As time passes, I realize that I need to make sure I take the time to tune out the noise and pay more attention to the signals I receive from my gut.
It rarely gives answers and seems only to speak in a binary language that either says “feels right” or “doesn’t feel right.”
But, as the stakes get higher, I’m beginning to realize that the cost of ignoring those signals is only getting steeper.
Hannah Ritchie from the “Our World in Data” team had a powerful post on our bias for sensational events. She analyzed the difference between causes of death covered in the news versus the actual causes of death. While the charts below cover data from the US, the trends are similar in other areas she’s analyzed as well.
This is a busy chart. So, here’s a simpler cut of what was over represented versus under represented.
Terrorism was ~4000x over represented in the news relative to the magnitude. Kidney disease and heart disease are far less newsworthy relative to their impact.
She ends with a lovely message about the challenges we (and the media) face.
“Media and its consumers are stuck in a reinforcing cycle. The news reports on breaking events, which are often based around a compelling story. Consumers want to know what’s going on in the world — we are quickly immersed by the latest headline. We come to expect news updates with increasing frequency, and media channels have clear incentives to deliver. This locks us into a cycle of expectation and coverage with a strong bias for outlier events. Most of us are left with a skewed perception of the world; we think the world is much worse than it is.
The responsibility in breaking this cycle lies with both media producers and consumers. Will we ever stop reporting and reading the latest news? Unlikely. But we can all be more conscious of how we let this news shape our understanding of the world.
And journalists can do much better in providing context of the broader trends: if reporting on a homicide, for example, include context of how homicide rates are changing over time. As media consumers we can be much more aware of the fact that relying on the 24/7 news coverage alone is wholly insufficient for understanding the state of the world. This requires us to check our (often unconscious) bias for single narratives and seek out sources that provide a fact-based perspective on the world.
This antidote to the news is what we try to provide at Our World in Data. It should be accessible for everyone, which is why our work is completely open-access. Whether you are a media producer or consumer, feel free to take and use anything you find here.”
Well said. And, big thank you to the “Our World in Data” team for the great work they do.
I came across this lovely anecdote from a book by late Vanguard founder John Bogle. This was an exchange Bogle witnessed at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island in New York.
The late novelist Kurt Vonnegut informed his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.
Heller responded – “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . enough.”
Fittingly, John Bogle titled his book “Enough.”
(H/T Morgan Housel’s blog)
I was watching kids interact with their parents at a play zone recently. If their basic needs (not hurt or hungry) were met, I realized that two words summed up most of what they asked for – attention and appreciation.
Just as I was about to file that away as a reflection on kids, it got me thinking about the root causes of issues adults I know face at home or at the workplace.
It turns out that attention and appreciation are just as important in dealing with adults as they are with kids.
The best partners, friends, managers, and leaders make it a point to never forget that.
“What is writing?” – Stephen King asks in his masterful book on the subject. “Writing is telepathy.”
He goes on to demonstrate with a beautiful example (shortened).
“Look- here’s a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. […] On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. […] The most interesting thing here isn’t even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It’s an eight. This is what we’re looking at, and we all see it. I didn’t tell you. You didn’t ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room… except we are together. We are close. We’re having a meeting of the minds. […] We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.”
We’ve all read works and posts by others that have spoken to us. Their thoughts seem to reach us at a time when we didn’t even know we needed them. We see the world they describe with clarity and relate to it.
Writing is telepathy.
One of our favorite traditions since last year has been to book our holiday trips well in advance. This might just be a long weekend trip to a place close by – but, we’ve been making it a point to book at least 3 months in advance.
While it helps to plan ahead with young kids, the bigger reason is a learning from a Dutch study about the connection between vacations and happiness that found something surprising – vacationers experienced the highest amount of happiness before the vacation.
It turns out anticipating vacations is a large part of the fun.
We’ve taken that lesson to heart (and we’ve found it to be true) – the practice comes recommended. :-)
The problem with attempting to prove yourself to others is that there’s no end to the stream of people you need to prove yourself to.
A better use of that energy is to simply use every available opportunity to learn, grow, and adapt to change.
The former isn’t an ineffective path – it tends to work rather well if all you are optimizing for is professional growth. It just isn’t a happy one.
I was about to take a (rare) taxi/rideshare the other day and decided to give Lyft a shot. And, not for the first time, the Lyft screen refused to move past the “Poor network connection” screen.
Uber, it turned out, worked just fine.
It reminded me that availability/up-time and site speed are among the most powerful user-facing features we can build into our products. Put differently, make sure the basic stuff works. And, try to make it work fast.
Sometimes, in the rush to solve interesting problems and add value, it is easy to forget that.
I’ve been thinking about this excerpt from Warren Buffett’s 2002 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting on investing in ourselves. It resonated.
Let’s assume a genie appeared to you when you turned 16, and the genie said, “You get any car you want tomorrow morning, tied up in a big pink ribbon, anything you name. And it can be a Rolls Royce, it can be a Jaguar, it can be a Lexus, you name it, and that car will be there and you don’t owe me a penny.”
And having heard the genie stories before, you say to the genie, “What’s the catch?” And of course, the genie says, “Well, there’s just one. That car, which you’re going to get tomorrow morning, the car of your dreams, is the only car you’re ever going to get. So you can pick one, but that’s it.”
And you still name whatever the car of your dreams is, and the next morning you receive that car.
Now, what do you do, knowing that’s the only car you’re going to have for the rest of your life? Well, you read the owner’s manual about 10 times before you put the key in the ignition, and you keep it garaged. You know, you change the oil twice as often as they tell you to do. You keep the tires inflated properly. If you get a little nick, you fix it that day so it doesn’t rust on you.
In other words, you make sure that this car of your dreams at age 16 is going to still be the car of your dreams at age 50 or 60, because you treat it as the only one you’ll ever get in your lifetime. And then I would suggest to your students in Phoenix that they are going to get exactly one mind and one body, and that’s the mind and body they’re going to have at age 40 and 50 and 60.
And it isn’t so much a question of preparing for retirement, precisely, at those ages, it’s a question of preparing for life at those ages. And that they should treat the importance of taking care and maximizing that mind, and taking care of that body in a way, that when they get to be 50 or 60 or 70, they’ve got a real asset instead of something that’s rusted and been ignored over the years.
And it will be too late to think about that when they’re 60 or 70. You can’t repair the car back into the shape it was. You can maintain it. And in the case of a mind, you can enhance it in a very big way over time. But the most important asset your students have is themselves.
You know, I will take a person graduating from college, and assuming they’re in normal shape and everything, I will be glad to pay them, you know, probably $50,000 for 10 percent of all their earnings for the rest of their lives. Well, I’m willing to pay them 10 percent for — $50,000 for 10 percent — that means they’re worth $500,000 if they haven’t got a dime in their pocket, as long as they’ve got a good mind and a good body.
Now that asset is far, far more important than any other asset they’ve got, unless they’ve been very lucky in terms of inheritance or something, but overwhelmingly their main asset is themselves. And they ought to treat their main asset as they would any other asset that was divorced from themselves. And if they do that, and they start thinking about it now, and they develop the habits that maintain and enhance the asset, you know, they will have a very good car, mind, and body when they get to be 60. And if they don’t, they’ll have a wreck.
(H/T: Jana’s post)
A periodic reminder about mistakes to self: Do not fear mistakes. Instead, if we must go down the path of fear, fear only –
i) the repetition of the same mistake because we didn’t learn from it and
ii) the absence of a creative, constructive, and corrective response to the mistake.
A Learning a Day 