How to Change, Thinking Outside Your Brain and Good Billionaires
Three reflections from last couple of weeks of reading:
In the last couple of years several books have come out on the science of behaviour change, including Tiny Habits, Atomic Habits, The Power of Habits. Yet another one on the topic that came out recently is How to Change by Katy Milkman. I read the book recently and it made for an easy read. I was keenly searching for some new concepts that I could learn and apply. In that regard, the book didn’t really give me anything new. However, there were a few nuances that stood out. For instance, we know that cues are essential to trigger an action. These cues normally work better in family context than in single households simply because the cues could be tightly woven into your family dynamics. The other thing that stood out for me was the importance of context. Here Milkman cites a few studies which I found quite interesting. One involved rats who were given heroine in a familiar setting till their bodies adapted to the high doses of the drug. However, when the rats were moved to an unfamiliar setting and given the same amount of the drug then quite a few of them suffered a fatal incident due to the overdose suggesting that even our bodies familiarises to usual context. Yet another research cited in the book was about ‘elastic’ habits, wherein subjects who were okay with a little flexibility in their habit schedule (I will exercise once a day but anytime during the day) were far more successful with adhering to their habits than those who slotted their habits strictly (i will exercise everyday at 0700 before breakfast). Overall if you haven’t read any other books on habit and behaviour change, then this one could be a good start.
Annie Murphy Paul wrote a mind boggling essay in NYTimes titled ‘How to Think Outside Your Brain’. “The quantity and complexity of the mental work expected of successful students and professionals have mounted; we’ve responded by pushing ever harder on that lump of gray matter in our heads,” she writes in the prelude. However, many of us at times feel depleted and distracted and not able to perform our tasks. Annie writes that we have somehow been sold the idea that our brains are plastic and can absorb any amount of information and master any task. This is not so and the brain has firm limits. “In recent years, I.Q. scores have stopped rising or have even begun to drop in countries like Finland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France and Britain,” she cites as an example of our brain-limit levelling off. However, there is an alternative, which entails making the brain more like an orchestrator and less of a workhorse. We do so already by leveraging technology, for example to remember phone numbers. But even our bodies can be employed as an extension of our mind. This field is called ‘embodied cognition’ according to which ‘the body — its sensations, gestures and movements — plays an integral role in the thought processes that we usually locate above the neck’. Similarly, three dimensional spaces around us offer more opportunities for offloading mental work and is often employed to better understand complex topics, such as physics. It is difficult to summarise this mind-blowing essay in a single paragraph and I recommend that you read it in full.
Anand Giridharadas wrote this critical piece on Warren Buffet (and a bunch of other billionaires) who paid little or no taxes. It’s based on ProPublica’s reveal which put Buffet at the top of the list of billionaires who manipulated the tax systems. We see them as ‘Good Billionaires’. However, according to Giridharadas ‘The worst billionaires are the Good Billionaires. The sort who make it seem like the problem is the distortion of the system when, in fact, the problem is the system.’ It is because we look up to them and they often have a major say over public policies.
A quote that I recently came across:
The more disciplined your environment is, the less disciplined you need to be. Don’t swim upstream.
