Personal growth and development Archives

How to Improve Your Decision Skills

When faced with a tough decision, calculate the expected value of each of the options, approximate dollar value and feelings with utils.

Today I am going to discuss the art of making a good decision. Especially when you need to consider alternatives which have both monetary and non-monetary impact. Just like last week, this article is inspired by the book “How Not to Be Wrong” by Jordan Ellenberg (link to Goodreads).

When my spouse and I need to travel back to Europe, we have same debate – how early we should be at the airport so that we don’t miss our flight. When flying there, I am always rooting for getting there as late as possible. And she wants us to be at the airport four hours before the flight. When we are flying back, our roles flip. What can I say … too many relatives, too many responsibilities, less relax time.

But how can you decide? Is there a mental model for solving this situation?

Cooking is the New Meditation

Cooking can be a wonderful way to meditate after work. You detach from your work mind and spend a few mindful minutes following very specific instructions.

So far in my life, I have always considered cooking as the activity of making food more edible. I am a functional eater which, for me, means that I see eating as a function (to keep you alive), not as must as an art.

Meditation, however, is an art. You start with baby steps as you learn how to concentrate on one thing at a time. Then, you learn how to concentrate on a particular thing at a time. And finally, you learn how to concentrate on nothing.

I’ve tried different, conventional meditation practices (standing in lotus pose, lying, sitting on a couch). And, I’ve also tried some unconventional ones: walking meditation, guided meditation. Finally, after so many years of rejection, I tried cooking as a meditation. It is amazing with the side effect that you are also producing something tangible at the end. It feels almost like a guided meditation (somebody, in my case a cookbook, is telling me what to do). But also, as I said there is the added concentration from the fact that you are actually in charge of preparing a meal for the whole family.

Care More About Less

Caring is our greatest trait, but modern life exploits it with news, gossip, problems, and clever product placement. This article teaches you how to care more about less, by reviewing and evaluating the important parts of your life where you want to spend your Care tokens.

Humans are caring animals. Most of you will stop and take care of a person who has fallen, or a bird that is trapped, or a puppy that is lost. Care has turned humans from groups of animals into societies. It has given us the power to unite (and separate), to achieve great things (and suffer huge failures). The modern life exploits this trait of ours, to force us into brand-loyalty, consumerism. This also causes more stress in our lives and generally makes us unhappy.

The answer, however, is not only to care less, it is to care more … about less. Review the things in your life you care about and rank and evaluate them. Imagine that you only have 6 care tokens a day. Do you want to spend them on Prince X and Princess M’s wedding news? On the turmoil in Country Z? Or on your family and kids?

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Personal Strengths Evaluation – the Rocket Model

Explains how you can evaluate your personal strengths based on the Myers-Briggs Model. Defines the Rocket Model for personal strengths evaluation.

Personal strengths evaluation is the next step after identifying your personal strengths (more info here) – you need to understand how they interact with each other and what is their place in your personality. Each of your skills has its exact place and it is just one piece of the puzzle. And last but not least, the same skills in different combinations most often lead to different results.

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Learning from the best

Learning from the best is a re-post of Mark Zuckerberg’s post on Facebook about building his own Jarvis (an AI assistant) as a challenge for 2016. I provide a brief commentary on the text and, most importantly, I answer the question why do I share it.

Learning is a continuous process that will not end for you in your entire life. There are so many forms of learning that I will not bother listing even a few of them. The main take-away from my post (hopefully) would be: learn from any opportunity life offer you!

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