“Try to pose for yourself this task, not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Dostoevsky wrote that in 1863, and whether it be polar bears or purple elephants, often when we don’t want to think of something the reverse happens and…
Nobody likes being wrong. That’s not a character flaw. It’s human, but some people take it further. They don’t just dislike being wrong, they can’t tolerate it. They’ll move heaven and earth to avoid being proven wrong, to reframe the evidence, to find anyone who agrees with them. Then they make a critical error, they…
Your life × doing zero = zero progress. That’s the Zero Law. Simple mathematics with profound implications for your life. I’m not a mathematician. I’m a GP. But I remember enough from school to know that any number multiplied by zero equals zero. n × 0 = 0. Always. No exceptions. And this basic mathematical…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Average isn’t good enough anymore. The Average Trap is where you end up when you try just enough. It’s a place you can hide from your potential, an excuse never to really stretch yourself. And maybe, if you’re honest, it’s also part of why you’ve never quite got what you really want. In a world…