a simple question

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Upon meeting someone, instead of asking, "What do you do?" I prefer asking, "What do you love to do?" That always stops people. Their eyes soften, and they smile. "What do I love to do?" Sadly, it usually it has nothing to do with their work.

The problem is that our society does not teach us to value what we really love. It teaches us to value what we are good at. How many people do you know who are really good at their jobs but hate what they do for a living? Think for a moment. It's staggering.

In the last few years, I've become acutely aware of just where the culprit might lie.

My daughter and I have just finished the college slog, and she is off to her freshman year in a matter of weeks. The journey wasn't easy. Over and over again at colleges around the country I heard admissions people with starched shirts and neat scarves shooting what felt to me like verbal bullets to a room full of prospective students, such as "Who here is good at math? Raise your hand."

Half the room would groan. Half would raise their hands.

"Okay — for those of you with raised hands, you might want to declare Accounting as your major. Accounting majors are guaranteed jobs out of college."

Eh-hem???

Is that what college is for? Getting a job?

A job is a good thing, of course, but college is about something deeper. It should teach you how to think. It should help you learn what you can't stand. It is about stretching your mind in ways you never thought you could and coming out the other side ready to fly into the unknowns of life with some level of confidence and better yet, wonder.

Every single time I witnessed this What-are-you-good-at-raise-your-hand assault on our college-bound youth, I wanted to stand up, Oz-like, and say, "Ignore the person on the stage. It's not what you are good at. It's what you love. If you are lucky enough to have both, good for you!"

Laura Munson, Writing in The Week

Behind Door #3

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Remember the old television show Let’s Make a Deal? Monty Hall would given contestants, typically dressed in outrageous costumes, a choice of three doors. The contestant would receive whatever was behind the door they selected. One of the doors had a great prize behind it. Pick that door and you get a valuable gift like a car or a vacation. But behind the other two doors were gag gifts. It might be a rooster or a lifetime supply of paper clips.

There was always one extra twist to the show: Once you pick a door, before revealing what was behind it, Monty would do you the favor of opening one of the remaining two doors and show one of the gag gifts. At that point, he'd let you switch doors if you wanted to do so. You could stick with your original choice as well.

What's the right move? Our instinct tells us to to stick to our guns. But you should go against that instinct and switch. Why? The chances you’ve picked the wrong door is two-out-of-three. But with only two doors left, your odds of getting the great prize goes up to 50-50. 

But there’s more afoot here than just winning a prize on a TV game show.

Economist M. Keith Chen says this phenomenon has been overlooked in some of the most famous psychology experiments. He claims The Monty Hall Problem shows there's a logical flaw in the idea of choice rationalization. Choice rationalization is the idea that once we reject something, we tell ourselves we never liked the one we rejected anyway. Psychologists say we do this because it spares us the pain of thinking we made the wrong choice. Chen believes it’s not the act of picking that makes people suddenly prefer one over the other. He claims the preference was there all along. It's just that the preference was so slight it was not initially obvious until other possibilities are cleared out. You can read his own explanation here.

Stephen Goforth

It's Contageous!

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Not only do you tend to hang out with people like yourself, your friends will influence you toward or away from self-control. Even the people you are forced by circumstances to hang out with (like co-workers) have an influence on your behavior.

That's the finding of researchers who asked participants to watch people either select carrot sticks or cookies to eat before taking tests related to self-control (not involving cookies and carrots). Participants who watched someone eat cookies before the tests did not do as well as those who had watched someone decide to eat carrots.

In another test, participants were told to think of a friend with good self-control. This group performed better on a handgrip test (used to measure self-control) than did the participants assigned to think about a friend with weak self-control. Other tests showed similar results.

Their conclusions: If you surround yourself with people who make wise choices, you are more likely to do the same. You can boost your self-control simply by networking with other people who reinforce positive behavior (or vise versa). And when you show a lack of self-control, you are probably influencing someone else to do the same.

Details of the study are published by the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Stephen Goforth

Slot machines in our pockets

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The capacity of slot machines to keep people transfixed is now the engine of Las Vegas’s economy. Over the last 20 years, roulette wheels and craps tables have been swept away to make space for a new generation of machines: no longer mechanical contraptions (they have no lever), they contain complex computers produced in collaborations between software engineers, mathematicians, script writers and graphic artists.

But it is the variation in rewards that is the key to time-on-device. The machines are programmed to create near misses: winning symbols appear just above or below the “payline” far more often than chance alone would dictate. The player’s losses are thus reframed as potential wins, motivating her to try again. Mathematicians design payout schedules to ensure that people keep playing while they steadily lose money.

Alternative schedules are matched to different types of players, with differing appetites for risk: some gamblers are drawn towards the possibility of big wins and big losses, others prefer a drip-feed of little payouts (as a game designer told Schüll, “Some people want to be bled slowly”). The mathematicians are constantly refining their models and experimenting with new ones, wrapping their formulae around the contours of the cerebral cortex.

Gamblers themselves talk about “the machine zone”: a mental state in which their attention is locked into the screen in front of them, and the rest of the world fades away. A player who is feeling frustrated and considering quitting for the day might receive a tap on the shoulder from a “luck ambassador”, dispensing tickets to shows or gambling coupons. What the player doesn’t know is that data from his game-playing has been fed into an algorithm that calculates how much that player can lose and still feel satisfied, and how close he is to the “pain point”. The offer of a free meal at the steakhouse converts his pain into pleasure, refreshing his motivation to carry on.

These days, of course, we all carry slot machines in our pockets.

Ian Leslie writing in 1843 magazine

 

The Prediction Learning Curve

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If you have strong analytical skills that might be applicable in a number of disciplines, it is very much worth considering the strength of the competition. It is often possible to make a profit by being pretty good at prediction in fields where the competition succumbs to poor incentives, bad habits, or blind adherence to tradition—or because you have better data or technology than they do. It is much harder to be very good in fields where everyone else is getting the basics right—-and you may be fooling yourself if you think you have much of an edge.

Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

Finding my Keys

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I was running late for work and was frantically searching for my keys. I would be working my 7th overtime shift in 7 days. I knew I wasn't thinking clearly.  Where were my keys? I gave up, picked up the spare keys to the house and car and decided I'd find the real ones later.

When I got off of work, I decided to clean the entire apartment while looking for the keys. That way, when I found them, instead of being upset at wasting a lot of time, I would have the keys along with a clean apartment.

As the cleaning proceeded, I got to thinking. What if I carelessly dropped them while working outside? Someone could find them, see my car on the property and take it. Or steal everything while I was at work. Hours went by, midnight came, and no keys. I had to get to bed.

Just before retiring, I started toward the trash. I took it out every Sunday night. That's when it hit me. What if?  I began rummaging. Sure enough, the keys were buried deep inside, covered with coffee grounds and spaghetti sauce.

Takeaway: Sometimes you have to go through some garbage to find what you need.

Stephen Goforth