The most dangerous person in any room is the one who doesn’t know what they don’t know. They’re confident. They’re decisive. They speak with authority. They’re absolutely certain they’re right. And they’re making terrible decisions that they don’t even realise are terrible, which is precisely what makes them so dangerous. It’s not the incompetent person…
Whilst lessons in this course have discussed the benefits of the compounding effect, of consistency and doing what you know you need to do, when people get stuck, they are often stuck because they are doing the wrong things, or things that don’t really matter. If you’re busy, working really hard, and you’re exhausted at…
There’s a condition I see on a regular basis when I talk to patients. It was first described by Aaron Beck, one of the fathers of modern cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), back in 1976, when he was researching the distorted ways people think and where therapy could help. This particular cognitive bias seems to affect…
Continuing with the theme of the last lesson — that being busy doesn’t mean you’re always being productive — I’m going to approach this from another angle and discuss two other cognitive biases that cause the same problem. Understanding them will help you see what you might be doing wrong when you’re busy, exhausted, and…
It’s winter in the UK, and flu season is upon us. I saw a really sick kid a few days ago and admitted him to hospital. He’d been seen just a few days before with what looked like a simple cold. Now he’s on a paediatric ward with pneumonia, struggling to breathe, parents terrified out…
Every living thing on the planet moves toward reward and away from punishment. Bacteria do it. Animals do it. You do it. It’s not complicated. It’s not sophisticated. It’s the most basic operating principle in all of biology: seek pleasure, avoid pain, move toward what helps you, move away from what hurts you. Charlie Munger…
“It’s not fair.” I hear this expression at least every week. Usually from people who aren’t particularly happy with their lot in life, especially when they feel others have more than them. Sometimes it’s said with resignation, sometimes with anger, sometimes with genuine bewilderment that the universe is out to get them or hasn’t arranged…
You decide you want a particular car, a specific model or a specific car colour. Suddenly, that car or that colour of car is all over the roads. You’d swear there are twice as many of them as there were last week. You hear a song you haven’t thought about in years and then hear…
Sometimes moving forward is as simple as letting go of what’s holding you back. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But you’d be amazed how many people stay stuck precisely because they’re gripping too tightly to the very thing that’s keeping them trapped. Think of monkey bars in a playground. You know how they work. To move…
That cup of tea tastes so much better after you’ve been out in the cold and wet for an hour. Not because you made it differently. Not because the tea changed. You changed. You went from freezing to warm, from miserable to comfortable, and now every sip feels like a small miracle. That’s your brain…