One of the most costly and intensive mental operations anyone performs daily is task switching. It’s as though a brain just isn’t geared for clearing its RAM to make space for a new process. Instead, it gets stuck trying to compute the new task using some ancient page file mechanism, while maintaining the previous task in the RAM. There are a few scenarios that can play out when switching. I can switch perfectly (100%), get into the new mindspace, and start work....
Ed Catmull shares the story of his journey into Pixar leadership, and the principles he believes has made Pixar and Disney able to capitalise on the opportunities they’ve come across. Catmull seeks to make a lasting impression of the principles by delivering them in story, instead of as just a list of tips (although the afterword does contain said list of tips, to serve as reminders – a cheat sheet to revisit for bite-sized Ed wisdom in the future)....
Because it’s all wrong, and detrimental to understanding how real humans actually navigate the world. The demand curve is true for robots, not people. In fact, every concept in traditional economics is true for robots instead of people. Start teaching behavioural economics instead of traditional economics. Indeed, any teaching that assumes rational behaviour by humans should be treated as extremely suspect.
When you say yes to something, you say no to a hundred other things. Often, those things are hidden, half-realised or unplanned. If you choose to go out with friends on an afternoon with no other scheduled activities, it’s not immediately clear what you said no to. It might be Netflix, writing another blog post, cleaning the house, or playing candy crush for 4 hours straight without blinking. Without knowing, it’s easy to say yes....
Think on how to optimise for outsized gain without outsized risk exposure. The premise is that there is a non-linear relation between risk of failure and potential gain in any set of choices. It’s not always true that one must take on more risk to create the possibility of greater gain – and it’s not always true that aiming for X increase in potential gain increases risk by some equivalent factor of X...