something else: students from low income countries are less likely to obtain PhDs in math than students with the same score from high-income countries. In Agrawal et al. (2023) they use this dataset to look at the different fates of those who immigrate from their home country and those who do not. On average, a migrant is about twice as likely to be employed in academia as a mathematician as someone from the same county who got the same math score but did not migrate. Of course, while math scores help address the problem of selection, this doesn’t really get at the problem of choice. Perhaps people who really want to be mathematicians are disproportionately likely to migrate, since the highest ranked mathematics departments tend to be in the USA, and it’s this difference in career intention that explains the difference in career outcomes between migrants and non-migrants. Agrawal et al. (2023) provides some additional evidence that this is not purely an outcome of career choice. For one, looking only at migrant and non-migrant students who both become math academics (in their own country or abroad), they find the migrants go on to garner about 85% more citations to their publications than their domestic peers (remember, with the same score in math competitions). We might think citations aren’t a great measure of math skill (see my post Do Academic Citations Measures the Value of Ideas?), but they also show migrant academics are about 70% more likely to become speakers at the International Congress of Mathematicians (a non-citation-based measure of community recognition). So among people who ended up becoming academic mathematicians (either at home or abroad), the ones who migrated went on to have more distinguished careers, as compared to their peers who did equally well in high school on math. But this is still pretty indirect evidence. Fortunately, Agrawal and coauthors also just asked Olympiad medalists directly about their preferences in a survey. From respondents in low- and middle-income countries, 66% said they would have liked to do their undergraduate degree in the USA if they could have studied anywhere. Only 25% actually did. Just 11% said their first choice was to study in their home country. In fact, 51% did. Why didn’t they study abroad if that’s what they wanted to do? A bunch of the survey evidence suggests the problem was money. For 56% of the low- and middle-income respondents, they said the availability of financial assistance was very or extremely important. Students from low- and middle-income countries were also much more likely to choose a hypothetical funded offer of admission at a lower ranked school than their peers in high-income countries. Gibson and McKenzie (2014) provides some complementary evidence outside of mathematics. As part of a larger project on migration and brain drain, they identify 851 promising young New Zealanders who graduated high school between 1976 and 2004. These students either represented New Zealand on the International Mathematical Olympiad teams, the International Chemistry Olympiad team, were top in exams, or earned the New Zealand equivalent of the valedictorian rank. Like Agrawal and coauthors, they can then see what happens to New Zealanders who migrate, versus those who remain. They find researchers who moved abroad publish more than those who do not. As noted, this poses some potential problems; even though we know all these students were talented, those who migrate may have different unobserved levels of skill, ambition, risk tolerance, or something. One way they attempt to deal with this is to focus their attention on the subset of researchers who actually do migrate away from New Zealand, and then looking to see what happens to their research output when they move back. The idea here is those who left were, at least initially, displaying similar levels of skill, ambition, risk tolerance, and so forth (if so, why did they return? We’ll get to that). For each New Zealand migrant researcher who returns to New Zealand, Gibson and McKenzie try to find another migrant who stayed abroad, but is similar in age, gender, what they studied in high school, highest degree, and so on. They then look to see what happens to the number of citations to their academic work. While both groups had essentially the same citations prior to return migration, after one group returned to New Zealand, the citations to their work declined substantially relative to the citations of migrants who remained abroad. From Gibson and McKenzie (2014).Citations fall at the end partially due to a mechanical effect: there are fewer years available for more recent papers to receive citations. Again, we see that being abroad was good for research productivity. But again, perhaps we are concerned that there is an important but unstated difference between New Zealanders who stayed abroad and those who returned home. Perhaps the ones who came back simply couldn’t cut it? But we actually don’t see much evidence of that. The figure above matches each returnee to someone who stayed abroad based on a number of characteristics. But one characteristic they were not matched on is citations to their academic work. And yet, prior to returning, their citations were on a very similar trajectory. And like Agrawal and coauthors, Gibson and McKenzie also surveyed their subjects to see why they moved back. Most of the answers were not related to individual research productivity, but had to do with, for example, concerns about aging parents, child-raising, and the location of extended family. Scholarship Restrictions Another line of evidence comes from Kahn and MacGarvie (2016), which focuses on PhD students who come to America from abroad. The paper’s big idea is to compare students who come on the prestigious Fulbright program to similar peers who were not Fulbright fellows. The students and their matches are really similar in this case: they graduated from the same PhD program, either studying under the exact same advisor and graduating within 3 years of each other, or merely studying in the same program but graduating in the same year. The only difference was the Fulbright students have a requirement to leave the USA for two years after finishing their studies, whereas the matched students faced no such...

We live in a society where speed has become a measure of performance. We try to quickly go through our to-do lists, keep up with fast-evolving market demands, and rapidly ship product updates. Sure, we’re productive, in the oldest sense of the term — from Latin producere, which means “to bring forth”. But it somehow doesn’t feel like we are going forth. We dreadfully sense that for all the work we do, we’re not really growing. We’re stuck in a pointless pursuit, trying to outrun each other and ultimately outrunning ourselves. As a result, the breakneck pace of blind productivity is leaving many people burnt out. In a 1953 article, famous physicist Samuel Goudsmit already wondered “whether [all the] contrivances physicists have lately rigged up to create energy by accelerating particles of matter [weren’t] playing a wry joke on their inventors. “They are accelerating us too,” he says. In protesting against the speedup, Goudsmit can speak with authority, for in the course of only a few years, he, like many other contemporary physicists, has seen his way of life change from a tranquil one of contemplation to a rat race.” We could argue that speed is not problematic in and of itself. In fact, many of us find ourselves able to work quite fast on a project when we feel passionate about it — as if wind was blowing through our sails and easily pushing us forward. But it’s because such projects come with a sense of direction. A mental model for directed growth Speed itself doesn’t have direction. When you say that you’re moving at a certain speed (“I’m driving 80 miles per hour”), it doesn’t tell you anything about where you’re going. This is what mathematicians call a “scalar” — a quantity that can be fully described by its magnitude alone. Speed is a scalar, and so are volume, mass, and time. When you’re talking about how fast or how big something is, you’re describing it as a scalar. In contrast, a vector is described by both its magnitude and its direction. Velocity is an example of vector: it not only tells you how fast you’re going, but also where you’re going — for instance, “I’m driving 80 miles per hour to the south.” Thinking about your actions as vectors instead of scalars is a helpful mental model to manage your goals. You’re working a lot (magnitude), but are you learning (direction)? Your team is shipping product updates fast (magnitude), but is customer feedback improving (direction)? How to design effective vectors of action Once you understand this mental model, you can consider your vectors of action so it becomes easier to objectively assess your progress, your impact, and your well-being. Consider velocity over speed. Remember to not only consider the magnitude of actions — i.e. how fast you’re going, how much work you’re producing — but also the direction of your actions. When considering your actions, think about your trajectory, such as your learning goals, personal growth, opportunities for self-discovery, and wider impact. Reflect on your sense of direction. Do you feel like you’re being pulled in different directions? That you’re unclear as to where exactly you — or your team — are going? Or maybe you are going in the right direction, but at the expense of your well-being. Block time to regularly review both your progress and its impact on your emotional and mental health. There is no point making progress if you burn out in the process. Reviewing your external success and your internal experience will help you more sustainable work practices.  Keep adjusting your trajectory. If you notice that you’re not going anywhere or not going in the right direction, make changes to get on a path that makes sense to you. These changes can be small such as tweaking a workflow or implementing a new routine, or bigger such as exploring a new career or starting a side project. Again, what matters is that these changes improve the direction of your actions. Vectors of action offer a more holistic view of your progress and whether you’re going in the right direction. Seeing your actions as a vector and not a scalar is a simple mental model to reflect and make adjustments to the way you work, so you can maximize personal growth without sacrificing your mental health. In the words of Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman: “Growth is a direction, not a destination.” The post Vectors of Action appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Laurent Cozic is the founder of Joplin, an open source note-taking app designed to help you capture your thoughts and securely access them from any device. In this interview, we talked about why open source matters for note-taking, the benefits of offline-first note-taking applications, his commitment to privacy and security, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Laurent, it’s great to have you! Joplin is one of the very few open source note-taking apps out there. What made you decide to go this route? The fact that it is open source is an important aspect for many of our users, because it means there is no vendor locking on the data, and that data can be easily exported and accessed in various ways. I went this route because I was looking for a good note taking app back in 2016 and couldn’t find any satisfying option, and I didn’t want to end up having all my data under the control of a third-party. Indeed, most companies have little incentive to provide good export options, because obviously they don’t want you to go elsewhere. So the day you want to migrate, you find that you’re kind of stuck here. With Joplin on the other hand, we make a point of providing multiple and reliable export options to standard export formats. Moreover, we have a strong commitment to make an app focused on privacy and security, and the best way to achieve that is to be transparent about the software. By publishing the code publicly, anyone can audit it and verify that the data is not misused for example. Those positions are not always economically sound ones — after all, anyone can steal the source code if it is public, and anyone can easily move to a different app if we make it easy. However, we want to differentiate ourselves and, in a way, convince our users to stay with us by providing quality and secure software you can rely on. That’s a great product philosophy! You’re also a vocal advocate for privacy and security. As we have more and more of our data online, keeping things private and secure is increasingly important, even more so for a note taking app, which can contain a lot of private notes and work-related documents. One of the ways we achieve this is via the end-to-end encryption feature. It means that the data is encrypted on your device before it is uploaded to the cloud. And since you’re the only one who knows the key, nobody else can access your data. Even if someone hacks the cloud server, they will not be able to read the encrypted information. We are also transparent about any connection that the application makes, and disclose the list of third-party services the app needs access to. Those are needed to provide certain features such as auto-update or to search for plugins, but usually those features can be disabled too. Finally, we also work with security researchers to keep the app more secure. We receive a few vulnerability reports every year and act on them as quickly as possible. The app was audited by a security analyst as well, who provided a number of useful pieces of advice, most of which were implemented. For example, we now make use of the system keychain to store sensitive information on Windows and macOS. Beside your strong commitment to open source, privacy, and security, what makes Joplin different from other note-taking solutions? Besides regular plaintext notes, Joplin supports various media formats such as images, videos, audio files and PDFs. From the mobile app you can also take a photo and attach it to the current note, and we will also add freehand drawing to the desktop and mobile apps soon. It’s also possible to create diagrams and charts using Mermaid, and to create maths expressions using Katex. One of the strengths of Joplin is the ability to customise it to your needs — you can do so for example by installing plugins. We have close to 150 different plugins to add functionalities such as backlink support (Zettelkasten style), calendaring, templates, tabs to open multiple notes at once, etc. And there are various plugins to improve the editor, improve tag management, and customise the application theme. We also have an Extension API which external applications can be used to interact with Joplin. For example, someone created a VSCode plugin to browse your notes from the editor, and there’s also a Thunderbird plugin to create a note from an email. Not long ago, we’ve also added support for “callback urls”. Those are Joplin-specific URLs that can be used to open a note within Joplin from any third-party application. For example, we use this feature in our issue tracker — the issues are on GitHub but we link to certain Joplin notes that will contain some additional information. Via these plugins and external applications, it’s possible to customise the application to fit your workflow, such as GTD and Zettelkasten, and to automate and simplify various tasks. Finally, Joplin is offline-first, so data is always available on the device, even without an internet connection. I believe this gives peace of mind because you can be sure that your notes can always be accessed, even without a connection, and even if the service you sync with closes down. This sounds like an infinitely extendable note-taking app! What about collaborating with other people? Thanks to Joplin Cloud it is now possible to collaborate on notebooks with others. You can share a notebook with someone, and they will have full access to it along with the notes and sub-notebooks it might contain. This is useful to teams for example, to share documents related to a project, or to create a wiki. We actually use this extensively at Joplin. As with regular notes, this shared data is secured using end-to-end encryption. Additionally you can also publish a note to the internet. The app will generate a secure link which can be shared with others — the note will then be displayed as a mini-website and can be accessed from any browser. With so many different use cases and so many different devices you support, what does it look like to capture notes with Joplin? Over time we developed various ways to capture notes into Joplin. The app is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android and all those apps can sync with each other. Additionally we provide a web clipper extension that can be used to save web pages or to take screenshots in the browser and save them to notes. The mobile apps also let you capture information in various ways. For example, you can take a photo and attach it to a note, or share documents with the app to again attach them. That kind of flexibility sounds great. What about you, how do you use Joplin? For work, I use it for example to maintain a list of features to be implemented. I also record various ideas for new features or plugins. And I keep various notes on how to run Joplin Cloud, email templates too. For personal notes, I use the app for many different things. For example, to organise trips so that I know where to go and when to go, and I link the relevant flight tickets and other reservations to these notes. I also have notebooks on various topics — cars, various recipes. I also use it to store sheet music so that I can easily access them from my tablet on the piano. I have general to-do lists too as well as shopping lists. My notes are not particularly well organised. I simply put them into different notebooks, and I rely on the search engine to find what I need. I use the “Go to anything” feature a lot, as it allows me to quickly jump from one note to another without leaving the keyboard. How do you recommend someone get started? There are many ways to use Joplin so it will depend on your objectives. For your own personal use, simply download the app from our website, install it and press “Synchronise” — that will give you some options to sync your data between devices. From there, try the app and see if you like it! Something that’s often overlooked in Joplin is that a large collection of plugins is available, and that’s useful to add certain features that you need but are missing from the app. To install a plugin, open the “Config” screen and navigate to the “Plugins”. From there you can easily search and install plugins. If you are planning to use Joplin for your organisation, it might be a good idea to give a try to the Teams option of Joplin Cloud. With this you can easily manage your team members, add new ones, and manage billing in a central place. Once Joplin Cloud is set up for everybody, you can share and collaborate on notebooks, and publish notes to the internet. And finally… What’s next for Joplin? For the fourth year now, we participate in Google Summer of Code, which means a few students will be working over the summer on various projects to improve the app. In general we remain committed to the open source spirit of Joplin and GSoC is a great way to do that — it gives students a chance to work on a relatively large codebase while being mentored by us, and on our side we can get some great work done. It’s always an interesting experience and we’re looking forward to it. The Joplin Cloud service that was launched in 2021 has been a great success and is being continuously improved. It offers increased performances over other sync options, and has additional features such as sharing and publishing notes. We have recently added a way to publish multiple linked notes, which essentially means that it’s possible to publish a whole website via Joplin Cloud. More such changes are coming as we want to make it easier to collaborate on notes and documents using this service. For example, we plan to implement an “email to note” feature soon, which will allow sending an email to a special Joplin Cloud address, and that will add the note to your collection. We are also very keen to make improvements to the mobile app, both i...

Lists of exercises to rewire your brain, books about the “plastic” brain… Neuroplasticity has been touted as a magical capability anyone can harness for success. As with many neuroscience-based concepts that made it into mainstream media, the hype starts from a fact: it is true that the adult brain is not hard-wired with fixed neuronal circuits. But many how-to guides take the idea much further than most scientists would be comfortable with. So, where does the boundary lie between neuroscience and neurobabble? What exactly is neuroplasticity, and can it be capitalized on in any practical way? And is there a more holistic way to explain learning, habit formation, and human behavior in general? A primer on neuroplasticity Neuroplasticity, short for neural plasticity, is the ability of the nervous system to reorganize its structure, function and connections. These changes can be small, such as a single neuron pathway making a new connection. Or they can be quite big, like when entire cortical areas are remapped following an amputation — which can lead to something called “phantom limb pain”, where amputees feel like their amputated extremity is still there. There are two main types of neuroplasticity: Structural plasticity. These are changes to the structure of the brain, including the creation and destruction of connections between neurons, or changes in the strength of these connections. Structural plasticity can also refer to other anatomical alterations, for example changes in the density of grey matter. It’s often studied using a variety of brain imaging techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Functional plasticity. This type of neuroplasticity refers to changes in how tasks are organized in the brain, and is most easily observed when parts of the brain are damaged, and other areas then “take over” the task. For instance, the area that normally fills the role of the visual cortex in sighted people can used to perceive touch in blind people. Contrary to a common misconception, the discovery of neuroplasticity is not new, with research papers on this phenomenon dating as far back as the 1800’s. However, the advent of neuroimaging techniques may have fueled the current hype. The main source of confusion is the loose definition of neuroplasticity used in the media, where it has become synonymous with learning new skills, acquiring new habits, or changing one’s behavior. By that account, any experience can be linked to neuroplasticity. As British neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell puts it: “This is the loosest and most problematic use of neuroplasticity. By definition if we learn something, acquire a habit or tendency, good or bad, something has changed in the brain. Without specifying what the brain is doing, we know nothing more.” And yet, we keep on seeing the word “neuroplasticity” pop up in articles about self-development, psychology, and human behavior in general. So, where does the problem come from? It boils down to how common it has become to use neuroscience to explain things that can be explained by other areas of research — a tendency called neuroessentialism. The problem with neuroessentialism In the words of William Schultz from Argosy University: “Neuroessentialism is the view that the definitive way of explaining human psychological experience is by reference to the brain and its activity.” Neuroessentialist thinking makes us consider mental processes and human behavior solely through the lense of brain processes. For example, we may start treating addictions through medical interventions, without taking into account the many social and environmental factors at play. Neuroessentialism is also used in more malicious ways to market products and give them an aura of scientific authority. In an article about neuroscience in the public sphere, researchers complained that “logically irrelevant neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.” In the case of neuroplasticity, the idea that the brain can rewire itself can be used to position products as tools to unlock one’s hidden potential. It helps that these brain processes cannot be seen, making them mysterious and exciting — like something new to work on when all other tools have seemingly failed. But Tom Stafford, a lecturer in psychology and cognitive science at the University of Sheffield, explains that “many claims about human psychology are adequately and entirely addressed at the level of behavior with no need to invoke neuroscientific evidence.” It’s not that the concept of neuroplasticity is boggus — in fact, there is lots of interesting research going on in this branch of neuroscience — but, in many cases, we simply don’t need to refer to neuroplasticity to understand and alter human behavior. And when we succumb to neuroessentialism and using neuroplasticity as an explanation for everything from habit formation to learning, we’re either ignoring other important factors beside brain processes, or we’re falling prey to pseudo-authoritative marketing designed to sell products that have little to do with the brain. Thinking beyond the brain That is not to say that we should ignore neuroplasticity as an important phenomenon that plays a role in how the brain works. Rather, we should apply caution when we engage with content that base their argument on neuroplasticity. Here are three simple ways you can practice healthy skepticism when it comes to neuroplasticity: Choose the most appropriate level of analysis. If you see the word neuroplasticity when reading an article or listening to a podcast, ask yourself: are brain processes the most relevant level of analysis to study this topic, or would a higher level of analysis make more sense? For example, when building new habits, wouldn’t the mental processes of motivation and attention be more helpful rather than the strengthening of synaptic connections? Consider other factors. Brain processes are often only a small part of the picture. Of course, neuroplasticity plays an important role in many areas of human behavior. But what about social and environmental factors? Sure, depression has been linked to chemical imbalances in the brain, but many helpful interventions don’t rely on medication. Ask yourself: what are the other factors beside neuroplasticity that can impact changes in human behavior? Question the intent. Be critical of the source of information. Are you reading a research paper from neuroscientists trying to understand brain processes, or a landing page for a product promising to help you rewire your brain? If you see “neuroplasticity” being used to sell a supplement or a brain training app, you can be almost certain that it’s being overhyped for marketing purposes. Again, neuroplasticity is a real and fascinating phenomenon, and much more research needs to be conducted to understand how it works and its role in shaping human behavior. By thinking critically about the context in which you encounter the word, you can ensure you’re not being an unknowing victim of neurobabble. The post Thinking Beyond the Brain: Why Neuroplasticity is Overhyped appeared first on Ness Labs.

While we try our best to be supportive of our loved ones, many of us struggle with self-compassion. We are often too harsh with ourselves, turning blame inwards and replaying the mistakes we have made on a loop. However, punishing ourselves for our failures and being too tough on ourselves may actually hinder our performance, and treating ourselves with more kindness and compassion is a better way to achieve the results we want. Self-compassion is an emergent area of research with the potential to help us develop a kinder approach to work and life. The three pillars of self-compassion Compassion can be defined as the desire to alleviate someone else’s suffering. It involves being sensitive to how others are feeling or being treated, and it motivates us to help relieve the discomfort of others, including physical and emotional pain. Self-compassion is simply the act of showing this same kindness towards oneself. Dr Kristin Neff is an associate professor in the department of educational psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr Neff has extensively researched self-compassion, describing the ways that self-compassion is closely related to wellbeing, and its influence on healing in psychotherapy. As part of her work, Dr Neff has identified three pillars of self-compassion: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Self-kindness exists in contrast to the self-critical approach that many of us are familiar with. When we turn criticism inwards, we might blame ourselves for not being good enough, or form negative thoughts regarding our inability to cope with life’s challenges. In the same way that we would be kind to a friend in distress, Dr Neff claims that we should also aim to comfort ourselves in difficult times by self-soothing and behaving thoughtfully towards our inner self. Common humanity involves recognizing that imperfection is a trait shared by us all. We are not alone in our mistakes and will all struggle at some point in life. Rather than thinking that our failures make us weak, unworthy or isolate us from others, this pillar of self-compassion encourages us to foster a sense of universal belonging. The final pillar, mindfulness, necessitates finding a measured response to difficulty or distress. If you experience uncomfortable emotions, a mindful approach entails striking a balance between ruminating on the distress and stifling your feelings. When facing unpleasant problems, whether from one’s own mistakes or through no fault of one’s own, mindfulness allows for observation of the present moment without evaluation or over-identification of emotions. When put into practice, Dr Neff’s three pillars interact to create a state of mind that favors self-compassion when faced with distressing life experiences, self-perceived inadequacies, and the mistakes we all make. And this approach comes with many evidence-based benefits. The scientific benefits of self-compassion Self-compassion has been shown to provide many benefits. In her book Compassion and Wisdom in Psychotherapy, Dr Neff writes that practicing self-compassion is linked to less anxiety and depression. We might incorrectly assume that this is because those who are compassionate towards themselves naturally have a sunnier personality or have honed the skill of avoiding difficult feelings. However, even when self-criticism and low mood are accounted for, self-compassion remains beneficial for mental wellbeing because those who try the practice learn to recognize when they are struggling. This self-awareness allows people to be kind to themselves. In these moments, they can then more effectively deal with any feelings of anxiety provoked by circumstantial difficulties. Self-compassion can also lead to empowerment — the feeling of being strong, competent, and holding the belief that we can succeed. For example, researchers Olivia Stevenson and Ashley Batts conducted a study into the impact of self-compassion for female domestic abuse survivors. They found that, when asked about a previous fight, women who showed more self-compassion reported a significantly better impact on their wellbeing. The researchers concluded that self-compassion led to feelings of empowerment, which was beneficial for processing and recovering from trauma. Developing self-compassion can bolster our inner strength and resilience as well. To be mindful, we observe our feelings without interacting with them. During mindfulness practice, you might recognize that you feel shame or regret over a mistake you made. Observing this feeling without ruminating on it, and then accepting that everyone makes mistakes, can help develop strength and resilience in the face of adversity. Finally, self-compassion is a learning tool. If a work project falls short of expectations, self-criticism will undermine your professional development. If a friend was in a similar situation, you would likely be encouraging and understanding of their mishap. Similarly, by practicing self-compassion, you will avoid falling prey to defeatism. How to practice self-compassion We are often much better at showing compassion for others than we are at directing it inwards. When learning how to practice self-compassion, it is therefore helpful to imagine how you would treat a friend in your situation. Think about what you would say to them, how you might try to help, and the tone of voice that you would adopt. Next, think about how you usually treat yourself in the face of failure. If you treat yourself differently to others, ask yourself which factors or fears lead to this disparity, and how you could close that gap to treat yourself with the same warmth, understanding and compassion that you offer your friends. Over the course of several weeks, be mindful of critical self-talk. Proactively adjust how you talk to yourself to include more kindness, encouragement, forgiveness and acceptance. Writing can be a great metacognitive strategy to practice self-compassion. Writing a letter to yourself from an unconditionally loving imaginary friend is an effective way to demonstrate self-kindness using metacognition. If you’re faced with a challenge or difficult situation, thinking about yourself from an outsider’s point of view can be beneficial in learning to treat yourself in the same gentle way that you would care for a friend. In this way, the distance metacognition offers can help to counteract feeling weak or unworthy of kindness. Most of us treat our friends with compassion when they make a mistake or are facing a difficult situation. However, under similar circumstances, we are often much harsher on ourselves. Developing self-compassion can lead to increased empowerment, strength, and resilience. When it feels difficult to turn compassion inwards, reflecting on how we would treat a friend in the same situation is a simple way to foster self-compassion. The post The Science of Self-Compassion appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our tools for thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. George Levin is the founder of Hints, an AI assistant designed to help you save up to one hour every day. You can talk to the Hints bot like you would talk to a human, which allows you to manage your business from your messenger. In this interview, we talked about the role AI can play in improving our productivity, the relationship between context switching and anxiety, the importance of streamlining tasks to increase focus, how knowledge workers can use templates to minimize distractions, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi George, welcome back! It’s great to follow up on your progress with this second interview. Since we last talked, you pivoted from a knowledge management app to a more holistic assistant. It’s great to be back and share our progress. Initially, we had set out to create a knowledge management app focused on quickly capturing and organizing information. However, through user feedback, we realized a greater need for a more holistic solution to assist professionals in their daily tasks and alleviate the burden of information overload. Our main goal has always been to reduce anxiety caused by the overwhelming amount of information that knowledge workers have to contend with daily. We began to notice a trend in user feedback, with many requesting integration with popular knowledge management tools such as Notion, Obsidian, and others. They loved our quick capturing via messenger, sms, email, and our apps, but they wanted to send notes to their existing systems. It prompted us to start with a Notion integration, and we saw a significant increase in new users to our platform. As we continued to engage with our early adopters, we discovered that they were using our app not just for capturing notes and ideas but also for other tedious tasks, such as updating CRM or project management boards within Notion. This realization was a turning point for us, as we understood that we were addressing the same problem of context switching on a larger scale. We decided to shift our focus to direct integration with CRM and project management tools to ensure that all users can benefit from our app and streamline their workflows. We pivoted to an AI-powered assistant that helps teams increase productivity and minimize distraction, allowing them to focus on what truly matters. It seems like AI is quickly permeating all productivity layers. How does the new version of Hints use AI? AI plays a crucial role in the new version of Hints. Our goal is to create a seamless and intuitive experience for users, allowing them to interact with our assistant as they would with a human. Through advanced natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, our  AI can understand and interpret user requests, even when they may be asking for multiple tasks to be completed in one sentence. For example, our AI can parse text such as “create a deal in my CRM for company Hints, add a new contact George Levin and remind me to call him on Tuesday” and create a company, a deal, a person, and a task in the user’s CRM. When a user wants to update a Notion table, it can identify which parts of the text correspond to different columns. This way, our AI-powered assistant can automate and streamline tasks, allowing users to focus on more important things. That’s amazing. More specifically, how does it work? Setting up the AI assistant takes about 30 seconds, and it can be used through SMS, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, or Email, with built-in voice-to-text capabilities. Users can communicate directly with the assistant bot to update their personal or work projects, especially from the phone. Additionally, the bot can be added to team group chats or Slack channels, allowing everyone on the team to use it. Currently, we see three prominent use cases for Hints: Sales teams are using Hints to update their CRMs, as they are tired of manual updates. It allows them to focus more on what truly matters to them: selling, which leads to increased commissions. Product and support teams use Hints to submit and update tickets with feature requests and bugs. It’s convenient for them as they can move threads from Slack or other messengers to their ticketing systems. For example, after discussing a feature in Slack, they can create a ticket for it and keep updating it from messengers.  Personal productivity. Some clients use Hints to send calendar invites, update their to-dos in Notion or capture any helpful information to their knowledge management tool. Less context switching means more focus. More focus means less anxiety. Less context switching, more focus, less anxiety — that sounds great. What’s the feedback like so far? The feedback for Hints has been positive. One of the most common comments we receive is that users are happy to use it with their existing systems and messengers without the need for complex rule-based configurations. The integration process is quick and easy, taking only 30 seconds, and anyone on the team can set it up without needing to involve a tech-savvy expert. We’ve received a lot of enthusiasm from in-field sales representatives who can now update their CRMs on the go via text messengers without spending time on data logging at the end of the day.  Product team leads are pleased that everyone on the team can create and update tickets in Slack, reducing the risk of valuable information slipping through the cracks. We’ve also seen some innovative and unexpected use cases for Hints. For example, one hospital reported that they greatly simplified their doctor scheduling process by utilizing Hints’ WhatsApp bot in conjunction with Notion integration. You’ve also added lots of new integrations. Yes, we have been adding new integrations to our platform. Currently, we are integrated with Notion, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Jira, Trello, ClickUp, Google Calendar, and Obsidian. We are in the process of integration with Salesforce, Asana, Airtable, and Google Sheets. Our goal is to integrate with the top 50 productivity software. After that, we plan to open our API and create a marketplace where anyone can integrate with Hints. We are also researching other fields where Hints can be beneficial to users. What about you, how do you use Hints? As someone who values focus and productivity, I strive to minimize distractions and reduce context switching. I use the Hints Telegram bot, easily accessible from my phone or laptop, to streamline my routine tasks. My top integrations are HubSpot, Notion, and Google Calendar. I use HubSpot to track my fundraising process, as well as to keep track of my conversations with clients and related tasks. With Hints, I can create a new deal in my HubSpot pipeline and add quick notes and tasks with a single message, saving me enormous time and energy. I use Notion to capture all my thoughts and ideas, clients’ feedback, testimonials, marketing inspirations, and links. Google Calendar integration is handy, as I often need to schedule meetings with people in different time zones. I usually do it from Telegram chat, and I love that our AI understands time zones by cities, so I can message “Discuss SalesForce integration with @Alex at 2 pm Lisbon time” to schedule a meeting. Overall, Hints helps me to stay more focused and productive throughout the day. Also, we have team use cases for capturing feature requests and bugs in the group chat. How do you recommend someone get started? Getting started with Hints is easy. Visit our website, create an account, and set up a quick integration with any of the productivity software we currently offer. If you’re a product or tech team leader and use tools like Notion, Jira, ClickUp, or Trello to track tasks, add our assistant to your team’s Slack or any other messenger and show it to the team. It will ensure that your backlog is up-to-date and relevant issues are quickly addressed. If you’re in sales and tired of manual CRM updates, our HubSpot or Pipedrive integrations can save you up to an hour a day. If you’re any other kind of knowledge worker with a lot on your plate and looking to minimize distractions, try building a simple template in Notion with two columns: one for notes and one for note types (idea, link, to-do, etc.). Then, add our SMS bot and send voice messages whenever you have something on your mind. Our AI will capture your notes and add the relevant parameters to the second column.  By the way, we are building Notion template integrations, so you can pick a template that works for you, and our AI will start filling it out from your notes.  Set up our Google Calendar integration to send invites to your team members by tagging them in Slack and blocking time on your calendar on the go. And finally… What’s next for Hints? Our primary focus for Hints moving forward is to continue to improve the AI’s ability to understand and interpret user requests. We are working on teaching it to ask the right questions when it is unsure or needs help understanding a request. Additionally, we are working on teaching AI to onboard users and showing them how to use integrations effectively. We have a web app that works well on laptops and phones, but we are also developing iOS and Android apps for a more native experience. We are adding more integrations with productivity tools and working on allowing the AI to control them more granularly. Additionally, we plan to expand to other messaging platforms, such as Teams and Discord. Our ultimate vision for Hints is to build an AI assistant that can communicate with you as a human and manage all your productivity tools from one central location. We are constantly working to improve the capabilities of our AI and make it more intuitive for users. Thank you so much for your time, George! Where can people learn more about Hints? Visit our website. You can also fo...

Success is commonly defined as reaching one’s goals. Getting accepted into a prestigious program, building a profitable business, becoming a doctor, completing an online course… Whatever the goal may be, success is simply bridging the gap between where we are and where we want to go. The Internet and our bookshelves are filled with exhortations to stay motivated, manage our time more effectively, and stick to our plan. If success is so easy to define, why is it then that we often struggle to establish, pursue, and reach our goals? The way we manage goals is broken, to the point where many people are questioning the very nature of ambition. And it is true that chasing ambitious goals may feel pointless when everything feels so chaotic. But ambiguity and opportunity are two sides of the same coin. Navigating uncertainty is how we learn and how we change. To flourish in our increasingly turbulent world, it is imperative we foster radical change at a realistic scale. Instead of applying rigid, linear models of goal management, we need to create space for our goals to emerge. A Tale of Success and Failure When we talk about goals, we suggest a desired outcome attained through some form of prolonged effort. Goal-setting usually goes like this: we define a target state, and then we map our journey to get there. It all sounds sensible: goal-setting allows you to decide where you want to go, and to define how you will get there. Then, we expect to reach our goal. And this is where things start to go wrong. See, there are only two possible outcomes: either we successfully reach our goal, or we fail. It’s easy to see why failure leads to disappointment. When we see any outcome other than the expected one is perceived as failure, it’s no wonder we start questioning our self-worth, wondering what went wrong, or blaming external factors – rightly so or not. Our reaction may vary, but the experience feels the same: distress and doubt. What’s more surprising is what happens when we successfully reach our goal. Designed for disenchantment In the process of working toward a goal, we come to imagine what it will feel like to achieve it. For example, we start thinking: “When I graduate, I will feel accomplished” or “When I launch this product, I will have more free time to spend with my family” or “When I get this job, I will feel like my career is on track.” Unfortunately, the happiness we feel when reaching a goal is short-lived. Dr Tal Ben-Shahar calls this the arrival fallacy. We give a big presentation, only to go back to our daily routines. We finish a project, then realize there are two more to work on. We receive a promotion, but still feel unsure about our career path. Life doesn’t seem that different after reaching a goal. It doesn’t help that modern life has created a giant public leaderboard that maintains the artificial need to “keep up” – to persist on climbing the ladder as new rungs are incessantly added.  Because of social media, we compare ourselves to our peers more than ever before. LinkedIn notifies us of the success of not just our colleagues, but all the people we studied with in school. Instagram is a constant reminder of the supposedly perfect lives of everyone in our network. This proverbial “rat race” feeds into the arrival fallacy: if only we can climb one more step – if only we can get that promotion, give that big presentation, grow our online audience, hire a team, buy that house – then, we’ll finally feel at peace. But both successful and failed goals seem to let us down, so those expectations are a recipe for disenchantment. The logical solution would be to let go of our ambitions and altogether abandon the idea of goals. In the words of Peter La Fleur, a character played by Vince Vaughn in Dodgeball (2004): “I found that if you have a goal, you might not reach it. But if you don’t have one, then you are never disappointed.” This sounds great in theory, but it goes against our very biological makeup. All living species are goal-oriented in nature. In fact, this is the key difference between living organisms and nonlife: all organisms have goals. These may be very basic goals, such as survival and reproduction, but goals nonetheless. Even sponges collaborate with other species to survive, and plants turn toward the sun to get the most sunlight.* As special as we like to think of ourselves, humans are no different. We are goal-oriented creatures. We need a sense of purpose to drive our actions, to survive and to thrive. Even so, goal-setting keeps on failing us. We sense that we need goals, but we know something is terribly wrong with the way we define and pursue them. Here lies the paradox of goals: Setting goals is a guarantee for disillusionment whether we reach the desired state or not, and yet working toward goals is an important part of evolving as a person. How can we resolve this paradox? From Goals to Growth Loops Notice the vocabulary we use to talk about goals. Goals drive us forward, we set out to achieve our goals, we make progress toward a goal. Those are called orientational metaphors. In our collective psyche, goals rely on a sense of movement. And that’s not wrong. But we may be misguided as to the direction of this movement. Instead of a linear scale progressing from a present state to a desired outcome (the classic “up and to the right”), goals should be conceived as cyclical. Let’s break it down. Two key ingredients are required to pursue a goal: the will and the way. The will is our motivation – a reason why we want to achieve the goal, which gives us the energy to push ourselves. The way is our ability to map out the steps to take and having the skills to execute the required actions. In simple situations, or when following a default path as prescribed by society, the will and the way are fairly easy to define. For instance, your goal might be to get a promotion, and the steps might even be outlined in a corporate handbook with a clear rating scale. However, life is rarely this simple – and, in fact, you may not want to live such a life where your goals are predefined and the way to achieve them is preprocessed for you. What if we don’t know where we are and where we want to go? What happens when the will and the way are unclear? It is tempting during such liminal moments to cling on to a ladder – any ladder – to regain an illusory sense of control and progression. But this temporary hack is rarely sustainable. Soon, we start noticing the cracks. We have the nagging sense of dread that we are on the wrong path, and yet, we are not sure what to do next. In our modern world with its infinity of potential goals to pursue, which ones should we explore? How do we know which one is right for us? As you can see, linear goals are inherently fragile. The solution, inspired by nature itself, is to design growth loops by practicing deliberate experimentation. As Nassim Taleb puts it: “It is in complex systems, ones in which we have little visibility of the chains of cause-consequences, that tinkering, bricolage, or similar variations of trial and error have been shown to vastly outperform the teleological – it is nature’s modus operandi.” The cycle goes like this: First, we commit to an action. Then, we execute the target behavior. Finally, we learn from our experience and adjust our future actions accordingly. Each cycle adds a layer of learning to how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Instead of an external destination, our aspirations become fuel for transformation. We don’t go in circles, we grow in circles. Goals turn into growth loops. Our ancestors instinctively knew of this circular model of growth. In many cultures, the wheel is a symbol of growth and success. The cyclic ages of Hindu cosmology, the wheel of life in Buddhism… The wheel combines the idea of progress and wholeness: it is complete and yet it keeps on moving. It represents the perpetual change and transitory nature of life. This cyclical model also aligns with the way our mind naturally works. The brain is built on a giant perception-action cycle with a circular flow of information between the self and the environment, and a system constantly conveying whether a signal should be intensified or stopped. This feedback loop is so well established, it is considered the theoretical cornerstone of most modern theories of learning and metacognition. Instead of ignoring ancestral wisdom and modern scientific knowledge by blindly pursuing goals at the expense of our mental health, we should consider going back to a circular model in which goals are continuously discovered and adapted – in conversation with our inner self and the outer world. An Antidote to Uncertainty We cannot think of goals without thinking of space and time. Space: where am I and where do I want to be? Time: how long will it take me to cross that gap? The uncertainty that surrounds the space-time continuum of goals is not just conceptual – it’s deeply emotional. For instance, a big gap may feel scary. Not moving fast enough can give us time anxiety.  By turning goals into growth loops, we can embrace the idea that achievement is simply the continuation of the learning cycle itself. Sure, the future is uncertain, but our personal growth is inevitable. Cycles of deliberate experimentation can help us let go of the chronometer. Growth loops may feel slower and they don’t come with a shiny finish line, but each layer of learning contributes to our ongoing success. And, perhaps paradoxically, we can often progress faster by allowing for the possibility of getting things wrong and facing challenges. This is the archetypal hero’s journey, where the hero embarks on an adventure, equipped with their current knowledge, and returns transformed by their experience. Some of the most successful endeavors are based on growth loops. The scientific method relies on formulating hypotheses, testing them, and imple...

In the past, workplaces were filled with experts who each knew a lot about one specific area. The changing scope of businesses, with more fluidity between roles and responsibilities, later led to the rise of generalists — individuals who are capable across a lot of areas but do not need in-depth knowledge of any of them. However, in a world driven by rapid changes in technology and industry best practice, being a generalist is no longer enough. To support the fast-moving targets of global businesses, a different profile now prevails: the versatilist. The shape of our skills The way we work is impacted by our talent archetype. The framework was devised by Gartner analyst Diane Morello. Morello stated that simply having technical aptitude was no longer sufficient to meet industry needs. Each archetype can be described in terms of the “shape” of its corresponding skills. Specialists, or “I-shaped” people, are experts at one thing. They may have deep technical skills in a certain field, or only work within a very narrow domain of work. They are considered to be experts in their field by their peers, but their value is often not understood by those working in different areas. On the other hand, generalists — or “hyphen-shaped” people — are capable in many different areas, but do not have expertise in any of them. The phrase “Jack of all trades, but master of none” is a popular way to describe a generalist. As a result of their broad  knowledge base, generalists can respond quickly to different situations. However, their competency and confidence are likely to be much lower than that of someone who has deep knowledge in an area relevant to the business. This is where versatilists come in. Also called “T-shaped” people, versatilists are capable in lots of areas, and can become experts in specific fields according to the business needs. Rather than settling in one area and becoming a specialist, they are comfortable exploring any new domain that demands their attention. With the fast pace of technological change, versatilists tend to be popular hires as well as successful founders, as they can more easily recognize new opportunities and make the required changes to quickly adapt to new technology. In fact, Shabnam Hamdi and colleagues argued in 2016 that when technology uncertainty is greater, having individuals with T-shaped skills is beneficial. Two years later, Haluk Demirkan and James Spohrer found that T-shaped digital professionals tend to combine critical thinking and in depth problem-solving with a “breadth of knowledge, skills, experience, and complex communication abilities.” They concluded that this combination of skills is crucial to build high-performance teams. The rise of the versatilist For fast-moving companies and startups alike, the versatilist has replaced the generalist as the ideal profile. By their very nature, versatilists are adaptable, and have an ability to take relevant information on board while developing and honing new skills. The career equivalent of a serial monogamist, the versatilist throws themselves whole-heartedly into a project or area to develop deep knowledge and competence. By becoming fully immersed in one field at a time, they develop a broad range of experience as well as multiple deep skills. Being adept at spotting new trends, they are ready to move to the next priority area as required. Being consecutively embedded in specific areas gives the versatilist an excellent foundation for multidisciplinary collaboration. Because of their wide-ranging experience, the versatilist also has greater insight than a specialist would have regarding the role they should take in a specific project. Their insight supports cross-organizational vision across people, processes, and products. How to become a versatilist Businesses thrive on adaptability and innovation. Being a versatilist involves anticipating what you need to learn to meet these demands. To do this, it’s important to cultivate a versatile mindset by consuming content across different disciplines. It’s also vital to practice lifelong learning by keeping up with trends in your industry. The versatilist is adept at anticipating what the next wave will be and upskilling themselves accordingly. Often, you will need to be prepared to study intensely and to quickly develop new skills to be ready to work on the next business initiative without delay. For instance, many versatilists are currently busy studying tools for generative AI so they can use them in their business. If you currently work as a specialist, it can be daunting to exit your comfort zone to deeply immerse yourself in unfamiliar territory. Taking time to practice metacognition is vital for reflecting on the best areas to invest your time and energy in. In addition, developing a deeper understanding of your thought processes will help you expand the versatility of your skill set in areas that are likely to be beneficial to your personal and professional growth.  Being capable in a variety of areas, able to spot future trends and adept at quickly upskilling to meet changing business are some of the benefits of the versatilist archetype. A versatile mindset can be cultivated by consuming information widely and practicing metacognition to quickly respond to fast-changing business needs. The post Talent archetypes: What is the “shape” of your skills? appeared first on Ness Labs.

Wondering how AI can help you be more productive? Welcome to this education of our interview series with founders on a mission to help us work smarter. Tariq Rauf is the founder and CEO of Qatalog, an intelligent work hub for teams powered by AI. It offers a self-structuring, centralized system to seamlessly manage people, knowledge, and operations. In this interview, we talked about the unnecessary complexity and fragility of patchwork collaboration systems, why we need to simplify our tool stack, what product design can learn from architecture, the power of modular business management, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Tariq, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Before we get into the details of Qatalog, I wanted to take a step back for a general look at the nature of work and the role of technology within it. In your documentary series you talk about the concept of the “productivity paradox” which I thought was fascinating. Can you tell us more? The productivity paradox refers to the idea that the tools that were designed to make us more productive are actually doing the opposite. There are lots of reasons for this, but here are two big ones. First, most of these tools are generic, and don’t account for the nuances of how individual businesses work, each with their own terminology, culture, and processes. Instead, we have been forced to adapt to fit the tools, which makes them hard to use and increases friction. It also means we end up finding new tools to fill the gaps, which adds to the second problem: we’re using far too many of these apps.  Data from Okta shows the average company now uses 89 apps on average and for large companies it’s double that. This results in constant context switching, which damages our productivity, as we found in our study with Cornell University. It revealed that knowledge workers waste an hour every day trying to find information hidden in different apps, while 6 in 10 of people say it’s hard to know what colleagues are doing.  In short, we’ve created an endless sprawl of generic tools, with thousands of iterations of clunky spreadsheets and documents for almost every problem. But there’s been nothing that puts the customer first and considers how all these pieces fit together. So, is that what inspired you to build Qatalog?  Yes, but there’s a bit more to the story that explains why we’ve taken such a radically different approach to most other companies. Although I’ve been building software since I was very young, I actually trained as an architect. After graduating, I had the privilege to work under the mentorship of the renowned architect, Charles Correa. It was during this time that I learned how to design spaces that lots of people could use simultaneously and navigate seamlessly. The mentorship and the lessons I learned were transformative to how I think about product and scale.  Then in 2011, I went back into the world of tech. First as CTO for a startup, then as a Product and Growth Lead at Wise, and then at Amazon, where I worked on projects spanning Prime, Prime Video, Alexa and Twitch. I had hundreds of colleagues in teams stretched across 32 different floors and 17 different countries. The productivity paradox was in full effect — everyone had an array of tools and technologies at their disposal, but work was about as disjointed as it could get. There were inconsistencies in every team and the only solution proposed was to hire more people and implement more coordination activities.  The architect in me was screaming. This was an ergonomics problem, and there had to be a systemic solution. That’s when I saw the potential to create something that tied all of this together into a single source of truth. The day after I got my permanent residency in the UK in 2019, I left Amazon to start Qatalog. That’s amazing. You recently announced Qatalog 2.0, which creates a centralized Work Hub in seconds using AI. This sounds like magic. Can you tell us more?  Qatalog 2.0 makes it easy for anyone to build powerful and scalable business software that’s intuitive and enjoyable to use. It’s built on the extensive infrastructure we built for Qatalog 1.0, but we made the underlying systems accessible to the user, meaning they get a Work Hub that they can configure precisely to their needs. To make it super quick and easy to get started, we combined it with our new Qatalog AI system, which deeply understands how different businesses and industries work and constructs a bespoke Work Hub to match to their business requirements, all in about 40 seconds. All the customer has to do is describe their business, press “Build” and Qatalog does the rest. Our goal is to democratize access to custom software and allow every company, everywhere to work the way they want.  A big challenge for knowledge workers is juggling dozens of apps and dealing with the productivity loss from constantly switching tools. Does Qatalog help to address this?  Yes, that’s the intention. Qatalog replaces your task managers, company wikis, project managers, people directories, and spreadsheets with a single Work Hub that’s bespoke to your company with all the functionality you need.  This radically simplifies the collaboration tool stack and centralizes your people, processes and knowledge in a single, seamlessly connected platform. Everything in your company is just a click away. Now, we’re not the first company to make claims like this, but I think we’re different in a few very important ways.  For one, Qatalog takes away the pain of setting up your system. For some tools, you can easily spend hundreds of hours learning how the system works and configuring everything to meet your requirements. Even then, they’re still very fragile. With our AI, we’ll do the vast majority of the work in under a minute and you just have to make the final tweaks so that it’s perfect.  The second is that it’s intuitive to use. Because everything molds to your business, the structure and terminology of your Qatalog system reflects the way your team operates. No one needs to learn a brand new set of vocabulary or processes just to retrieve or contribute to the overall system. And the last one is that it’s built to grow with your company. A frequent complaint we hear about tools is that they don’t scale well, because everyone can edit and change the structure of the system. What worked for a team of ten becomes complete chaos with a team of 100, and the problems keep compounding as you scale. Qatalog is different. We set out to solve this problem from day one, with a robust structure and guardrails that ensure consistency as your team expands.  What kind of companies use Qatalog? It’s been a little over a month since we launched Qatalog 2.0, we’ve had over 4,000 businesses creating work hubs and the range of requests and use cases we’ve had in that time show there is a clear need for custom software. But there are also some clear clusters, in terms of the types of businesses.  We’ve had tech startups, agencies, consultancies, real estate, galleries, investment firms, manufacturing companies and everything in between. Every version of Qatalog is custom to the customer’s needs, but agencies, for example, typically use it to create a clear system to organize their clients, centralize all the work related to projects and campaigns, track the services they offer, and create flexible and connected teams. Qatalog helps new joiners get up to speed quickly, as they can access all the info they need from one place.    How does it work exactly?  The foundation of Qatalog’s customizable system is something we call ‘Modules’, which typically reflect the core pillars of your business. Let’s take the design agency example, where you might have ‘Clients’ as one of your Modules. Every time you create a new client in Qatalog, it ensures a consistent format with the same information, as determined by the Module. The module centralizes everything to do with clients too: documents, data, tasks, workflows etc. This gives you a dedicated space to store information and make decisions about each client, in context.  The beauty of Qatalog is that you can configure every Module exactly as you want. For example, you could add a field to your Client Module to record the account lead for each client, or capture what industry it’s in, or the value of the retainer. Now, everytime someone creates a new client, you can ensure this information is captured consistently. This also allows you to quickly filter through all your clients using this info, giving you an overview of your client base at the click of a button. You can also add or remove features from each Module. These include Measurements to track key metrics or goals, Threads for async discussions, Workflows to make repeatable processes easy to assign and complete, and lots more. Our AI will give you a recommended set up, but you can customize these, depending on what you actually need. Where things get fun is when you have relationships between different Modules. Maybe this design agency also has another Module called ‘Contractors’, where the agency records information about the different external contractors they work with, such as their contact details, areas of expertise, location, and hourly rate. This means that when you create a new Project using your Project Module, you can select which Client it’s for, and identify the contractors being used, if any. Now, at the click of a button, anyone looking at that project can easily see what it’s all about and who’s working on it, including contractors.  Because everything is connected in one place, if someone in the team needs context on the client, it’s a click away. Or maybe they need some information about the contractor to share with the client, it’s all in Qatalog. It gives you a single system where everyone can easily find the information on their own, without switching tools or asking someone else. And when they do have questi...

All changes, even positive ones, come at a cost. Whether we deal with personal transitions — a new role, a newborn, a new city — or experience the wider societal shifts that impact our daily lives, each change forces our brain to adapt, altering its neural pathways to encode new patterns and to reduce uncertainty. This is why change feels effortful: we don’t simply observe change, we change ourselves in the process, and each change recruits our mental and physical adaptive systems. This is why many of us currently feel so tired: these systems are mostly designed to deal with sudden change, not long, drawn-out periods of change. The resources that allow us to deal with acute stressful situations have been drained by years of turbulence. As psychologists would put it: our “mental surge capacity” is depleted. We are experiencing change fatigue at an unprecedented scale. A hidden driver of burnout Imagine a world where, each morning, you would have to relearn everything you know. How to get out of bed, how to turn on the tap, how to brush your teeth, how to make coffee, how to open a door. It would be impossible to function. Instead, our brain stores all those common patterns, then matches your actions to specific situations. Sometimes, you encounter a new pattern. It could be something mundane — maybe you have bought a new coffee machine which works differently than the previous one — or something more complex, such as a new project at work which requires different skills. In those cases, performing the new action will require more effort. Maybe you’ll figure it out on your own, or maybe you’ll ask someone for help. Once the new pattern is acquired, your brain will match it to the corresponding reaction. The more often you encounter this pattern, the more effortless the process will become, and the less energy your brain will require. This process, which seems simple on the surface, applies to everything we do. Over time, we develop habits and routines, we become more comfortable with the skills we use at work, and we certainly don’t think twice about how to brush our teeth. But what happens when things keep on changing? When we can’t rely on many of the useful patterns we have acquired? Slowly, our ability to cope with change starts eroding. Each new change requires even more effort. Because of the constant cognitive overload, we start feeling a sense of resistance, apathy, or resignation. If this goes on for long enough, we may even burn out. Fortunately, change fatigue doesn’t inevitably lead to burnout. As often when it comes to mental health, being aware of the reason why we may be struggling is an important first step. When constant adaptation starts to feel like it’s becoming too much to deal with, some simple strategies can help to cope with change fatigue. How to manage change fatigue Change fatigue mostly arises when we feel like we’re not in control of the never-ending chaos that keeps on derailing our routines and forces us to constantly adapt. Very often, it is the case that change itself is unavoidable. What we have some control over, however, is how we react to change. Instead of resisting change, adding to the load we put on our adaptive systems, we can strive to accept, embrace, and even foster change in a way that leads to personal growth. Accepting change. The first step is to confront reality. No, the situation may not come back to normal anytime soon, but you must maintain hope that they will at some point — even if it is in the distant future. This is known as the Stockdale Paradox. Admiral Jim Stockdale was a military officer who was imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp for eight years during the height of the Vietnam War, with no set release date nor certainty as to whether he would ever see his family again. He attributed his resilience to a way of thinking that may seem contradictory: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” Accepting change is acknowledging the worst while still hoping for the best. Embracing change. Beyond the mindset shift of accepting that change, good or bad, is an integral part of life, the next step is to welcome the opportunity to learn how to do things differently. Change is a tough teacher, but a teacher nonetheless. An effective way to unlearn old patterns and relearn new patterns is to practice metacognition — thinking about thinking. Each week, write down surprising new patterns you’ve noticed, how your current reaction may not be appropriate anymore, and ways you could adapt. Treat this process as an experiment where your life is a giant laboratory, and where failure is just another data point which you can incorporate in your next iteration. Fostering change. The last step is to become a change agent yourself. You may not be able to alter the course of big societal shifts, but you can induce local change in your community, whether it’s at work, in your neighborhood, or even online. How can you support others through change? What actions can you take to improve the trajectory of projects and people around you? Is there any knowledge you can share with others, so they don’t only have change as a ruthless teacher? “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” Most importantly, don’t be hard on yourself. Everyone’s mental surge capacity has been depleted in different ways, and you don’t have to push through all three stages if you don’t have the mental and emotional capacity to do so. Simply accepting change is already an amazing feat of resilience. The post Change fatigue: When our brain’s adaptive capacity is depleted appeared first on Ness Labs.

Have you ever found yourself in a brainstorming session at work, where everyone ends up agreeing on a less-than-ideal course of action? The Abilene paradox describes this unfortunately common situation where a group of people agree to an idea, despite most of them not fully believing that it is the best decision. Although it may seem surprising that several people might pursue something that few of them truly have faith in, the phenomenon has a simple explanation: it’s mainly caused by a fear of challenging the status quo. Learning to identify and manage the Abilene paradox is essential to avoid costly group decisions. A family trip gone wrong The Abilene paradox was first described by Jerry B. Harvey in his 1974 article The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement. Harvey, a professor of management science at the George Washington University, D.C., was spending time with his in-laws during a heatwave in Texas. When his father-in-law suggested going for dinner in Abilene, 53 miles away, Harvey went along with the plan as his wife and mother-in-law also both agreed to making the trip.  Later, all four returned home hot and irritated, with Harvey’s mother in-law admitting that she always thought Abilene was a terrible idea and would rather have stayed at home. Harvey and his wife then declared that they had not wanted to go either, but had agreed to it to avoid rocking the boat when everyone else had seemed keen. Even Harvey’s father-in-law said he had not really wanted to travel in the unairconditioned car. He explained that he had only suggested the trip as he was worried his guests were getting bored. Harvey went on to coin this occurrence the Abilene paradox, in which there is a failure to effectively manage agreement. At the time, most managerial advice was focused on how to better manage conflict. Instead, Harvey argued that in modern organisations, learning how to deal with agreement was more pressing than the management of conflict. The Abilene paradox can have terrible consequences. The 1986 NASA shuttle tragedy, in which all seven crew members lost their lives, is such an example. After several delays and launch cancellations, managers were desperate to launch the shuttle. As a result, the group collectively disregarded warnings from engineers about the risks associated with a launch in cold weather. With millions of viewers watching live on TV, the shuttle broke apart within 73 seconds of launching. The Abilene paradox is commonly confused with groupthink, but the two have different characteristics. Researcher Yoonho Kim explained that in groupthink, a unanimous decision is driven by the “high energy” desire for cohesiveness and group harmony. Conversely, the Abilene paradox occurs in a state of “low energy” in which there is a fear of disturbing the balance. The Abilene paradox is an important topic of research in social psychology. The power of social conformity can persuade us to agree to the perceived general consensus and can lead to extremely poor group decisions. The Abilene paradox at work While numerous studies have examined the management of conflict and disagreement in organisations, far less is understood about managing agreement. In business, multiple decisions need to be made each day, and failure to agree can lead to delays or increasing costs. However, Vincent Bagire of Makerere University Business School stressed that “a serious gap arises in the agreed decision when team members individually do not agree with the group decision.”  Bagire also explored that when decisions are not truly backed or agreed to, individuals and organisations are at risk of making “wasteful, costly and at times disastrous” decisions. The Abilene paradox can lead you to believe that the “rule by committee” is superior to your own opinion on a matter. If all of your colleagues appear to have an opposing view to yours, you might assume that they must all be correct. This can make it difficult to object. Failure to speak up will be even more common if team members feel that they have been disenfranchised. Employees may feel disempowered from speaking up or have concerns that disagreeing will put their position at risk. This can lead to the conviction that they must agree with the group despite the decision going against what they believe to be correct. When individuals feel they cannot put forward an argument, the company is less likely to explore alternative options, which can lead to less creativity. Group mentality can also make people feel absolved of responsibility for a decision. Going along with what the group has voted on may lead some members of a team to feel that the decision had little to do with them. As you can imagine, this lack of accountability can have negative effects on the business. Managing the Abilene paradox The Abilene paradox may occur in your professional or personal life. It’s an insidious phenomenon that can be hard to spot, precisely because it arises from a fear of speaking up. The following strategies may be helpful in both recognising the paradox and limiting its potential for damage: Foster a safe environment. Psychological safety is paramount to avoiding the Abilene paradox. Without it, team members may remain quiet and nominally agree with the rest of the group rather than risk looking like an outsider. However, when people live or work in a setting that is psychologically safe, they will feel more comfortable about speaking up or expressing an opinion that differs from the status quo. Asking team members to create a personal manual is a simple way to foster a safe environment that is conducive to open communication. Make space for honest discussions. Instead of waiting for those conversations to happen, make sure there is a time for these to be held, which will ensure that the final decision is based on a review of diverse perspectives. Simply booking half an hour for an open forum where all thoughts are fair play can help mitigate the Abilene paradox. Be transparent in addressing feedback. As a manager, there will be times when opinions are voiced that you disagree with. It is helpful to offer feedback to team members whose suggestions or views are not taken on board, to explain the rationale behind the final decision. This should provide confidence that their opinion was still considered, so that they feel able to share their views again in future. As you can see, the Abilene paradox can lead to costly decisions. To promote a culture where people feel able to raise concerns or opinions that differ from those of others, it is crucial to foster a psychologically safe environment, promote honest discussions, and give clear feedback. And don’t forget to lead by example: if you feel safe to do so, speak up next time you disagree with a group decision! The post The Abilene paradox: When not rocking the boat may sink the boat appeared first on Ness Labs.