All posts by mlpearso@aol.com

The Thinker

Attention

Writer David Foster Wallace on the importance of controlling your attention:

“Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

Source: This is Water

The Danger of False Concreteness

I was once an analyst for an aircraft component supplier. The Division Vice-President asked me for an estimate of the market size and of our sales for the next year. I had access to the best data in the whole world. My data listed every commercial airliner in the world (over 40,000 of them), by model and type, by owner, by tailnumber. It included hours flown for each aircraft, by month. I could tie this data to our records for each customer and tail number. I built a huge spreadsheet model and pasted the spreadsheets all over my office wall. Continue reading The Danger of False Concreteness

Eager or Anxious

Your body reacts exactly the same when you are eager and when you are anxious.

But your mind reacts quite differently.
Hearing eager generates confidence. Hearing anxious generates fear.

Then you act in confidence or you act in fear. Everyone around you will pick up on your actions and attitude.

Now that you have become aware of this, you will substitute eager for anxious every time you hear it.

Second-Order Thinking

Great decisions require understanding the second-order effects of your decision. Second-order effects are the consequences of the consequences of a decision. For example, the Prohibition Amendment stopped the legal production and distribution of alcoholic beverages. That was the intended consequence. The unintended second-order consequence was the rise of large criminal enterprises that continued far beyond the bootlegging. Continue reading Second-Order Thinking