Too busy to read?

This is the adaptation principle at work: People's judgments about their present state are based on whether it is better or worse than the state to which they have become accustomed.9 Adaptation is, in part, just a property of neurons: Nerve cells respond vigorously to new stimuli, but gradually they "habituate," firing less to stimuli that they have become used to.

The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.

"the aggregation of marginal gains," which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. Brailsford said, "The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together."

Recognize that conflicts are essential for great relationships . . . . . . because they are how people determine whether their principles are aligned and resolve their differences. Everyone has his or her own principles and values, so all relationships entail a certain amount of negotiation or debate over how people should be with each other. What you learn about each other will either draw you together or drive you apart. If your principles are aligned and you can work out your differences via a process of give-and-take, you will draw closer together. If not, you will move apart. Open discussion of differences ensures that there are no misunderstandings. If that doesn't happen on an ongoing basis, gaps in perspective will widen until inevitably there is a major clash.

The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

The Compound Effect is based on a principle I've used in my own life and training; that is, your decisions shape your destiny. The future is what you make of it. Little, everyday decisions will either take you to the life you desire or to disaster by default.

Embrace Reality and Deal with It 1.1 Be a hyperrealist. a. Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life. 1.2 Truth--or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality--is the essential foundation for any good outcome. 1.3 Be radically open-minded and radically transparent. a. Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change. b. Don't let fears of what others think of you stand in your way. c. Embracing radical truth and radical transparency will bring more meaningful work and more meaningful relationships. 1.4 Look to nature to learn how reality works. a. Don't get hung up on your views of how things "should" be because you will miss out on learning how they really are. b. To be "good," something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded. c. Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything. d. Evolve or die. 1.5 Evolving is life's greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward. a. The individual's incentives must be aligned with the group's goals. b. Reality is optimizing for the whole--not for you. c. Adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable. d. Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing--and decide what you want to be. e. What you will be will depend on the perspective you have. 1.6 Understand nature's practical lessons. a. Maximize your evolution. b. Remember "no pain, no gain." c. It is a fundamental law of nature that in order to gain strength one has to push one's limits, which is painful. 1.7 Pain + Reflection = Progress. a. Go to the pain rather than avoid it. b. Embrace tough love. 1.8 Weigh second- and third-order consequences. 1.9 Own your outcomes. 1.10 Look at the machine from the higher level. a. Think of yourself as a machine operating within a machine and know that you have the ability to alter your machines to produce better outcomes. b. By comparing your outcomes with your goals, you can determine how to modify your machine. c. Distinguish between you as the designer of your machine and you as a worker with your machine. d. The biggest mistake most people make is to not see themselves and others objectively, which leads them to bump into their own and others' weaknesses again and again. e. Successful people are those who can go above themselves to see things objectively and manage those things to shape change. f. Asking others who are strong in areas where you are weak to help you is a great skill that you should develop no matter what, as it will help you develop guardrails that will prevent you from doing what you shouldn't be doing. g. Because it is difficult to see oneself objectively, you need to rely on the input of others and the whole body of evidence. h. If you are open-minded enough and determined, you can get virtually anything you want.

There are similar reasons for the Party's resistance to democracy and individual rights. If the population were to be given a free vote, the unity of the Han might begin to crack or, more likely, the countryside and urban areas would come into conflict. That in turn would embolden the people of the buffer zones, further weakening China. It is only a century since the most recent humiliation of the rape of China by foreign powers; for Beijing, unity and economic progress are priorities well ahead of democratic principles.

The second principle of memory concerns emotions. If something made us incredibly frightened, elated, sad, or angry--four of the primary human emotions--we're more likely to remember it. This is because the brain creates neurochemical tags, or markers, that accompany the experience and cause it to become labeled as important. It's as though the brain took a yellow fluorescent highlighter to the text of our day, and selectively marked up the important parts of the day's experiences. This makes evolutionary sense--the emotionally important events are probably the ones that we need to remember in order to survive, things like the growl of a predator, the location of a new freshwater spring, the smell of rancid food, the friend who broke a promise.

Earlier I traced people's confidence in a belief to two related impressions: cognitive ease and coherence. We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But ease and coherence do not guarantee that a belief held with confidence is true. The associative machine is set to suppress doubt and to evoke ideas and information that are compatible with the currently dominant story. A mind that follows WY SIATI will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions. Klein and I eventually agreed on an important principle: the confidence that people have in their intuitions is not a reliable guide to their validity. In other words, do not trust anyone--including yourself--to tell you how much you should trust their judgment.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, stresses the importance of having a broad theoretical toolbox - not to be a good academic, but to have a good, pragmatic grip on reality. He regularly explains to students which mental models have proven most useful to help him understand markets and human behaviour. He advocates looking out for the most powerful concepts in every discipline and to try to understand them so thoroughly that they become part of our thinking. The moment one starts to combine these mental models and attach one's experiences to them, one cannot help but gain what he calls "worldly wisdom." The importance is to have not just a few, but a broad range of mental models in your head. Otherwise, you risk becoming too attached to one or two and see only what fits them. You would become the man with a hammer who sees nails everywhere

we can call the Bennett Principle, provides a plausible foundation for the active leisure lives we've encountered so far in this section. Pete Adeney, Liz Thames, and Theodore Roosevelt all provide specific arguments for their embrace of strenuous leisure, but these arguments all build on the same general principle that the value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested.

I have found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is a puzzle I need to solve. By solving the puzzle, I get a gem in the form of a principle that helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future. Collecting these gems continually improves my decision making, so I am able to ascend to higher and higher levels of play in which the game gets harder and the stakes become ever greater.

The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don't remember all types of information equally well. As exceptional as we are at remembering visual imagery (think of the two-picture recognition test), we're terrible at remembering other kinds of information, like lists of words or numbers. The point of memory techniques is to do what the synasthete S did instinctually: to take the kinds of memories our brains aren't good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.

The redesigned physics class at the University of British Columbia offers a road map for redesigning instruction according to deliberate-practice principles: Begin by identifying what students should learn how to do. The objectives should be skills, not knowledge. In figuring out the particular way students should learn a skill, examine how the experts do it. In particular, understand as much as possible about the mental representations that experts use, and teach the skill so as to help students develop similar mental representations. This will involve teaching the skill step by step, with each step designed to keep students out of their comfort zone but not so far out that they cannot master that step. Then give plenty of repetition and feedback; the regular cycle of try, fail, get feedback, try again, and so on is how the students will build their mental representations.

Goodhart's Law. Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."9 Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you. Each number is simply one piece of feedback in the overall system.

pain as nature's reminder that there is something important for me to learn. Encountering pains and figuring out the lessons they were trying to give me became sort of a game to me. The more I played it, the better I got at it, the less painful those situations became, and the more rewarding the process of reflecting, developing principles, and then getting rewards for using those principles became. I learned to love my struggles, which I suppose is a healthy perspective to have, like learning to love exercising (which I haven't managed to do yet).

The Amish, it turns out, do something that's both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.

you had to trade places entirely with the person you envy, if you had to give up your brain, your principles, your proudest accomplishments to live in their life, would you do it? Are you willing to pay the price they paid to get what you covet? No, you aren't.

I've become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.

we also apply two of the primary learning principles in the book: spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related topics. If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better. Similarly, if they interleave the study of different topics, they learn each better than if they had studied them one at a time in sequence.

in terms of understanding the content of the lecture, the students who took their notes by hand came out much, much better. After a week, this difference in understanding was still clearly measurable. There is no secret to it and the explanation is pretty simple: Handwriting is slower and can't be corrected as quickly as electronic notes. Because students can't write fast enough to keep up with everything that is said in a lecture, they are forced to focus on the gist of what is being said, not the details. But to be able to note down the gist of a lecture, you have to understand it in the first place. So if you are writing by hand, you are forced to think about what you hear (or read) - otherwise you wouldn't be able to grasp the underlying principle, the idea, the structure of an argument.

Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln's principle that 'you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time'. ... government control of the media undermines Lincoln's logic, because it prevents citizens from realising the truth. Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others, and divert attention to external threats - either real or imaginary.

Advertisements generally work on the principle of creating in us a feeling that we lack something and then providing the means to fill it. The writer David Foster Wallace describes their goal as to 'create an anxiety relievable by purchase'.

Whatever success I've had in life has had more to do with my knowing how to deal with my not knowing than anything I know. The most important thing I learned is an approach to life based on principles that helps me find out what's true and what to do about it.

Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox, they define Lean as, "a strategy of flow efficiency with key principles of just-in-time and visual management."

you have letters to mail, put them near your car keys or house keys so that when you leave the house, they're right there. The principle underlying all these is off-loading the information from your brain and into the environment; use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.

Craft unique roles that amplify each individual's strengths and motivations. Avoid the Peter principle by promoting people only to roles in which they can succeed.

almost all "cases at hand" are just "another one of those," identifying which "one of those" it is, and then applying well-thought-out principles for dealing with it.

This principle is also true in sales. An effective sales person first seeks to understand the needs, the concerns, the situation of the customer. The amateur salesman sells products; the professional sells solutions to needs and problems. It's a totally different approach. The professional learns how to diagnose, how to understand. He also learns how to relate people's needs to his products and services. And he has to have the integrity to say, "My product or service will not meet that need" if it will not.

When arguing from first principles, you are deliberately starting from scratch. You are explicitly avoiding the potential trap of conventional wisdom, which could turn out to be wrong. Even if you end up in agreement with conventional wisdom, by taking the first-principles approach, you will gain a much deeper understanding of the subject at hand.

Gather everybody around. Answer the question and explain the philosophy. Make sure everyone understands the thought process. Ask one person to write it in the manual. Let everybody know they can decide this without me next time.

5 Learn How to Make Decisions Effectively 5.1 Recognize that 1) the biggest threat to good decision making is harmful emotions, and 2) decision making is a two-step process (first learning and then deciding). 5.2 Synthesize the situation at hand. a. One of the most important decisions you can make is who you ask questions of. b. Don't believe everything you hear. c. Everything looks bigger up close. d. New is overvalued relative to great. e. Don't oversqueeze dots. 5.3 Synthesize the situation through time. a. Keep in mind both the rates of change and the levels of things, and the relationships between them. b. Be imprecise. c. Remember the 80/20 Rule and know what the key 20 percent is. d. Be an imperfectionist. 5.4 Navigate levels effectively. a. Use the terms "above the line" and "below the line" to establish which level a conversation is on. b. Remember that decisions need to be made at the appropriate level, but they should also be consistent across levels. 5.5 Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it. 5.6 Make your decisions as expected value calculations. a. Raising the probability of being right is valuable no matter what your probability of being right already is. b. Knowing when not to bet is as important as knowing what bets are probably worth making. c. The best choices are the ones that have more pros than cons, not those that don't have any cons at all. 5.7 Prioritize by weighing the value of additional information against the cost of not deciding. a. All of your "must-dos" must be above the bar before you do your "like-to-dos." b. Chances are you won't...

The way of the Essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better. It doesn't mean occasionally giving a nod to the principle. It means pursuing it in a disciplined way.

We can call this "the progress principle": Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: "Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing."

Two of the most crucial principles used by the attentional filter are change and importance.

Be Radically Open-Minded 3.1 Recognize your two barriers. a. Understand your ego barrier. b. Your two "yous" fight to control you. c. Understand your blind spot barrier. 3.2 Practice radical open-mindedness. a. Sincerely believe that you might not know the best possible path and recognize that your ability to deal well with "not knowing" is more important than whatever it is you do know. b. Recognize that decision making is a two-step process: First take in all the relevant information, then decide. c. Don't worry about looking good; worry about achieving your goal. d. Realize that you can't put out without taking in. e. Recognize that to gain the perspective that comes from seeing things through another's eyes, you must suspend judgment for a time--only by empathizing can you properly evaluate another point of view. f. Remember that you're looking for the best answer, not simply the best answer that you can come up with yourself. g. Be clear on whether you are arguing or seeking to understand, and think about which is most appropriate based on your and others' believability. 3.3 Appreciate the art of thoughtful disagreement. 3.4 Triangulate your view with believable people who are willing to disagree. a. Plan for the worst-case scenario to make it as good as possible. 3.5 Recognize the signs of closed-mindedness and open-mindedness that you should watch out for. 3.6 Understand how you can become radically open-minded. a. Regularly use pain as your guide toward quality reflection. b. Make being open-minded a habit. c. Get to know your blind spots. d. If a number of different...

Understand That People Are Wired Very Differently 4.1 Understand the power that comes from knowing how you and others are wired. a. We are born with attributes that can both help us and hurt us, depending on their application. 4.2 Meaningful work and meaningful relationships aren't just nice things we chose for ourselves--they are genetically programmed into us. 4.3 Understand the great brain battles and how to control them to get what "you" want. a. Realize that the conscious mind is in a battle with the subconscious mind. b. Know that the most constant struggle is between feeling and thinking. c. Reconcile your feelings and your thinking. d. Choose your habits well. e. Train your "lower-level you" with kindness and persistence to build the right habits. f. Understand the differences between right-brained and left-brained thinking. g. Understand how much the brain can and cannot change. 4.4 Find out what you and others are like. a. Introversion vs. extroversion. b. Intuiting vs. sensing. c. Thinking vs. feeling. d. Planning vs. perceiving. e. Creators vs. refiners vs. advancers vs. executors vs. flexors. f. Focusing on tasks vs. focusing on goals. g. ...

Perhaps the most important principle of memory is that we tend to remember best those things we care about the most. At a biological level, neurochemical tags are created and attached to experiences that are emotionally important; and those appear to be the ones that our dreams grab hold of.

Use the 5-Step Process to Get What You Want Out of Life 2.1 Have clear goals. a. Prioritize: While you can have virtually anything you want, you can't have everything you want. b. Don't confuse goals with desires. c. Decide what you really want in life by reconciling your goals and your desires. d. Don't mistake the trappings of success for success itself. e. Never rule out a goal because you think it's unattainable. f. Remember that great expectations create great capabilities. g. Almost nothing can stop you from succeeding if you have a) flexibility and b) self-accountability. h. Knowing how to deal well with your setbacks is as important as knowing how to move forward. 2.2 Identify and don't tolerate problems. a. View painful problems as potential improvements that are screaming at you. b. Don't avoid confronting problems because they are rooted in harsh realities that are unpleasant to look at. c. Be specific in identifying your problems. d. Don't mistake a cause of a problem with the real problem. e. Distinguish big problems from small ones. f. Once you identify a problem, don't tolerate it. 2.3 Diagnose problems to get at their root causes. a. Focus on the "what is" before deciding "what to do about it." b. Distinguish proximate causes from root causes. c. Recognize that knowing what someone (including you) is like will tell you what you can expect from them. 2.4 Design a plan. a. Go back before you go forward. b. Think about your problem as a set of outcomes produced by a machine. c. Remember that there are typically many paths to achieving your goals. d. Think of your plan as being like a movie script in that you visualize who will do what through time. e. Write down your plan for everyone to see and to measure your progress against. f. Recognize that it doesn't take a lot of time to design a good plan. 2.5 Push through to completion. a. Great planners who don't execute their plans go nowhere. b. Good work habits are vastly underrated. c. Establish clear metrics to make certain that you are following your plan. 2.6 Remember that weaknesses don't matter if you find solutions. a. Look at the patterns of your mistakes and identify at which step in the 5-Step Process you typically fail. b. Everyone has at least one big thing that stands in the way of their success; find yours and deal with it. 2.7 Understand your own and others' mental maps and humility.

Bodybuilders, for instance, will change the types of exercises they are doing, increase or decrease the weight they're lifting or the number of repetitions, and switch up their weekly routine. Actually, most of them will vary their patterns proactively so they don't get stuck on plateaus in the first place. Cross-training of any sort is based on the same principle -- switch off between different types of exercise so that you are constantly challenging yourself in different ways.

Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning. 2. Know when not to have an opinion. 3. Develop, test, and systemize timeless and universal principles. 4. Balance risks in ways that keep the big upside while reducing the downside.

Here's a short checklist worth keeping in mind when it comes to persevering, to doing it "your way" at all costs: 1. A leader must never quit. 2. A leader must know when to quit. 3. Proving that you are right or proving that someone is wrong are bad reasons for persisting. 4. Good logic, sound principles, and strong belief are the purest and most productive reasons for pushing forward when things get rough.

classify these situations into types and have good principles for dealing with them, we will make better decisions more quickly and have better lives as a result. Having a good set of principles is like having a good collection of recipes for success.

The keys to flow: There's a clear challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step (the progress principle).

It is much more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first, not only because to fail to do so will lose the influence of the contrast principle; to fail to do so will also cause the principle to work actively against them.

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It's not "integrity," it's "always do the right thing." It's not "innovation," it's "look at the problem from a different angle." Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea ... we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation.

Out of the 15,000 barristers in England and Wales, around 4,000 of us are criminal practitioners, assuming one of these diametric roles in Crown Court (and occasionally magistrates' court) cases across the country. Most of us are self-employed; hired guns, ethically obliged by the 'cab rank rule' to take the first case that comes calling to our clerks, regardless of its merit or our personal feelings about the parties or principles involved. And in crime, this means that most barristers both prosecute and defend (although not, obviously, in the same case). And my view has always been that doing a bit of both is good for the soul. It reinforces your independence. It sharpens your objectivity. And it helps you, in any given case, to know your enemy.

The good news is that we now know of simple and practical strategies that anybody can use, at any point in life, to learn better and remember longer: various forms of retrieval practice, such as low-stakes quizzing and self-testing, spacing out practice, interleaving the practice of different but related topics or skills, trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution, distilling the underlying principles or rules that differentiate types of problems, and so on.

Mind Gym by Gary Mack is a book that strips down the esoteric nature of applied sport psychology. Gary introduces a variety of mindset training principles and makes them extremely easy to understand and practice.

The truth is that the entire case in favour of magistrates' courts, as we currently run them, is a sham. There is little sustainable rationale for their existence in principle, and no justification whatsoever for the way in which these courts operate in practice. There is no excuse for the amateur, sausage-factory paradigm of justice and 'that'll do' complacency that pervades 94 per cent of criminal cases, other than that most cynical political trinity: it's cheap, it's the way we've always done it and no one who votes either knows or cares.

Lean principles focus on creating value for the customer--thinking systematically, creating constancy of purpose, embracing scientific thinking, creating flow and pull (versus push), assuring quality at the source, leading with humility, and respecting every individual.