When you’re blessed with intelligence you’re cursed with the ability to use it to concoct intricate stories about why things happened – especially stories justifying why you made a mistake or why you’ll eventually be right in an area you’re wrong.

Too Smart

But it’s all too easy to imagine some enlightened, superintelligent being standing outside our world, looking at us with the same pity and smug superiority that we feel toward the piranha.

Quantum Mechanics, Plato’s Cave and the Blind Piranha

The goal of coaching isn’t to make someone feel good. The goal is to break through a person’s guise of knowing. Human beings are master rationalizers in an effort to protect themselves from feeling challenged and embarrassed.

The Key to Effective Coaching: Psychologically Safe Partnering That Encourages Discomfort

We played his favourite classical music (one for a future episode of Troika), read the news or books, and generally waffling in an attempt to provide some comfort. Mostly he slept, and we listened to his breathing, trying to discern any changes.

Bryan Font

Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking”. What kind of risks? Expressing ideas, concerns, feedback, etc, without fear of any kind of repercussions. The idea is that when everyone’s perspective is shared, the team can learn from all these perspectives and perform at its best.

Facilitating Feedback That’s Psychologically Safe

When the two groups were given a variety of puzzles, children in the second group were more likely to choose a harder puzzle. Dweck also found that praising the process made them more likely to feel confident in a task even if they made a mistake.

A psychotherapist says parents who raise confident, mentally strong kids always do these 3 things when praising their children

If the whole team is responsible for product success, not just getting things built, then the whole team understands and contributes to both kinds of work.

Dual Track Development is not Duel Track

Describing the whole from so many different angles illuminates the complex. By chronicling microinteractions, such as those between areas of hot and cold water or high and low pressure, we can see how changes in one aspect produce cascading change.

How Description Leads to Understanding

But is there a better term that would describe a non-specialist person whose chief skill is curiosity, generalist knowledge and an ability to integrate various disciplines and their specialists to solve a problem? As it happens, there is – and it comes to us from a science fiction novel from 1950.

The Nexialist approach: Van Vogt and the idea that ‘specialisation is for insects’

Feature factories are deeply unsatisfying for craft obsessed designers as it turns them into “short order chefs”. It feels like we’re somehow skipping the parts where we feel we can add the most value to both the companies we work and the users we serve.

@andybudd on Twitter

They have to feed you every six hours. So if I can stack six hours on six hours on six hours, and just focus on getting to the next meal, it doesn’t make matter how much I’m in pain, doesn’t matter how cold I am.

Why Emotionally Intelligent People Embrace the Small World Rule to Achieve Huge Goals

But Tversky’s point is that if your job is to be creative and think through a tough problem, then time spent wandering around a park or aimlessly lounging on a couch might be your most valuable hours. A little inefficiency is wonderful.

Casualties of Perfection

How do we quantify the informal effects of people physically working alongside each other – making and losing friends, falling in love?

If working from home becomes the norm, housing inequality will deepen

Consistent effort over time is more sustainable than pushing your limits to work as fast as possible. To do our best work, we need mental downtime, space for self-reflection, and a realistic schedule we can actually keep up with.

An ode to slowness: the benefits of slowing down

All of this does not imply that you can choose your own reality. Firstly, you can choose what questions you ask, but the answers are given by the world. And even in a relational world, when two observers communicate, their realities are entangled. In this way a shared reality can emerge.

A new quantum paradox throws the foundations of observed reality into question

1. Use base components for variant sets

10 Figma Best Practices to 10X Your Workflow

Bedtime procrastination becomes revenge bedtime procrastination when the decision to delay sleep is in response to a lack of free time earlier in the day. Staying up late and carving out some leisure time even if we feel tired and need sleep becomes a way of getting revenge on daytime hours with little free time.

The psychology of revenge bedtime procrastination

If we removed the contents of the universe, we would remove space and time also. This is the “relational” view of space and time: they are only the spatial and temporal relations between objects and events. The relational view of space and time was a key inspiration for Einstein when he developed general relativity.

Does a chair exist if nobody sits on it? Relational quantum mechanics says ‘NO!’

When handling risks, it is important to be aware of what we don’t or can’t know for sure. The Precautionary Principle is not intended to be a stifling justification for banning things—it’s a tool for handling particular kinds of uncertainty. Heuristics can guide us in making important decisions, but we still need to be flexible and treat each case as unique.

The Precautionary Principle: Better Safe than Sorry?

The filing cabinet contributed to the rise of a popular nontechnical understanding of information as something discrete and specific. Critically, it illustrates the moment in which information gained an identity separate from knowledge, an instrumental identity critical to its accessibility.

The Filing Cabinet