psychology

The single most important thing a boss can do, Scott has learned, is focus on guidance : giving it, receiving it, and encouraging it. Guidance, which is fundamentally just praise and criticism, is usually called “feedback,” but feedback is screechy and makes us want to put our hands over our ears. Guidance is something most of us long for.

The self.

The strange loop of us thinking about our own consciousness in relation to others.

Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong, will.” (related: Hofstadter’s Law, “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”)

ore often than not, our fear doesn’t help us avoid the feelings; it simply subjects us to them for an agonizingly long time. We feel the suffering of procrastination, or the frustration of a stuck relationship. I know partnerships that drag along painfully for years because no one is willing to speak about the elephant in the room. Taking risks,

These are the 4 “phases” to expect as you move from one stage to another:

• Alpha – Life is good and normal. There is order.

• Beta – Doubts arise as you enter a new phase. Doing the same thing only makes it worse.

• Gamma – You feel lost. Things are chaotic and turbulent. This is where you can get trapped and feel like there’s nowhere to go.

• Delta –

Your values—beliefs, standards, points of reference, or other elements of identity—shape what is important to you and what is worth noticing.

Motivation often comes after starting. Find a way to start small. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

Dunning-Kruger Effect — “Relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is…[and] highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.” (related: overconfidence