incredibly fortunate to have a chairman on our board who brings so much clarity of thought to the business.
He's unemotional yet thoughtful. If he doesn't have an immediate answer for something, he instinctively understands how to search for the answer. He has a natural sense of the real priority of work and discussions.
So I asked him for some of his favourite brain hacks...simple tricks he uses when he has a mental challenge to overcome. A couple of his insights were very useful to me, so I thought I'd share them here and ask HN for their personal brain hacks in response.
Artificial deadlines
He has a clever technique for bringing tough choices to a conclusion and avoiding procrastination. This is especially useful for life changing decisions such as moving country or taking that new job.
To put an end to the decision making process he sets a deadline for the decision to be made. Say 6pm on Monday. At five minutes to 6 he usually doesn't know the answer but in those 5 minutes something clicks, and by 6pm the answer is always there.
10/10/10 rule
This is something I've read before but he applies this. The 10/10/10 is the framing of the outcome of a decision across three timeframes:
How will he feel about the outcome 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now?
The answers to these questions provide a different perspective and usually help him to find the correct answer without being misguided by circumstances at the time of making the decision.
This will all be over by 6pm
If there's an important meeting with stakeholders, a scary appointment with the doctor or a tough chat with an employee - he simply keeps in mind the fact that by "X time", the thing will have passed and won't matter anymore.
If it doesn't matter after X time, chances are it probably doesn't matter now.
1) Suspension of judgement (from Sextus Empiricus, Zhuang Zi, Ecclesiastes): avoid forming an opinion at all about things that are not evident. The way I do this is by thinking through an opposing argument or two, and using language like "it seems" or "it appears" rather than "I know", "I think", etc. This technique saves time and energy by helping me avoid getting wrapped up in opinion-based thinking and helps me develop equanimity.
2) Suspension of value-judgements (from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Zhuang Zi, Ecclesiastes): being aware and in control of the value-judgement loop (this thing is good or bad). I do this by shifting the language in my mind from "that is bad" to "I feel this way because..." Again, like #1, this is about inverting the locus of control in my cognitive discourse such that my mind can easily go its own way from there, only on a more productive path.
3) Awareness of the mode of thinking I'm in, and the kind of learning that's appropriate to the task or objective at hand (from Plato). There are several modes of thinking or learning (eikasia, pistis, dianoia, episteme, techne, phronesis, and noesis, for example). Simply being aware of which mode you should be in for a task is much more valuable than it might appear at first glance. I see these less as bins to put various kinds of thought in and more as tools to apply to a problem.
Understanding your current state of mind, and what state of mind would work better for the current task is important, so you can match those up, or at least understand more deeply. These are things like the appearance of things or imaginative situations (eikasia), good faith and trust or persuasiveness (pistis), discursive thought (dianoia), theoretical thought (techne), practical knowledge (phronesis), or intuition (noesis). [Note: my comments on the meanings of the Greek terms are probably wrong, but...] You could combine multiple of these to reach your goal; and you will often have a sequence of thoughts that are in different ones.
Initial reading
* eikasia -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eikasia
* pistis -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistis
* dianoia -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianoia
* episteme -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episteme
* techne -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techne
* phronesis -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudence (latin: prudence)
* noesis -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nous
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy_of_the_divided_line
The "smallest possible thing" hack is a great one. It also works great for exercise. If your goal for example is to work out every morning before work, instead of setting ambitious goals for what's going to happen tomorrow morning when the alarm rings at 6am, promise yourself the following: "I will physically get out of bed. I will put on my workout clothes. I will do five pushups. If I don't feel like doing anything else after that, I will go back to bed."
When you've gotten up, gotten changed and begun to move, the prospect of going on to do an actual workout becomes like 90% less unpleasant of an idea, compared to how you perceived it from the comfort of your warm soft bed.
