Reading

★★☆☆☆ | Psychology | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

An entire book dedicated to the premise that our devices and social media are harmful to our concentration.  Two hundred pages of studies, yet hardly any advice on how to mitigate the effects.  The final chapter dealt in platitudes.  This was a waste of time. 

★★★★☆ | Psychology | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

My second recent book where the author is/was a professional poker player (the other was The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova). Duke lays out the unsung merits of timely quitting, citing many personal and business stories of people who successfully cut their losses and went on the bigger and brighter things, or failed to quit when they should have and paid the price.

As someone who only two jobs out of college, you would think I could learn a little about quitting.  These past few years though — I think I’ve caught up.

Expected Value –  The benefit of the outcome multiplied by its probability of occurring. Compare expected values of each potential decision.  Think like a power player.

“If you feel like you’ve got a close call between quitting and persevering, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice.”  — because we don’t like to quit.

Prospect Theory — model of how people make decisions.  Key finding: losing feels about two times as bad to us as winning.

Sure-loss Aversion — makes us not want to stop something we have already started.  We will do anything to avoid a loss, even if it’s the right decision.  “Once we suffer large casualties, we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process.” — Vietnam war dilemma.

Sunk Cost Effect — a systematic cognitive error in which people consider past investments of time and money and effort in making decisions about whether to invest future money, time and effort.

Katamari — Video game metaphor for the snowballing effect of decision-making.

Monkeys and Pedestals — teaching monkeys to juggle flaming torches is hard.  Building the pedestal for the monkey is easy.  Make sure to spend your efforts on teaching the monkey, not building the pedestal.  Similar to James Clear’s action over motion. Atomic Habits by James Clear

Endowment Effect — when we own something, it’s more valuable to us than an equally valuable object we don’t own.  Richard Thaler: “people often demand more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.” We also become endowed to our beliefs, our ideas, and our decisions.

Cognitive Dissonance — When new information conflicts with our prior beliefs and that new information makes us uncomfortable.  We naturally want the discomfort to go away so we rationalize away the new information so we can defend our prior beliefs.

Quit Plans

• Making a plan for when to quit should be done long before you face the decision to quit.  The worst time to make a decision is when you’re “in it”.
• Kill criteria — information you learn that tells you the monkey isn’t trainable or you’re not sufficiently likely to reach your goal.

Highlights

In large part, we are what we do, and our Identity is closely connected with whatever we’re focused on, including our careers, relationships, projects, and hobbies. When we quit any of those things, we have to deal with the prospect of quitting part of our identity. And that is painful.

Adults ask children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” We don’t ask, “What job do you want?”

We are asking who they will be, not what they will do. This is a difference with quite a large distinction.

And children get that. “I’m going to be a firefighter,” or “I’m going to be a doctor,” or “I’m going to be a basketball player.”

When your identity is what you do, then what you do becomes hard to abandon, because it means quitting who you are.

Inflexible goals aren’t a good fit for a flexible world.