Tag: psychology

  • potential fatigue

    The old system said: ‘Obey.’ The new system says: ‘Realize your potential,’ which can be a much crueler thing because potential’s infinite, and people, last time I checked, are not. There’s no stopping point in an achievement society. ‘Potential’ is the modern world’s term for whatever you haven’t done yet and, frankly, should already kinda…

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  • Your Most Improbable Life

    Yeah, sure. But it sounds like a lot of work. Can we strive for an equilibrium of not having to strive all the time? 🔗 Your Most Improbable Life

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  • Get a Good Return on Your AI Investments

    AI improves software throughput modestly but exposes weaknesses, increases cognitive and verification debt, and shifts engineering leverage toward strong internal platforms. Summarized by AI. 🔗 Get a Good Return on Your AI Investments

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  • The Agentic P&L: Beyond the Empire of Headcount

    Headcount as a unit of corporate prestige is becoming architectural debt; the federated agentic enterprise replaces departments with sharded knowledge enclaves and agent-to-agent handshakes, judged by contextual density, cost per cognitive outcome, decision provenance, and revenue per person. Summarized by AI. 🔗 The Agentic P&L: Beyond the Empire of Headcount

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  • The Identity Crisis AI Didn’t Warn You About

    For most of modern history, we’ve invested perhaps 10% of our energy in ‘be’ and 90% in ‘do’. The AI era invites (demands?) something closer to the reverse. That’s not a comfortable shift for an industry that prides itself on shipping, but might be the most important thing we build next. 🔗 The Identity Crisis…

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  • Do less

    For most of modern history, we’ve invested perhaps 10% of our energy in ‘be’ and 90% in ‘do’. The AI era invites (demands?) something closer to the reverse. That’s not a comfortable shift for an industry that prides itself on shipping, but might be the most important thing we build next. 🔗 The Identity Crisis…

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  • Laws, anecdotes, and other shit people say

    Laws, anecdotes, and other shit people say

    Betty Crocker, mid-1950s. I heard a reference the Betty Crocker “add an egg” cake-mix story recently. It is: originally, people didn’t buy the cake mix because it felt too easy and didn’t feel loving, or at least sufficiently Calvinistic; General Mills removed the egg, then people cracked one in themselves, and suddenly they felt like…

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  • “Your brain hates unbounded risk. When there’s no plan, it escalates into dread.”

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  • “Let’s say one person forgot to pick up groceries or didn’t accurately recall a conversation; the other would say, ‘Oh, you’re gaslighting me. This is psychological abuse,’” he said. “But they weren’t. They were just having what I would consider pretty normal miscommunications.” 🔗 Why Couples Therapists Are Sick of ‘Therapy-Speak’

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  • We conflate the quality of our decisions with the quality of their outcomes so automatically that we rarely notice we’re doing it. A good decision that leads to a bad outcome gets reclassified in our memory as a bad decision. A terrible decision that happens to work out becomes evidence of our brilliant judgment. We…

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  • 🤖 Optimism Linked to 15% Longer Life and Higher Odds of Reaching 85+

    People who maintain a more optimistic outlook tend to live longer and are more likely to reach “exceptional longevity,” defined as surviving to 85 or beyond. Drawing on data from over 69,000 women and 1,400 men, researchers found optimism’s benefits persisted even when accounting for health conditions, depression, and lifestyle habits. Summarized by AI. Source…

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  • Audience participation, “don’t sweat the small stuff.”

    “Very often, you need great audiences to have great art.” Tyler And at: “people judge things at the margin, right? In a friendship, or marriage, or if you have co-founders. At the margin, am I getting what I want? And, getting out of that mindset is very difficult. ”

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  • Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong? – “rather than continuing to treat ADHD as a chronic medical disorder primarily requiring pharmaceutical intervention, it may be more helpful to see it as a situational mismatch between individuals and their environments.”

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  • A Conversation Algorithm I Cribbed From Clinical Psychologists – What does “open ended question” even mean? Here’s some examples, and a conversational framework built around it. This also probably good for sales and marketing.

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  • Do these dual images say anything about your personality? – It doesn’t matter if you saw a rabbit, a vase, or an old woman. // “We didn’t find very much support for the claims, but there were some correlations in our data.”

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  • How to break free from your “toxic productivity” cycle – “if you’re not able to carve out even 20 minutes for yourself, then something needs to change in your life.” // Tools that find the priorities are hard: “We hear a lot about how to optimize for productivity, but what we don’t have is the…

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  • Need to contemplate the difference and overlap between “being genuine” and “being a jackass.”

    Need to contemplate the difference and overlap between “being genuine” and “being a jackass.”

    Detroit, 2015. Wastebook “I’m still in my pajamas — haven’t changed since Tuesday night. I’m also drinking a fair amount…” ProfG. “My conspiracy theory has a much higher budget.” Lordess. “To create this post, I used a cascade of AIs.” Tomasz Tunguz. “improvident” is an adjective meaning lacking foresight or failing to plan ahead, often…

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  • Why We Glorify Overwork and Refuse to Rest – One of the better explanations of what’s probably wrong with me: “It’s the most reliable way to feel a sense of his own worthiness — and to avoid difficult emotions.”

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  • Launchpad

    Launchpad

    The Bad Child For the most part, I think of therapy as gaslighting. The work (usually in my experience, at least) is about two things (1) making you accept the situation you’re in, and, (2) making changes in how you act and think. The part where you’re encouraged to talk more and “let people” in…

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  • Cynical Tactics for Change Management, Summer Hurry Up And Wait

    Scroll to the bottom for my daughter’s favorite joke. Cynical Tactics for Change Management Most people don’t want to change. And why would they? What they’ve done to this point has been successful: they’re still here! Most people want stability in their day-to-day life, not the risks of trying new things all the time. So…

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