Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder.
This week: the hidden cost of searching for the best, how a raccoon makes dissent easier, why video calls turn us into actor, audience, and critic, and where introspection turns into rumination.
Plus, a behavioral-science cookbook, a virtual Blockbuster store, the mystery of left-handedness, and a mix of inspiring quotes, and a fun icebreaker for your team.
As always, I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here!
My Favorite Find
I read hundreds of blogs and dozens of newsletters every week, and I always find more ideas than I can share. My favorite this week is David Epstein’s essay Make the Third Best Choice about Herbert Simon and the hidden cost of searching for the very best:
But searching for the best is the wrong goal. That is because searching is itself a cost, and most people forget to account for it. If you did, you would see that the optimal strategy isn’t optimizing at all.
Mr. Simon demonstrated that for most decisions, humans can’t really evaluate the options available — there are too many, our information about them is incomplete and our minds aren’t built to weigh them all — and so we rely on mental shortcuts. He coined the term “satisficing” — a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice — to describe how we consider a limited set of options, then choose one that is good enough and move on to live our lives.
This Week's Question
This week’s question is a fun icebreaker for individuals and teams:
What is something you decided not to spend money on — that you now wish you had?
A Few More Things Worth Your Time
We do this at Filament with Elephants, Zombies, Squirrels, and Porcupines. At DBS, they add a "Wreckoon" (raccoon) creature to their meetings to make dissent easier:
CEO Piyush Gupta explains its origins and intent: “Netflix has something called the Chaos Monkey that they use in programming. Once they create a program, they unleash the Chaos Monkey in the program to try and mess it up. It stress-tests the program. We stole that idea and created ‘Wreckoon,’ where we stress-test our thinking in meetings.”
In practice, a picture of a raccoon shows up periodically in DBS’s discussion documents, and when it does, it prompts the group to stop and reflect on questions such as: What are we not thinking about but should be? What could be wrong with the path we’re going down? What would have to be true for this to be a bad decision?
Gupta explains the benefits of this exercise: “You can tell people to dissent, but when you create a small mnemonic, people remember, and it becomes easier. You start to see it happen more in practice, and decision-making gets better as a result.”
We were never meant to see our faces this much:
Picture yourself at a cocktail party — one you’re dreading, one for work. A colleague approaches you. Beside him, there is a large mirror, and as you converse with him and answer his invasive personal questions, you do not look at his face. Instead, you look at yourself, at your own reflection. You watch yourself talk and laugh, you see the face you pull when he asks if you’re going to have another kid soon. You monitor your reflection, correct your posture, exaggerate your “I’m listening” face. In person, this would be utterly bizarre. People would probably ask if you need to sit down. But this is what we do, all day long, on Zoom.
There is something eerie about being both the speaker and the watcher, performing one’s own identity for oneself, rather than simply living it. When we take on the roles of actor, audience and critic all at once, it’s going to cause some psychic strain.
As the husband of a lefty, I was fascinated by the quest to learn why such a small percentage of people are left-handed:
There may never be a certain, or simple, answer to the question of why I am left-handed. Or why humanity is so right-handed. Or why left-handed people are overrepresented in some fields and slightly more likely to have certain health conditions. But as I’ve followed the clues through developmental biology, genetics, evolution, and culture, I now see that our peculiar handedness is inextricable from our humanity.
Maybe we're introspecting a bit too much?
Self-focused attention is one of the strongest correlates of depression and anxiety in the entire literature. The goal of introspection is a weekend job – your strengths, your weaknesses, what you want. Everything past that is rumination the wellness industry keeps selling you more of.
Random Things for Smart People
- The Coglode Cookbook is a collection of behavioral research distilled, applied, and combined to help you make better strategic decisions.
- BingeBuster displays all the titles on your selected streaming services in a virtual Blockbuster store.
- This tool removes single objects from images better than most I've tried.
- A chart on how to play every golf lie.
Words of Wisdom
Innovation requires you to be brave because you’re not repeating a formula. You are risking something. – Patricia Varella
Nothing and everything is "worth" working on. You don’t know what something is until you complete the process of making it whole. — Brooke Berman
Ambiguity is the warp of life, not something to be eliminated. — Mary Catherine Bateson
Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice. — Octavia Butler
The only way you are ever going to get others to value your time is if you value it first. You should never be afraid to ask for money in exchange for your knowledge and help. — C. C. Chapman