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The way I see the world is fundamentally different from every other person out there. This is because I’ve got a different bunch of DNA combined with a different set of actual experiences, and it’s shaped the lens through which I view everything. My map does most things well. However, it doesn’t look like your map. You map probably also does most things well. My map isn’t more correct than yours, because it’s a stretch to label all but a tiny part of existence as “objective”....

When bees fly out to find food for their hive, they don’t always make it back. They can get fatigued, sometimes to the point where they are unable to keep going. If this happens, they simply wait to die. I found one such bee on a windowsill. Immobile, unable to respond with more than slight twitches of its legs when provoked. I gave it liquid honey. It drank for several minutes, rested for half an hour and left....

This read came up in conjunction with taking a certificate on behavioural economics. It’s essentially a business handbook, a reference of sorts that is designed to quickly guide the reader through a series of 25+ ways in which human decision making is biased, and how that affects how business can be conducted. Since we treated the course material as a direct input source for coming up with new projects for work, it was a totally awesome read....

Giving is scary. A creeping fear lingers, always, that what you’ve got is not enough. That your gift will not be well received. The fear persists across so many domains. Contributing to group projects, starting a business, giving presents, personal relationships, community participation, leadership. Fear gets in the way of generosity. The desire to contribute is in constant combat with the reptilian thought that your contribution will be deemed unworthy....

I operate at least one order of magnitude better when I’m on a roll. I suspect this is true to varying degree among most people. The effect is similar to confirmation bias, or faking-it-until-you-make-it – being on a roll is a story, one that’s hard to diverge from once I’ve entered into the core narrative. Conversely, just as momentum describes the relationship between an object’s mass and velocity, inertia describes the energy it takes to accelerate or decelerate said object....