Notes From the Best

Just my notes, but from the best

TED

TED

Why you should define your fears instead of your goals by Tim Ferris

April 2017 | Click here to watch the TED talk

He likes to think of stoicism not as a philosophy but as an operating system for thriving in high-stress environments and for making better decisions.

The purpose of it is to train yourself to separate what you can control from what you can’t control and to focus only on what you can control.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality

Seneca

To prevent this suffering, he found the exercise called Premeditatio Malorum -or the pre-meditation of evils- which makes you visualise the worst-case scenarios that you fear so that you can overcome them.

He then adapted it to his current fear-setting exercise.

Fear-setting exercise

Page 1

Ask yourself “What if I…?” and then fill it with the thing you fear most.

Once you have it define all the worst case scenarios, what can you do to prevent them and what can you do to repair the damage if they happen.

His example:

What if I go to London?

Define

  1. I’ll be depressed
  2. I’ll miss a letter from the IRS
  3. …

Prevent

  1. Bring a blue light
  2. Change the mailing address
  3. …

Repair

  1. Go to Spain
  2. Call a friend who’s a lawyer
  3. …

A good question to keep in mind is: Has anyone else in the history of time less intelligent or less driven figured this out?

Page 2

What might be the benefits of an attempt or partial success?

Maybe you’d build confidence, develop skills, grow emotionally or financially. Spend 10 to 15 min answering this question.

Page 3

What’s the cost of inaction?

If I avoid this action or decision, what will my life look like in 6 months, 12 months or 3 years?

Get detailed and cover all the areas impacted: financially, emotionally, physically, etc.

The cost of inaction

6 months

  1. …
  2. …
  3. …

1 year

  1. …
  2. …
  3. …

3 years

  1. …
  2. …
  3. …

Conclusion

Oftentimes knowledge is already available, we just need to make it our own.

Using this exercise will not make tough decisions and facing your fears easy, but it’ll make it easier.

Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.

Jerzy Gregorek

The talk

Click here to go to TED’s website or watch the talk down here:

More

Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month – Here’s an article on Tim’s Blog where he talks about the exercise and elaborates around it.

Stoicism and the Art of Happiness is a book by Donald Robertson that Tim recommends if you want to read more about Stoicism.

How to make stress your friend by Kelly McGonigal

June 2013 | Click here to watch the TED Talk

After years spreading that stress makes you sick and that increases the risk of everything from a cold to cardiovascular diseases, a study began to change her approach to it.

The study tracked 28.753 adults in the United States from 1998 to 2006 it began with two questions:

  1. How much stress have you experienced in the last year?
  2. Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?

Then they used public death records to find out who died and they cocluded that:

  • People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43% increased risk of dying if they believed that stress was harmful
  • People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful had the lowest risk of dying. Even below people who had relatively low stress.

Science says that changing your mind about stress can make you healthier because you can change your body’s response to stress.

In this study from Harvard University, they compared the physical and cognitive response between 3 groups that were submitted to a stressful situation. Two of them were control groups and the participants from the other group were told to view the signs of stress as signs that your body was preparing you to meet the challenge. The results showed that:

  • By changing their perception to stress, they were less stressed out, less anxious and more confident
  • On top of that, their physical response changed too. Their blood vessels stayed relaxed and it looked like the response of joy or courage instead of the typical stress response.

Stress makes you social. Oxytocin (a.k.a “the cuddle hormone”) is a hormone that gets pumped out by the pituitary gland in stressful situations to motivate you to seek support and surround yourself by people who care about you.

When you’re stressed and reach out to others to seek support or to help someone else, you release more oxytocin, your response to stress gets healthier and you can recover faster from its negative symptoms.

Finally, in this study conducted at Buffalo University, they wanted to test if the hypothesis that providing help to others predicts a reduced association between stress and mortality. What they found is that:

  • For every major stressful life experience (financial difficulties, family crisis, etc) the risk of dying increased by 30 percent
  • But, people who spent time helping others didn’t see any increase in stress-related deaths, zero

Conclusion

How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress.

When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience.

The talk

Why we make bad decisions by Dan Gilbert

July 2005 | Click here to watch the TED Talk

The way we calculate our expected value (or what makes us decide) is as follows:

Expected Value = Odds of getting the value x Actual value we get

Which is usually problematic because of 2 reasons:

Reason 1: Bad calculations of the odds

We usually think that the most probable thing is the one that comes us first to memory.

  • This can be true for calculating things like: How many dogs vs pigs on leashes are in London? 
  • It’s easy to recall dogs with leashes but not pigs, so one would probably answer dogs correctly.

But very often this approach leads to false conclusions whenever we only know one side of the story: What are the odds of dying drowned vs dying of asthma vs dying in a tornado vs dying in a firework-related accident?

  • In this case, the first things that come to mind are the big events because we see them on the news more often and we can wrongly overestimate those ones and underestimate the ones we never know about:
Cause of deathEstimateActual
Tornado56490
Fireworks1606
Asthma5061886
Drowning16847380
  • The lottery is another great example. We see winners all the time but never (or not in the real proportion) losers.

Reason 2: Even worse calculation of the value

We compare value to the past instead of the present

Is a Big Mac worth $25?

  • The true answer depends on the situation and the answer that we get to the question “What else can I do with $25?”. But instead, we relate it to what we’re used to pay.

Example:

  • Most travellers would buy the trip they want if it was $2000 and at the moment of paying is on offer for $1500.
  • But most travellers won’t buy the trip they want if it was $2000, they see an offer for $700 and, after they think about it, at the moment of paying it costs $1300.

We compare it to the possible value instead of the real one

We tend to buy the middle price, not the lowest and not the highest because compared to the others, it seems not too cheap but not too expensive either.

🧪 Experiment

A group of people were asked to value how much would they love to eat chips a minute after. One group had delicious food on the corner of the table and the other some ugly caned food.

The first group expected to enjoy the chips less than the second group because all of the were unconsciously comparing the value with the other food.

In the end, the chips (the value) were the same, but the expected value dramatically different.

Example:

  • You want to buy a stereo for your car and your neighbour has it for $200 but across town, someone sells it for $100. Would you drive?
  • Now, if you wanted to buy a car and your neighbour had it for for $30,000 but across town, someone sold it for $29,900, would you make the drive?
  • Most people say yes to the 1st option and no to the 2nd even though $100 are $100 no matter were they come from.

It gets even more complicated when we have to deal with time.

Most of us believe thad more is better and now is better than later. But what happens when these two things are in conflict?

  • Would you prefer $50 now or $60 in a month?
  • What about $50 in 12 months vs $60€ in 13 months?

In those cases we tend to compare and people who would prefer $50 in the first question often change their minds in the second question.

The Talk

Click here to go to TED’s website or watch the talk down here:

The paradox of choice by Barry Schwartz

July 2005 | Click here to watch the TED talk

We tend to associate happiness to freedom and define freedom as the possibility to choose unrestrictively. Therefore, the more choices we can make the more free and happy we are.

Because our brain was built for another era were we didn’t have a lot of choices (we ate what we had, we slept were we could, we lived with the people from our tribe/village, etc), it’s not prepared to handle that many choices.

That creates to main problems:

Too many options produce paralysis rather than liberation

How can we know which option is best if we have 2389 to choose from? Or even “just” 46 options? How can we choose when there’re so many options that we don’t even know about all of them? What if there’s an option I don’t even know it exists?

As it’s easy to see, in most cases, having too many options makes choosing an epic task which is overwhelming for most of us and we end up not doing anything instead of feeling free.

In other words, when we’re free to choose anything we want, we can become prisoners of choice.

We end up less satisfied when we have many options than when we just have one

There are 4 reasons for that:

Regret and Anticipated Regret

If we don’t like the choice that we’ve made it’s easy to imagine how another choice would’ve been better. This imaginary alternative induces us to regret the decision we’ve made and these regrets detract us from our satisfaction even if it was a good decision.

The more options we have the easier it is to regret not having chosen one of them.

Opportunity costs

When we’re choosing one thing, we’re choosing not to do other things that may have lots of attractive features and that’s going to make what we’re doing less attractive.

Escalation of expectations

When there’re a lot of choices, we expect to find the perfect option for us. Probably, there’s going to be a great option for us but rarely it’ll be perfect, so we end up more disappointed than if we had no choice at all.

EXAMPLE: Buying jeans.
Some years ago, there was only one kind of jeans, they were horrible but that’s what you had. Now there are thousands of jeans, so you expect to find the perfect ones for you, and if you just find some good ones -even though they’re much better than the old ones- you feel disappointed because you compare what you’ve got with what you expected.

Years ago it was easy to be surprised and therefore pleased. Nowadays we expect perfection, so there’s no room for surprise, and we feel more unhappy.

Self-blame

Who’s responsible for the lives we live?

When there are no options the blame goes to the world, to the fact that there are no more options, to the quality of what we’ve got.

When there are a lot of options the blame usually goes to ourselves because we could have chosen another option.This can be tough because we tend to think that we’re capable of precisely predicting the outcome of a decision, which is usually far from the truth.

Conclusion

Some choice is definitely better than none, but more choice is not better than some.

The secret to happiness is low expectations

Barry Schwartz

The talk

Click here to go to TED’s website or watch the talk down here:

More

The talk is based on Barry Schwartz’s own book also called The Paradox of Choice. Click here to check it on GoodReads.com

The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

Disclaimer

By any means I think these notes are a substitute of their source, so if you try to learn just from here, you’re going to miss a lot of information.
Nevertheless, if you use them as a way to remember or clarify some ideas, they can be very helpful. At least they are for me and I hope they are for you too!