This lesson is about circles. Your Circle of Influence, your Circle of Concern, and your Circle of Competence. For those of you that recognise these concepts, you can probably see that I’ve cobbled them together from the work of Stephen Covey and from a term used by Warren Buffett. Despite being totally different concepts, I’m…
You’re doing what everyone else is doing. Even when it’s wrong. Perhaps you look around before you act. Maybe you check what others think before you speak. You follow the crowd because the crowd must know something you don’t. That’s social proof tendency, and it’s running your life more than you realise. It’s not always…
OPD is what I call Obsessive Planning Disorder. As you’ve already guessed, it’s what happens when you over plan things a bit too much. Even though it sounds a bit like a proper medical condition, it’s not — I’m being deliberately light-hearted with the name. But it’s still a worrying trait that some people have…
Have you ever known something before you could explain why? A decision that felt obviously right, or obviously wrong, before you’d worked out the reasons? That’s intuition. And you’ve got it too, even if you don’t trust it. In a new situation, intuition can feel absent, or you can mistake a rushed decision for a…
Sometimes gradual doesn’t cut it. Sometimes you need to burn the bridges. Disruptive change is major change that happens all at once. It’s not gradual, it’s not incremental, it’s not marginal gains compounded over time. It’s sudden, complete, and irreversible. It’s the opposite of everything we’ve discussed about small steps and one percent improvements. But…
The purpose of this article is to get you to the point of full commitment. If you’ve been working through this hub in order, you’re somewhere between 25% and 50% of your journey. You’ve made the choice to start and leave the old you behind. You’ve started moving and you’ve got to keep moving up…
Your brain wants you to make decisions fast. Not good decisions. Not thoughtful decisions. Just fast ones. This made perfect sense when you were running from predators on the savannah. It makes considerably less sense when you’re choosing a career, ending a relationship, or deciding whether to send that angry email. This is called Doubt…
Common sense is not so common at all. I see this every single day in my practice. People come in with problems that have obvious solutions, and they can’t see them. They’re overthinking, overcomplicating, and completely missing what’s staring them right in the face. Most of my job as a General Practitioner isn’t about diagnosing…
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…
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…