Category: Expectations
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Maps, masks, and models
“Never confuse your mask with your face. You are so much more,” Frederik Gieschen writes. “The map is not the territory,” is a phrase coined by Alfred Korzybski. “All models are wrong, some are useful,” George Box writes. By default, every analysis, heuristic, and principle omits something. They’re useful because they generally omit the right…
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A table for your thoughts
I once had a colleague who said he wasn’t able to stop snoozing his alarm clock. There was no way for me to talk him out of it. It was a fact of life to him: the sky was blue, the table was holding his laptop, and he couldn’t stop snoozing his alarm clock. Things…
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Creating a perception
Media—social, traditional, or otherwise—is not the ideal place to seek honesty, vulnerability, and genuine connection. It’s not a place to understand reality. It’s a place to create and interpret perceptions. If you’re doing creative work, your image and brand are an inherent part of the art. There’s a notion that work should be appreciated for…
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Betrayals
My father has a saying in Cantonese, which roughly translates into, “You can’t trust people, you can only trust God.” This saying came to mind in last night’s episode of Ted Lasso. Betrayal is one of the most painful emotions. We’ve seen Ted Lasso deal with it, in different orders of magnitude, each season. I…
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Validation addiction
This is the latest in a series on theTV show Ted Lasso. Here was the first. Spoiler alert! One of the best gifts a person can receive is validation. The more underestimated a person is—bullied, treated cruelly, or just not being seen or respected—the greater the hunger for this validation. Nate’s storyline in Ted Lasso…
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Sour yell
There’s a scene in the latest episode of Ted Lasso (season 3, episode 2) in which AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Welton is watching her ex-husband Rupert Mannion (who owns a rival team, West Ham United) persuade a superstar soccer player, Zava, on the verge of signing a deal with Chelsea, to join his team instead. …
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“Luck” covers the outcomes we can’t explain
Peter Thiel defines luck: What I do think is that as a society we attribute too much to luck. Luck is like an atheistic word for God: we ascribe things to it that we don’t understand or don’t want to understand. As a venture capitalist, I think one of the most toxic things to do…
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Extreme affirmations don’t work, compassion does
In “Positive Self-Statements Power for Some, Peril for Others,” authors Joanne V. Wood, W.Q. Elaine Perunovic, and John W. Lee write: When people with low self-esteem repeated the statement, ‘‘I’m a lovable person’’ (Study 2), or focused on ways in which this statement was true of them (Study 3), neither their feelings about themselves nor…
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The prediction machine
Neuroscience makes the case that the brain is capable of prediction. In Chatter, Ethan Kross writes, “The brain is a prediction machine that is constantly trying to help us navigate the world.” He references Andy Clark’s mental model of brains as predictive machines (more here at The New Yorker). There’s also Micha Heilbron’s work saying…
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Get optimism out of your head
The optimistic bias is powerful; even the most successful confidence artists, often the manipulators of their marks’ optimism, are susceptible to its bias. Whether it’s biases like motivated reasoning, some version of magical thinking (like lucky girl syndrome), or Solomon’s paradox—or perhaps all of them together!—optimism can all too quickly inflate expectations. One of the…