The Weekly Circle #5
Welcome to the fifth episode of The Weekly Circle. A free Circles in Time newsletter released every Sunday.
Hey everybody,
Next week is a big one for me! The third edition of the Circles in Time programme kicks off, with a brand new cohort of curious participants from around the world.
One of the highlights of the second edition for me was the broad geographic diversity of the participants involved. Fortunately, that range seems set to continue. The current cohort includes participants from the UK, China, France, Australia, Hungary, Taiwan, US and of course, my home, South Africa :)
The professional backgrounds of the participants are also interesting to see. The majority of participants apply behavioural science in a professional capacity (either to product design, service design, strategy, UX or marketing). There are also quite a few independents/self-employed (designers, strategists, researchers, developers) participants. This is encouraging, as professionals who are doing a lot of self-management on a day-to-day basis have tons to gain from the programme.
I’m very much looking forward to working closely with all of them over the next eight weeks. I’m sure I’ll be learning just as much as I’m teaching.
WORLD VIEWS
Here are the ideas I’ve been circling around this week.
THE WORLD AROUND US
Deliberately Curated Consumption Flows
The behavioural scientist, author and leading expert on the science of habit formation, Wendy Wood, is well known for shining a light on the persistence with which humans tend to repeat a large chunk of the activities we perform daily. To quote her:
"We find that about 43 percent of what people do every day is repeated in the same context, usually while they are thinking about something else."
Although this mindless repetition may feel like we’re trapped in some modern dystopia, what Wendy is talking about isn’t a novel byproduct of the civilised world. In fact, this tendency toward mindless habituation is just the opposite. It has always been with humans. And not just, humans. Look more closely, and you’ll see it in almost all natural organisms.
The problem is that we’re often told that this mindlessness is a problem. Something we need to solve for. To wake up! To take control! Be more conscious of our surroundings, more often. Without context, this isn’t helpful advice. As the author, Ryan Holiday points out:
"No one is more exhausted than the people who must belabour every decision and consider every temptation.”
Now, of course, I’m not saying that there isn’t work to be done to be more mindful. Paying attention is a skill that bears more fruit, the more you invest in it. But to expect yourself to achieve a state of deliberate, always-on conscious awareness, is a delusion that even the spiritually inspired would agree with.
Why? Because mindlessness is one of the core optimising functions of our brains! To maintain sustainable use of the available cognitive resources, the brain is continually looking for ways to improve efficiencies. Compression, mental short cuts, rules of them, heuristics or habits, are all ways of describing what the brain is up to here. It’s a system doing the work it is meant to be doing. A law of human nature.
What’s the take away? Move with the grain of how your brain works rather than against it. Curate your food and information consumption environments to serve you when you’re acting mindlessly. Create principles, rules and helpful patterns and then systemise them. The most important things you consume should be the easiest to do so.
THE WORLD BETWEEN US
Emotions as Useful Fictions
I’ve burnt my fingers a few times talking about the science of emotion. It is probably not the best topic of conversation for a casual family dinner or first date. Especially if you have been exposed to Lisa Feldman-Barrett’s work on the subject.
The call for caution isn’t because the new science of emotion isn’t robust or rigorous. It definitely is. In fact, the recent studies are probably some of the best designed in the field of psychology. The problem is what the findings point to. They reveal a set of truths about how emotions work, that runs contrary to how we experience them. To how we talk about them. To how we expect them to work.
As Lisa Feldman-Barrett writes in her book, How Emotions Are Made:
"When scientists set aside the classical view and just look at the data, a radically different explanation for emotion comes to light. In short, we find that your emotions are not built-in but made from more basic parts. They are not universal but vary from culture to culture. They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment. Emotions are real, but not in the objective sense that molecules or neurons are real. They are real in the same sense that money is real—that is, hardly an illusion, but a product of human agreement."
Knowing this, and then observing the speed with which we reach consensus about our own emotional states or those of others, becomes a wonder in itself. The depth of our social nature revealed and worth marvelling at. But also, the realisation that uncomfortable truths stand little chance here, especially when they challenge collective coherencies.
As the Neuroscientist, Anil Seth likes to say - rather than anything objective, “reality is just the collection of hallucinations we all agree on”. Emotions are just one type of these agreed-on hallucinations.
THE WORLD WITHIN US
Tricking your Brain’s Reward System
One of the most important lesson’s I’ve learnt from the behavioural scientist and author, BJ Fogg, is the importance of celebration when it comes to habit formation.
It is well known that habit formation requires some variation of a cue-response-reward loop. When it comes to the ‘reward’ component of this equation, many people often default to finding external rewards. Fortunately, extrinsic rewards like money, coffee or sugary treats aren’t necessary and in fact may be a less effective path, because of the time gap between the action and reward often being too wide for a neurochemical connection to form.
A better approach is to focus on eliciting the positive sensation associated with a reward, by performing celebrations immediately after the action of interest has taken place. The more sound and movement involved in your celebration, the better.
This seems a bit bizarre, right? When I first started doing it, I definitely felt a bit silly, even though I had a good conceptual understanding of the cognitive psychology involved. But as I continued to play with it, and find celebrations that worked for me, I started seeing what all the fuss was about. This isn’t just another clever psychological hack. It’s a powerful, domain-neutral lever, for accelerating the rate of habit formation.
It isn’t hard for me to envision a future where celebration is accepted as a practice in the same way meditation and gratitude journaling are today. Give it a try.
Here are 102 celebrations to explore:
WISE WORDS
The quotes I’ve been circling around this week
START WITH YOURSELF
"There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self." ~ Aldous Huxley
“If your goal is to reduce suffering in the world, a good place to start is your own mind.” ~ Rorty Witt
"Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself." ~ Publilius Syrus
"Your ability to run deteriorates before your ability to walk. Keep your ability to run in older age. Aging is the diminishing ability to create or tolerate extremes." ~ Mark Baker
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” ~ Leonardo Da Vinci
LEARN FROM YOUR ACTIONS
“You learn to swim by jumping into the water and swimming, not by sitting in a classroom studying aqua-dynamic theory. Practical application is what matters.” ~ Jed McKenna
“Your actions reveal not what you want, but what you choose.” ~ Shane Parrish
“Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth.” ~ Machiavelli
“To maximize growth, increase agency over decisions and exposure to results.” ~ Michael Mayer
“Essentially, human behaviour deviates from pure rationality, the longer the feedback loop between action and reaction is.” ~ Liad Shababo
“If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.” ~ Epictetus
"If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn." ~ Ray Bradbury
"Don't look where you fell, but where you slipped." ~ African Proverb
“We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
"Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety." ~ Josh Waitzkin
ACCEPT THE WORLD AS IT IS
"All judgment reveals itself to be self-judgment in the end, and when this is understood, a larger comprehension of the nature of life takes its place." — David Hawkins
"What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven." ~ Chuck Palahniuk
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be." ~ Alexander Hamilton
“The human ability not to see cruelty or madness, when it is harnessed in the service of ‘your own side’ is quite something, huh?” ~ Yascha Mounk
“Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.” ~ Anthony de Mello
"A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing the anxiety." ~ Bertrand Russell
“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.” ~ John C. Maxwell
"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." ~ Henry Kissinger
“Hope is the belief that this moment isn’t good enough.” ~ Naval Ravikant
“Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.” ~ Carlo Rovelli
COMMUNITY
The Circles in Time community members that attended the first members’ workshop are now up and testing their new systems. Each of them was also connected with an accountability partner that they check-in with weekly, to discuss their progress, and provide feedback. This exercise runs for four weeks, followed by a system integration, iteration or cancellation decision.
There are also several new activities coming up for members, including the Circles in Time Book Club launch, and the Sample of One Webinar Series. Stay tuned!
SOMETHING TO PART WITH
A fascinating conversation between Maria Konnikova and Shane Parrish about decision making, uncertainty, the role of luck and what poker can teach us about the world we all live in.
Take care,
David