psychology

To avoid impulsively “just shipping it,” he introduces deliberate friction through cooldown periods when reviewing designs or providing feedback. This intentional pause allows ideas to mature, fostering more thoughtful and meaningful responses.

Flow follows focus, and we pay the most attention to the task at hand, when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. We want to stretch, but not snap. When we are pushing on our talents and advancing our abilities, we are walking the path to mastery—and the brain notices. It rewards this effort with dopamine. And because dopamine

explains why so many young men have lost themselves in video games, and are no longer in employment or relationships. The false signals they’re getting from video game progress, combined with the sexual reward of online porn, are convincing their dopamine pathways that they’re winning in life, even as their minds and futures atrophy.

It’s easy to

Why do people fail it? Panic. They forget it’s a game. They think they’ll really die. Joe Simpson didn’t know if he would survive the mountain, but he could get to that next rock in twenty minutes. That game was winnable and it kept him going.

It’s time to realize that pain, struggle, suffering, and waiting are signs that it’s time for another approach.

Economist Per Bylund once noted: “The concept of economic value is easy: whatever someone wants has value, regardless of the reason (if any).” Not utility, not profits—just whether people want it or not, for any reason. So much of what happens in the economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to make sense of.

Neuroscientist Diana Tamir found that your brain gets more pleasure from you talking about yourself than it does from food or money.

‘In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.’

He concludes that stories of success and failure consistently exaggerate the impact of leadership style and management practices on firm outcomes, and thus their message is rarely useful.