mind traps

I sense there is a shift happening where people are realizing that they are channeling an ambitious impulse - the desire to grow and evolve - into dumb goals. Rejecting legible ambitious might be the most ambitious thing you can do.

A shift from legible ambition (my parents can easily brag about me) to illegible ambition (no one, including me know

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse on

In performance cultures, people often become attached to best practices. The risk is that once we’ve declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time. We preach about its virtues and stop questioning its vices, no longer curious about where it’s imperfect and where it could improve.

When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called escalation of commitment.6 Evidence shows that entrepreneurs persist with failing strategies when they should pivot,7

That’s what I saw with my straight-A students: they were terrified of being wrong. To give them a strong incentive to take some risks, I made the assignment worth 20 percent of their final grade. I had changed the rules: now they were being rewarded for rethinking instead of regurgitating.