The Reality of Irrationality

Over the past couple of years, I read a lot of books regarding how humans think and their irrationality. Some of them are: Predictably Irrational, Influence, Thinking Fast and Slow and Factfulness. All of these books are great. They show how we make decisions and why they’re often not rational at all. If you haven’t read any of them, I highly recommend to add it to your reading list.

The original school of economics thought stated that humans are “rational agents”. It means that they make decisions after analytically and rationally thinking about all the possibilities. This sounds reasonable until you realise that it isn’t. 

We as humans have so many things going around us all the time that we cannot possibly spend the time thinking about every little detail. Imagine what would happen if we started pondering about how to pick up a fork, lift a mug, place our leg when walking, etc.

We usually have unconscious rules of thumb about what decisions to make. This comes from ancient times, where we needed to react quickly to survive. Nowadays, we like to think of ourselves as rational (as that’s what’s perceived as valuable in the economy today), but in reality, that’s just not the case. 

The books mentioned at the beginning of this post dive deep about our heuristics (“rules of thumb”) and biases. They’re showing us how efficient (but irrational) our brains actually are. We make choices, which require the least mental effort but, not necessarily the most rational ones.

Thinking Fast and Slow is almost like a textbook that talks about all of our biases. I highly recommend starting with this specific book if you want to dive deeper and get the foundations. If you want an easier read, that will completely change your worldview – consider Factfulness.

If I were to tell you one reason why you should read these books, it’s this: you’ll understand why we don’t make the best decisions.

The Benefits of Journaling

I’m a bit of a productivity freak. I spent quite a bit of my time measuring how well did I complete my tasks, how long it takes me to complete them, etc. I’m always keen to learn how I can do something better. 

Initially, I thought that everyone’s like that. Everyone wants to do everything as efficiently as possible, right? As it turns out, that’s not the case. I’ve learned that a lot of people simply don’t care. They just want to get through their tasks without spending too much thought and effort on it. Talking about work, Gallup found that 87% of people are not engaged. This just shows that people are not invested in trying to do their best work.

I’ve developed my own technique that helps me get through every week feeling that I’ve done something. Here’s a quick breakdown of my journaling process. 

Every Sunday evening I sit down for about an hour and write my journal. I write down how the week went, what specific events happened, were there any hardships, etc. It’s a bit like therapy – you write down important thoughts and events that happened. It allows you to think more clearly as you let these things out of your chest. I find it immensely helpful to write out my emotions. Almost as soon as I do, they lose their power over me. 

After the reflection, I write down the goals for the week. They may be something as simple as calling someone or as difficult as a full day of focused work on a topic (e.g. completing a part of machine learning project). It can be any goal that needs to be completed within the week. I prioritise what’s the most important thing for me to do and not what someone else demands me to do. It’s a subtle difference, but I find it incredibly important.

Throughout the week as I complete these tasks, I get the mental satisfaction of being able to cross them off. It really makes my life much more enjoyable. Journaling removes a lot of the stress from my life and helps me do my work in a focused way. If I ever don’t know what to do, I can just open my notebook and check what’s the most important thing to do this week.

At the end of each week, I’ll review how well I’ve done, reflect on it and make new goals. I dubbed it “Reflection Sunday” and I highly encourage you to try it out. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now. It takes just an hour and I can say with confidence that it’s one of the better habits that I’ve taken on. 

As a cherry on top you’ll realise that you now have a summary of your year in weekly chunks. You’ve started writing down your life story. 

How to Learn a New Skill in 20 Hours

Learning new skills is actually not that difficult. You just have to persevere for 20 hours and you’ll have the basic level of the skill. This sounds borderline absurd, right? It’s true though. I’m sure that you can remember moments from your life where you magically learn a new skill on the fly.


If you want to get the basics of something, 20 hours of focused attention is often enough. Let’s take the example of a Ukulele. If you start learning all the possible chords, progressions, strumming patterns, well… Then it’s definitely tough. But, if you start with just a subset, let’s say 4 chords and 2 strumming patterns. That way you can learn to play them very well in a short period of time. With these 4 chords alone, you can play up to 100 songs, they just have a different arrangement. 


This is also true in languages. I’ve spent 20 hours over a week on Lingvist app (was procrastinating from my exams) learning French. Just from that, I could understand big chunks of it, had a vocabulary of over 500 words. Tim Ferriss is also a big promoter of quick, basic learning. In his article, he showcases how to learn the basic grammar rules of a language in 1 hour. I agree, though, that to be a world-class master of a certain skill you should spend about 10,000 hours in deliberate practice and there’s no magic bullet.


The concept of learning quickly is not to start learning anything but to try and structure it in a way, where you master the fundamentals first. The skill of learning the fundamentals requires some dissection before starting. However, that extra hour of planning can save you hundreds of hours down the road. 


Here’s a reference video of a Ted talk about this topic.

A Quick Glance at Gamification

When working on a project, I was forced to dive a bit deeper into gamification. Initially I thought it’s just adding some points and badges, but in reality it’s much more complex and there are many more parts to it. 


The purpose of gamification is to help you get motivated to complete tasks in life that you don’t always find particularly enjoyable. It may be doing your laundry, learning a language or simply filling out a couple of spreadsheets. The applications are almost endless. 


I’m going to base this discussion based on the Octalysis framework by Yu-Kai Chou. He’s one of the first people to engage in gamification and his explanations really hit the mark for me.


According to the framework there are 8 core drives of gamification – Meaning, Accomplishment, Empowerment, Ownership, Social Influence, Scarcity, Unpredictability and Avoidance. What I find really interesting that there are black-hat and white-hat methods. The black-hat focus on negative emotions, feelings such as Scarcity, Unpredictability and Avoidance. While white-hat focus on positive, feel good goals such as Meaning, Accomplishment and Empowerment. 


The problem with this is that it’s very easy to apply the black-hat methods and they’re highly effective. In the wild, online, in sales, in marketing you can see lots of examples where people try to exploit these techniques. They can make you get things you may not necessarily need. Or play on your emotions so that you keep on doing tasks that are not in your best interest.


On the other hand, it’s harder to create white-hat methods. It takes a lot of thought, insight and experimentation to find something that people would find Meaningful, Empowering and Accomplishing. That’s exactly what the best games offer, fulfilling your intrinsic motivations and making you feel good playing it. 


With this minuscule look at gamification I wanted to share that it’s much more complex than just points, badges and streaks. Even though that’s the first thing I think about when I hear the word. 


It’s also clear that gamification can be used for both good and bad. You personally have to choose which side you cheer on. I guess, as always, it comes down to providing the value by undertaking ethical choices and design. Making the society better as a whole. 

4 Simple Ways to Improve Your Focus

Throughout our lives we go through many phases. Initially we just have fun and don’t worry about anything, but as we grow up we have to learn to follow rules and focus on particular tasks. Life makes us learn the skill of concentration and deep focus. That’s what school is for, right? 

Having just read the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport I’m convinced that everyone can accomplish more in less time (in comparison to what they currently do). The key is the ability to concentrate on a specific problem you’re trying to solve, or something you’re trying to learn “deeply”. By this word I mean having no distractions around you, no notifications, no peers telling you to do things. It’s just you and your work.

I have my own ways to stay concentrated and here are a couple that I hope you’ll find useful: 

  1. Use the “Self Control” app on mac. It blocks all the websites that I think are distracting (Reddit, Facebook, Messenger, BBC, etc). 
  2. Put your phone either into airplane mode or turn off wifi & data for a longer period. I personally don’t use airplane mode, so that if there’s an emergency, people can still call me. Alternatively just put the phone in a different room. It’s surprising how effective it is. 
  3. Tidy your desk. I find that when I’m working on my laptop and there are no distractions around it, there’s nothing to distract me.
  4. If possible, have a specific place just for working. That means no video watching at that table, no social media while I’m sitting there, just the task at hand. That way you can associate the place with the state of “deep work”. That’s one of the reasons why I think co-working is a much better working environment for me than just staying at home. Because I live in a flat and so I tend to reuse the same space for leisure and work, which is not ideal. 

These tips are all very simple and anyone can implement them. By using just #1 and #2 I think that I almost doubled my productivity. It’s really just about making it as easy as possible to concentrate and as hard as possible to get distracted. 

7 Tips to Become a Better Learner

This is obvious to many, but I found it personally difficult to perceive that people learn in different ways – some take less time, some take more for exactly the same task. I do believe that genetics and the environment you grew up in affects the way you learn, however there are some tips and tricks that I use that, in my opinion, can help any learning experience. 
Here are a couple of tips to improve your learning effectiveness:

  1. Revise it within 24. After you’ve learned something, be it vocabulary of a new language, a new concept, or a new technique – make sure that you either revise it or practice it in the next 24 hours. I find that this way the information doesn’t disappear from my short-term memory straight away, and sticks much longer. Afterwards, do the same thing in a week, and then in a month. That way it should be etched into your long term memory, not just the short-term. 
  2. Associate it with something. It’s much easier to retain new information if you can associate it with something you already know. For example if I wanted to learn about the Vietnam War, it’ll be much easier if I already knew some information about Vietnam, e.g. some of their cities, what kind of food there is, roughly even how it looks. The new facts become more relatable and easier to remember, it’s easier to join them together. 
  3. Learn the basics and the fundamentals first. This is just my personal opinion, but once you know the fundamentals of the field, sticking and adding pieces to it becomes much easier. It is much easier to build upon a solid foundation as the pieces just “fit” together, in comparison to disjointed blocks of information, that don’t really have a link. This is especially true in complicated skills/concepts. In my case, I definitely found it useful when learning machine learning. Without the fundamentals, just applying the algorithms I would’ve been lost. 
  4. Make it practical. The best way to master a new skill is to try it in practice. I’ve made the mistake numerous time where I thought that if I just read something I knew it. Now whenever I read something of value, I try to apply as soon as possible. I cannot overestimate how much of an impact it had on my abilities.
  5. Change your perspective and make it interesting. I find it obvious that something that’s interesting is much easier to learn and master. I’ve personally been blessed (or cursed, I’m not sure yet) that I find almost everything interesting. But because of that I realised that everyone can make it so. Even if you’re learning programming for example and in the beginning it’s soul crushing, as in reality nothing really works, you can change your perspective that if you make one little piece work a day – you’re a winner. Fuelled by these small wins it suddenly becomes interesting. Also, if you start asking yourself questions, “how does this work?”, “what would happen if I did this?” instantly it also becomes more interesting. 
  6. Allow yourself to fail. It’s not a secret that we can’t do everything right the first time. One of my favourite quotes about learning is: “If you want to be good at something, you have to be bad at it first”. When you learn, expect that in the beginning it’s going to be tough, you’re going to get things wrong and that’s ok! Enjoy the process of adding one extra bit to your knowledge and if it doesn’t come out as you expected, take a break and start again! 
  7. Take notes. However good your memory may be, notes help. Studies have shown (Journal of educational psychology) that hand-written notes help you remember better than if typed on a computer. Having said that, any notes are better than no notes, so start taking them! 

These are just a couple of tips that I use on a daily basis that (hopefully) make me a better learner. Apply some of them yourself and see where it takes you!

The World Is Not As Gloomy As You Think

The reason why travelling is amazing is because it gives you the ability to expand your worldview. It allows you to see your past preconceptions, see a different side of the world. When you travel to different countries you realise that people are much nicer than you initially thought. Strangers quickly become friends and all it takes to get started is just that initial leap out of your comfort zone.

Media portrays the world as this big, scary place where a lot of bad things happen. In reality these events are rather rare (although of course they happen), but the chance that they’ll happen to you is minimal. The human mind has a bias towards negative things (read more about this in a great book called “FACTFULNESS”). The thing that I’ve learned is to take news with a grain of salt, or if it’s not crucial, don’t look at them at all… Especially the free ones as their main motive is clicks (and not quality journalism). Shocking news catch our attention better than most things, which leads to more clicks, more ads seen, higher profit (note: not better news). There are so many things I could write about the news. Citing material from books such as Ryan Holiday’s “Trust me I’m Lying”, Nir Eyal “Hooked”, but that’s a story for another time. 


For me it’s quite clear that our view of the world is biased around our personal perception and travelling helps us remove that bias bit by bit. When we travel we start to understand how other people live, their culture, their traditions. This gives us the opportunity us to empathise with them and realise that we’re not that different after all. 


Traveling is the ultimate routine breaker. If you’re thinking where to spend your money, you’ll be surprised how much traveling will actually change your worldview and benefit your life.