psychology

It doesn’t make more things true, it just uncovers more true things than we saw before.

You will never get into trouble by admitting that you may be wrong. That will stop all argument and inspire your opponent to be just as fair and open and broadminded as you are. It will make him want to admit that he, too, may be wrong.

A helpful exercise is to describe the situation from the beginning, either out loud or in writing, as if to a stranger who isn’t aware of any of the specifics—much like Holmes talks his theories through out loud to Watson. When Holmes states his observations in this way, gaps and inconsistencies that weren’t apparent before come to the surface.

11. Explanatory Inversion:

Questions rest on unexamined assumptions, so always try flipping them. For instance, don’t just ask why there is poverty, ask why there is prosperity. This helps you realize poverty is the norm and the lack of it is the thing that needs to be explained.

Let’s say the first layer of the self-awareness onion is a simple understanding of one’s emotions. “This is when I feel happy.” “This makes me feel sad.” “This gives me hope.”

My friend’s wisdom was a type of abstraction, abstracting heartbreak down to its very essence. Abstraction can appear to take you further and further away from reality, but really you’re getting closer and closer to the heart of the matter. To get to the heart, you have to strip away clothes and skin and flesh and bone.

Whenever I’m presenting an analysis, I like to start with the story of how we got to the need for this analysis to be with and why this math matters—fairly normal advice. However, I’ll take it a step further.

Rather than rattle off the numbers along with my suggested fix, I’ll wave three red story flags in front of the executive’s eyes. Each

it induces an availability cascade.

our storytelling proclivity in another guise: we imagine stories based on the ones we’ve experienced, not the ones we haven’t.