The more junk I have in the pantry, the more junk I end up eating.
Often, improving the odds of making better choices isn’t about more willpower – it’s about removing bad options in the first place.
Environment shapes behavior.
Design your environment so the better choice becomes the easier choice.
There was a recent fascinating experiment with a group of undergraduate students who are part of the digital/social media generation.
In the first half of the study, they experienced a collection of stimuli (a spanish guitar riff, an exposure to a cockroach, an electric shock, the sound of knife scraping) and were asked to share how much they’d pay to avoid the bad stimuli. Most folks said they’d pay $1.5 to $2 to avoid an electric shock.
They were then asked to entertain themselves with their thoughts for 15 minutes in an empty room. They were told that they could choose to experience one “randomly selected” stimulus during this period.
In reality, all participants were given the “electric shock” option. A computer recorded whether and how many times the participant chose to administer an electric shock.
25% of the women and ~70% of the men found it preferable to shock themselves rather than sit with their own thoughts (study summary).
Mindblowing.
When I reflect on the biggest global changes we’ve seen in the past 20 years, I think of politics powered by social media and virality.
This graph beautifully shows the representation of extreme views in all traditional media vs. cable TV vs. social media.
As extreme views increasingly become commonplace, so does its place in politics.
When I talk to new parents, I give just one piece of advice: Keep extremely low expectations – and let life exceed them.
I don’t share tactical advice because every parent figures out the tactics over time. That’s not the hard part. The real challenge is managing your mindset – living through the inevitable ups and downs, and sitting with the discomfort of losing the control you once had.
It’s tempting to over-optimize: the nap schedule, the sleep routine, every regression or phase. But the truth is, babies are doing a tremendous amount just by growing and making sense of the world.
Routines will come with time. Consistency definitely helps and can be a high probability strategy for many kids. But outcomes won’t always match the plan.
And that’s okay.
No eight-year-old struggles forever with sleep or with getting to the bathroom to take a poop. These things work out in time.
The reason I love lowering expectations is because it reminds us to let go a little, stay consistent where it helps, and – most of all – calm down.
There’s an eatery on the slopes of Blackcomb Mountain at Whistler-Blackcomb in Canada called Crystal Hut. It’s on the far side of the mountain and takes effort to get to.
But once you get off the chair, you are drawn in by the smell of waffles and maple syrup.
When I got there, I was reminded of Scooby Doo following the smell of food. The smell was that memorable.
You then get to a small log cabin – that gets very crowded during lunch time – where friendly staff serve the tastiest waffles with exquisite maple syrup, berries and such. It’s been over more than a year since we went to Crystal Hut and I still think of the place every time I see a waffle.
I’ve eaten waffles many times over the years. They were all events that I had, for the most part, forgotten.
Not at Crystal Hut though.
It wasn’t an event, it was an experience.
It made me realize how the most memorable experiences have a way of engaging many of our senses. In this case, the combination of the view, the taste, and the smell combined to transform something seemingly ordinary to an unforgettable memory.
Sometimes the sternest test of our character isn’t in how we hustle when the chips are down.
It’s in how we behave when we have to wait.
One of my favorite characters in The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the dwarf Gimli. He begins as a pompous, proud dwarf and transforms into someone fiercely loyal, courageous, and funny.
There’s a great moment in the last movie, just as they’re about to make their final assault. They review the plan, and Gimli remarks – “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?”
It’s a line I think about often – partly for the grim humor in facing absurd odds, but mostly for the reminder that courage means acting anyway.
Whenever you’re starting something new, it helps to begin with hypotheses.
Hypotheses aren’t facts or certainties — just assumptions about how things might play out.
The next task is to test them. Use every conversation to stress-test your idea. Harsh criticism is especially valuable because it reveals weaknesses quickly.
After twenty such conversations, your hypothesis will either collapse or sharpen into a thesis worth acting on.
Then the time for debate is over.
It’s time to ship.
Growing up, we used to have teachers call the television “the idiot box.” Spend too much time in front of the TV and we’ll all become idiots, they’d say. I was reminded of this when I learnt about “the reverse Flynn effect.”
The Flynn effect is the observed, long-term rise in fluid and crystallized intelligence (IQ) test scores across the 20th century, named after researcher James Flynn. In measures of general intelligence (GIQ), verbal intelligence (VIQ) and non-verbal intelligence (NIQ), scores tended up for every decade since world war II…
… until 2010.
Baz, Sezerel, et al, found the trend to be consistently downward since.
Across both boys and girls – with a stronger effect on girls.
While some of the biggest drops came during the COVID-19 pandemic, these trends have been heading downward since before 2020 – across both teens and adults.
That brings me back to the idiot box.
When I was growing up, we needed to go the idiot box, turn it on, and watch.
The difference now is that we’ve got a portable version of this idiot box in our pockets. And these trends are just the first-order effects.
Our phones are not just making us stupid. They’re making us angrier and more depressed.
Either we learn to use them carefully or they use us.
Our World in Data has a useful analysis of how the UK has some of the safest roads on the planet.
It wasn’t always this way. Road deaths per billion miles driven have plummeted since the 1950s.
The first big infrastructure change they made since the 1950s was investment in motorways. Globally, motorways have far lower fatalities due to lesser head-on collisions, no pedestrians, etc.
The second big change was roundabouts. Roundabouts are just way safer than traffic lights and stop signs because there are just fewer collision opportunities and those are mostly slower and sideways vs. head on.
Third, strict enforcement of penalties for drunken driving.
And, finally, strict speed limits have drastically reduced the number of children dying on British roads. I saw this first-hand in London where the speed limit is 20 miles per hour and it is strictly observed.
Overall, these statistics are impressive. There’s a lot everyone can learn from the British transport authority.
A Learning a Day 