Often, it’s easier to blame others when bad things happen rather than blame yourself. It’s easier to look for someone external to carry the can than to accept it’s actually your fault you’re in that situation to begin with. This is a self-protective conditioned response. It’s a recognised thing most of us do from time…
You only see the winners. That’s the problem. You see Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs. All dropped out of university, all became billionaires. So you conclude that dropping out leads to success. You don’t see the thousands who dropped out and failed. That’s survivor bias. You’re only seeing the survivors, only seeing the winners,…
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…