The Weekly Circle #3
Welcome to the third episode of The Weekly Circle. A free Circles in Time newsletter released every Sunday.
Hey everybody,
It is Women’s Day here in South Africa. In the spirit of this, I thought I would pay tribute to three women who have inspired me and shaped my vision for the Circles in Time initiative.
Wendy Wood
I don’t think there is anyone more knowledgeable about the science of habit formation than Wendy. Her book Good Habits, Bad Habits has played an enormous role in shaping my thinking on habit formation, the power of context, the importance of repetition and personal behaviour change.Angela Duckworth
Although Angela is well known for her work on grit and growth mindset, it is her more recent work that has made an impression on me. There are two projects, in particular. The first is the Behaviour Change for Good Initiative that she set up with Katy Milkman. It’s an Avengers-style approach to tackling the biggest behavioural problems in the world. The second piece, which had a more direct influence on my thinking about Circles in Time, was a paper she wrote called ‘Beyond Willpower’. I’ve summarised the key points in a thread that you can access here.Bridget Woods
Last but not least, I wanted to share some appreciation for Bridget, who had a profound influence on my thinking around community building, facilitation and development. During the last Circles in Time programme, I got a lot of positive feedback about my workshop style and structure. I can trace much of the good that I was doing there, back to the lessons I have learnt from Bridget over the years. You can explore all the exciting work she is doing here.
An additional note here: I shared a Twitter list of female leaders in the behavioural sciences that have inspired me. You can view the list here.
The Next Edition of the Circles in Time Programme
Sign-ups for the next edition of the Circles in Time programme are starting to trickle in. There are still quite a few seats available at this point, so if you are interested, please consider signing up. You can do so here.
Some frequent questions I am getting:
Who is the programme for?
Behavioural science researchers, practitioners and enthusiasts who are interested in learning about how behaviour insights, tools and techniques can be applied to improving one’s own behaviour.
What are the benefits?
You will learn how to move from broad aspirations to narrowly defined behaviour-based goals; from ambiguous intentions to deliberately designed person systems; from rough guesses about what works for you to rigorous personal experiments that generate data to evaluate impact clearly.
How long is the programme?
The programme spans eight weeks (24 August - 15 October). The first four weeks include focused course-style workshops. The second four weeks focus on a personal experiment with periodic check-ins.
WORLD VIEWS
Here are the ideas I’ve been circling around this week.
THE WORLD AROUND US
How to Build Online Communities
I came across a fascinating book this week called ‘Working in Public’ by Nadia Eghbal. In this book, Nadia shares her insights on open-source online communities, after having studied their dynamics as a researcher and community experience designer.
One neat take away is the taxonomy that Nadia has created for making sense of online communities. She divides communities into four distinct categories:
Federations (many users, many contributors) - e.g. Wikipedia; Linux
Clubs (few users, many contributors) - e.g. Astro Pi; Group chats
Stadiums (many users, few contributors) - e.g. Newsletters; Courses; Podcasts
Toys (few users, few contributors) - e.g. Personal projects
This framework, and Nadia’s work more generally, is interesting and relevant to the Circles of Time initiative on a few different levels. For one, it is useful for thinking about how to build small yet highly engaged and participatory communities online. This is especially important given the necessary presence of key social drivers in improving behaviour (pledging, social commitment devices, accountability partners, etc.). Secondly, it talks to the growing importance of self-management in a remote, always-on, distraction-rich world. Lastly, it spotlights an essential yet underrated feature community engagement—namely, creator attention. Attention is often spoken about from a consumer/demand-side perspective. Nadia’s work encourages us to consider the other side. The limits of attention from a contributor/supply-side perspective.
You can grab Nadia Eghbal’s excellent book here. She also spoke recently on the a16z podcast, which you can listen to here.
THE WORLD BETWEEN US
Goal Selection, Mimetic Desire & Self-Deception
Why do we want what we want? Behavioural science has a lot to say about goal setting and how to reach the set goals. It has less to say, however, about why we select one particular goal in the first place, instead of the infinite other possible options.
There are, of course, analytical and systematic approaches to choosing one’s goals. Books like Essentialism, Super Thinking and Seeking Wisdom show us this is possible and provide blueprints for how to do it ourselves. Yet, my experience and I’d expect yours too, is that goal selection is a much more intuitive process. Our ambitions. Our aspirations. Our wants. Our desires. These all feel like deeply personal things. Not the sorts of things that can be corrected or adjusted with a framework or toolkit.
Why? Perhaps, because they are, in some deeply felt sense, the essence of who we are. They provide validity for our agency. Justification of our individuality.
Unfortunately, when it comes to goal selection, this felt sense of agency is likely just to be a cunning performance in self-deception. Something the human mind is exceptionally effective at.
Okay, so if our desired goals aren’t the result of independent agency, what is creating them, and why do they feel like they are truly ours? One of the most compelling answers to this question comes from the French philosopher, Rene Girard.
Girard understood all desire to be mimetic. Essentially, people don’t want things because of some deeply personal or instinctual desire for such things. We want things because we infer that other people want them. We mimic the desires of those around us, especially those with power and influence, and then call those desires our own. Girard described this phenomenon as Mimetic Desire. The idea is outlined by him neatly below:
“Human beings influence each other, and when they are together, they tend to desire the same objects. This not because these objects are scarce, but because imitation governs desire. Man attempts to create a being out of himself that is essentially based on the desire of his fellow.”
~ Rene Girard
I’ll share a more in-depth discussion on Girard and Mimetic Desire another time, but if you’re interested, you can explore his many books on the subject.
THE WORLD WITHIN US
High Blood Sugar Reduces the Benefits of Exercise
A study published in Nature this month provides evidence for a concerning new way in which high blood sugar might be harming our health.
Scientists have known for a while that there is a direct relationship between blood sugar levels and long term health. However, this new study revealed that one of the primary ways in which high blood sugar may be harming us is through limiting the typical benefits that people get from regular exercise.
What’s going on here?
According to a recent New York Time article:
“To better understand why, the scientists next looked inside muscles. And conditions there were telling. The muscles of the control animals teemed with healthy, new muscle fibers and a network of new blood vessels ferrying extra oxygen and fuel to them. But the muscle tissues of the animals with high blood sugar displayed mostly new deposits of collagen, a rigid substance that seems to have crowded out new blood vessels and prevented the muscles from adapting to the exercise and contributing to better fitness.”
Essentially, what these findings suggest is that although sugar may provide us with short term spikes in energy, the damage this is doing to our muscles is severely undercutting the possible gains we would expect to receive from exercising.
The assumption that we can balance things out by going for a long run after a sugary meal, turns out to be faulty and harmful, especially over the longer run.
Food for thought: If sugar is doing such harmful damage to our muscles, how might it be affecting our brains?
WISE WORDS
The quotes I’ve been circling around this week.
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” ~ Alexander Den Heijer
“One of the best acts of self-determination is to change the things other than you that are influencing you.” ~ Daniel Schmachtenberger
“The best learners are the people who push through the discomfort of being objectively bad at something.” ~ Tommy Collison
“Repetition is the father of learning. I repeat, repetition is the father of learning.” ~ Lil Wayne
“We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.” ~ E.O. Wilson
“Most people think they lack motivation when they really lack clarity.” ~ James Clear
“Growth happens by doing things you are unqualified to do.” ~ Sahil Lavingia
“I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” ~ James Baldwin
“If you push fear away, the only version of fear available to you will be its crazy, irrational, or contorted version. If you’re willing to feel it and merge with it, its energy and wisdom will appear.” ~ Kristen Ulmer
“Courage is grace under pressure.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive; to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
“You grow up the day you have the first real laugh at yourself.” ~ Ethel Barrymore
“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” ~ Joseph Campbell
“When you get the choice to sit it out or to dance, I hope you dance.” ~ Lee Ann Womack
“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” ~ Pericles
“Life is not about you. It’s about what you do for others. The faster you are able to get over yourself, the more you can do for the people who matter most.” ~ Tom Rath
COMMUNITY
Next week we kick off the first Circles in Time Members Workshops! For details on these workshops and all the other recent announcements, please see the community members post that I shared earlier today.
If you have completed the programme but are not yet a part of the community members space, you can join at any time. Simply follow this link to get started.
SOME PARTING INSPIRATION
Take care,
David
Love reading this! One quote to add, as Carl Jung famously said: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."