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Behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have two selves: an experiencing self and a remembering self. . . . Your experiencing self lives in the present and is happiest spending time around people you like. . . .

The remembering self cares about story, and about appearances. . . .

Your remembering self cares about money and mobility deeply. Why? No one wants to be remembered as the person who “didn’t do anything with their life.” Getting rich and moving around a lot adds dramatic, tangible plot-points to your story, which comforts your remembering self greatly. But your experiencing self can easily be less happy. What if you are unable to turn your money into people you enjoy spending time with? What if you move away from the people and places that bring you joy?

— Dave Troy

Here’s conundrum of fame, as I see it: It’s always said that if you want to be famous, you must endure criticism. The fabled “trade off”…

…But the whole reason people want to be famous is to be loved. They’re love-addicts. Hating a celeb is like kicking a hemophiliac.

Like I bet Tom Hanks internalizes a shitty remark way more than, say, the HR lady in your office. He’s needy. That’s why he’s Tom Hanks.

All right, enough Psych 101. My Chihuahua looks like Billy Crystal and my Shepherd is Gheorghe Muresan. They need a development deal.

— Diablo Cody

One of my owner’s friends gave me a Christmas pug to use on my blog. My first present of the season! Thanks, MS!

The pug looks a little sad, probably because someone made him wear that stupid Santa hat. Pugs don’t like to wear hats. We may look like funny little animals, but don’t forget we are descended from the mighty gray wolf. Before you put a Santa hat on a pug, try putting a Santa hat on a wolf. That will teach you a good lesson.

Don’t think that the pug is sad because of the snow. Pugs love snow! A day in the snow is the best day ever! Now that I think about it, every day is the best day ever!

Oh, one more thing: I do NOT endorse Popdarts.com. Do not go to that site. Go to sites that support pugs.

Oops — my owner just told me that if you tell people not to do something, that just makes them want to do it even more. It’s called “reverse psychology.” That doesn’t make sense to me. Pugs can be a little stubborn, but mostly we like to do what we’re told, because it makes our owners happy.

Here’s another phrase my owner taught me recently: “eating your own dogfood.” To humans, it means doing what you tell other people to do. To dogs, it means . . . well, I guess it’s pretty obvious what it means.

Merry Christmas, everybody! I’ll post some more Christmas pug pictures later.

— Lightning

When we give up trying to convince, we become more convincing.

— Crucial Conversations

So — I should give up trying to convince in an effort to become more convincing?

A fat woman at the office, sitting at her desk finger-fondling a frosted gingerbread man, whether because it was “male” or because it was edible, I’m not sure. It’s no less disturbing either way.

Parenthetically: I don’t think she knew anyone could see her . . .

John F. Kennedy, in 1961, proposed to put an American on the moon in a decade. That idea stuck. It motivated thousands of people across dozens of organizations, public and private. It was an unexpected idea: it got people’s attention because it was so surprising–the moon is a long way up. It appealed to our emotions: we were in the Cold War and the Russians had launched the Sputnik space satellite four years earlier. It was concrete: everybody could picture what success would look like in the same way. How many goals in your organization are pictured in exactly the same way by everyone involved?

My father worked for IBM during that period. He did some of the programming on the original Gemini space missions. And he didn’t think of himself as working for IBM–he thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. An accountant who lived down the street from us, who worked for a defense contractor, also thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. When you inspire the accountants you know you’re onto something.

— “Crafting a message that sticks: An interview with Chip Heath,” The McKinsey Quarterly, 24 November 2007

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny.

— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

My son’s having some trouble with 8th grade Algebra. When I work with him on it, I can see that he knows the material and he can do the calculations . . . his biggest problem is a fatalistic, let’s-get-it-over-with, I’m-no-good-at-math attitude, which leads to careless errors, and frustration if his first approach to a problem doesn’t work.

I encourage him to take a more positive attitude, to go into the next test saying positive things to himself, like “I know this material” and “I can handle these questions.”

“But I don’t know it,” he says. “Mrs. Bryant [his math teacher] throws the gyroball every pitch! And sometimes she hits me with it!”

What we have here is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy . . .

The halo effect is a cognitive bias whereby people tend to make specific inferences on the basis of a general impression. It was first identified by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920.

I read an interesting article this weekend by Phil Rosenzweig, the author of The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, on the halo effect in the business world:

Imagine a company that is doing well, with rising sales, high profits, and a sharply increasing stock price. The tendency is to infer that the company has a sound strategy, a visionary leader, motivated employees, an excellent customer orientation, a vibrant culture, and so on. But when that same company suffers a decline–if sales fall and profits shrink–many people are quick to conclude that the company’s strategy went wrong, its people became complacent, it neglected its customers, its culture became stodgy, and more. In fact, these things may not have changed much, if at all. Rather, company performance, good or bad, creates an overall impression–a halo–that shapes how we perceive its strategy, leaders, employees, culture, and other elements.

For example, when Cisco Systems was riding high in the late 1990s, it was widely praised for its “brilliant strategy, masterful management of acquisitions, and superb customer focus.” When the tech bubble burst, Cisco was said to have “a flawed strategy, haphazard acquisition management, and poor customer relations.”

Another example: When ABB — a European engineering firm — was performing well, it had an “elegant matrix design, risk-taking culture, and charismatic chief executive.” When the company’s performance dropped off, ABB had “a dysfunctional organization, a chaotic culture, and an arrogant CEO.”

In reality, neither company had changed much; only the perceptions had changed.

Most of the business books I read are full of this type of after-the-fact “analysis,” where judgments are merely attributions reflecting a company’s performance. It appeals to managers who’d like to find a simple formula that ensures success.

Of course, if success could be reduced to a simple formula, there’d be a lot more successful managers and companies . . .

Perhaps most surprising to us has been the degree to which fear appears to be a feature of modern work life. Whenever we talk with others about this work, such as on airplanes with strangers, we get a similar response — “Oh yeah, I can relate to wanting to speak up but biting my tongue.” It’s really a shame how much apparently untapped knowledge there is out there and how much pain and frustration results from this silence. That, too, has been somewhat surprising–that people are genuinely hurt and frustrated about their silence. This suggests that employees aren’t failing to provide ideas or input because they’ve “checked out” and just don’t care, but because of fear.

— “Do I Dare Say Something?,” HBS Working Knowledge

What is happening here? Let’s examine some possibilities:

1. Some people are afraid to speak up under any circumstances and the workplace has nothing to do with it.
2. In some workplaces, speaking up is so obviously unsafe or a waste of time that everyone just keeps their yap shut.

Assuming neither of these conditions holds, people make a decision to speak or hold their tongue based on the specific features of the situation, including a calculation of how what they have to say is likely to affect their job security and/or mobility.

People who don’t care about job security or mobility are therefore able to be more fully engaged in their work, ask questions that need to be asked and say things that need to be said.

Hence the old saying that the effective leader must come to work everyday prepared to lose his or her job . . .

Jerry Weinberg’s top three reasons for software projects going over budget or failing to meet their original requirements:

1. The original budget, schedule and requirements were totally unrealistic, due to the inability of people to speak truth to power.

2. The original budget, schedule and requirements were totally unrealistic, due to the inability of people to understand and acknowledge their own limitations (which we all have).

3. Even in those rare cases that people pass those first two hurdles, they lose emotional control during the project when something goes wrong — and something ALWAYS goes wrong. In 50 years, I’ve never seen a project where something didn’t go wrong. When it does, the project’s success is determined by the leaders’ ability to manage themselves emotionally.

I’m rereading parts of The Psychology of Computer Programming and I notice that several of Weinberg’s “food for thought” questions at the end of each chapter would be good questions to pose to a hiring manager:

1. How long have you been in charge of your present group? How many of the original people remain? How many people have left and what were the reasons for their departure? What sort of provisions do you make for this kind of turnover?
2. Describe the sequence of work planned for your current project. Is the actual work proceeding according to the original plan? Do you expect it to continue in this manner?
3. How close is your progress reporting scheme to the reality of the work that goes on? What checks do you have to find out if it corresponds to reality?
4. What is your impression of what motivates your staff? Is it the same for all of them?

I don’t know how Peopleware became a best-seller. . . . I hardly run into any managers who read about their industry, management theory, or psychology, period. I used to believe that they were overloaded with information regarding the specifics of their job, but frankly, managers still aren’t trained, or do not educate themselves, to do their jobs.

— Brian Pioreck

Mike Shanahan never calls a timeout to ice the kicker because Jason Elam let him in on a little secret among the kicking fraternity: most of them like the extra time to check out the conditions.

— “There goes that theory,” L.A. Daily News

The article goes on to quote several other kickers who say the timeout gives them a chance to get out on the field, go through their whole routine, fix up the field if they need to, and generally improves their chances of making the kick.

Vikings kicker Ryan Longwell says that coaches fear being second-guessed if they don’t try to ice the kicker: “So I think a lot of coaches do that just for that reason, to clear their conscience on using all the timeouts.”

This confirms a theory of mine, that a lot of things coaches — in any sport — do during a game are just for the sake of being seen to have done something, are not only not helpful, but probably harmful.

. . . it is utterly trivial to create a case (and to “prove” it, too) that pretty much anybody is pretty much to blame for pretty much anything. Since a causal link can readily be drawn from either of us to anything in our lives, we simply stipulate our own blame. This saves effort, reduces friction, disinvites defensiveness and promotes remediation. Of course I cause my own troubles. . . . If I am not the prime cause of my own circumstances, I am doomed to live in a victim’s world. That would suck so bad that I prefer personal accountability.

— Jim McCarthy

If by “90 percent confident” you mean “30 percent confident.”

Key takeaway:

We are conditioned to believe that estimates expressed as narrow ranges are more accurate than estimates expressed as wider ranges. We believe that wide ranges make us appear ignorant or incompetent. The opposite is usually the case.

— Steve McConnell, Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

— Judges 12:5-6

Thus the original meaning of the word “shibboleth”: a password that people from one side can pronounce but their enemies can’t.

The word has since taken on a more general meaning as not necessarily a password, but a custom or practice that separates the good guys from the bad guys, the insiders from the outsiders.

Continue reading Shibboleths

Psychologists have found that if you put a dog in a cage and repeatedly zap him with an electrical shock, the dog will soon stop trying to avoid the shock because he realizes he’s got nowhere to go.

This is called “learned helplessness.”

I mention this for educational purposes, not because it sounds like life in a nutshell . . .

My son had a very nice piano recital last weekend. He played the right notes, he played the quiet parts quiet and the loud parts loud . . . and yet he had never once, to my knowledge, practiced the piece at home without playing it too loud, too fast, and having a simulated nervous breakdown if anything was said to him about it.

I’ve Googled this all day and I can’t figure it out . . .

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

— Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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