psychology

‘There is nothing I need so much as nourishment for my self-esteem.’

What is empathy? Empathy is when the line between you and another blurs, when you become confused where you end and another person begins.

Success breeds overconfidence like nothing else.

The harder we have to work to get something, the more we value it.

Excellence requires repetition. Even if you’ve got passion and purpose perfectly aligned and completely love what you do, what you do is often reduced to a daily checklist. This means a portion of peak performance is always sculpted out of Wallace’s hallmarks of adult life: boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

When we focus on novelty, we lose sight of behavioral outcomes. And while using validated pressures to inform our designs can help guard against the natural tendency to pursue interventions that feel unique, they aren’t a guarantee; just as data can be used to justify bad business decisions, pressures can be used to justify bad interventions.

I myself like to call it attentive inattention. The concept was pioneered by Ulric Neisser, the father of cognitive psychology. Neisser noticed how he could look out a window at twilight and either see the external world or focus on the reflection of the room in the glass. But he couldn’t actively pay attention to both. Twilight or reflection had

The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.

Instead, what I think we’re missing is a sense of imagination, creativity, and genuine curiosity. Without these elements, the act of research itself has lost its potency, our findings and interpretations reduced to a shallow performance, where the same ideas are recycled and repackaged in an endless feedback loop.