Group items tagged

Luck Isn’t Random. It’s A Skill.

people who tend to be more lucky have a much more open stance to their world. They interact with people at gatherings or parties who are different from them. They’re just more open to different types of people, and unlucky people tend to just stick to their very own type, people who are of similar backgrounds, similar educational backgrounds, etc.

“I’m going to try this for a few weeks and I’m going to see where it gets me. Then I’m going to check in again and I’m going to measure the progress. I’m going to take stock and I’m going to make a decision then about whether to keep going in that direction or to shift.”

The willingness to spend 5 to 10% of your time doing experiments will, over the long run, really open up that part of you that can be more creative and entrepreneurial, and yield, hopefully, some new opportunities that you hadn’t thought of before trying something.

“Yes. That looks good and what if we did this,” instead of saying, “I don’t like that idea,” and just throwing it out completely.

you take the good elements and then you make them better and you constantly do this until you get to perfection.

The term for these people is “experimental innovators” – those who learn from each little mistake and piece together what ends up being something great, whether it’s a comedy act or a building or a piece of music. It just doesn’t come without lots of setback and toil.

A durable product may require investigation of disposal options, which delays action.

With this, good intentions fade, resulting in recyclables that are tossed into the trash or hoarded for lengthy amounts of time. 

he perceived value of a product can determine many aspects of its lifecycle, from how long it is kept to how it is disposed.  Not surprisingly, more expensive products are perceived as “more valuable” and less disposable, even at the end of their usable life.

the tax frame affected the outcome

I think there’s an attractive version of the carbon tax if somebody thought about its design,”

The crucial question, at least to her, is whether (and when) we want to use the tools of decision science to try and steer people toward better choices. If our preferences aren’t fixed the way we think they are — if, as Weber has argued, they’re sometimes merely constructed on the spot in response to a choice we face — why not try new methods (ordering options, choosing strategic words, creating group effects and so forth) to elicit preferences aligned with our long-term interest? That has to be better, in Weber’s opinion, than having people blunder unconsciously into an environmental catastrophe.

“Let’s start with the fact that climate change is anthropogenic,” Weber told me one morning in her Columbia office. “More or less, people have agreed on that. That means it’s caused by human behavior. That’s not to say that engineering solutions aren’t important. But if it’s caused by human behavior, then the solution probably also lies in changing human behavior.”

we have a “finite pool of worry,”

which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem — a plunging stock market, a personal emergency — comes along. We simply move one fear into the worry bin and one fear out. And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.”

Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.