Month: July 2016

Blind Spot Examples

Follow the instructions for the first image. Note: because your display might render these smaller/larger than mine, you will need to adjust how far your head is from the monitor. What I do is move my laptop/phone closer/further until the blindspot effect kicks in. Now, try the following as well and elephant should disappear at some distance, depending on which…

Eradicating Emotional Blindspots (PEAR)

Emotions are par for the course until you educate yourself and develop awareness. Take a simple example: when you’re tired you’re much more likely to get angry and yell at someone. But when is the last time you took this into consideration when you were in the middle of biting someone’s head off for a minor infraction? I’ve developed a…

Remove the irrationality

If you find yourself repeatedly incensed, take note and try to avoid similar situations in the future. This is sage advice and yet every day, on Facebook especially, people take turns berating each other. On Facebook, consider: – Avoid looking at your newsfeed if it’s filled with pointless controversy. – Hide people that have nothing of substance to say, the…

Solutionism

Have you everĀ felt excited at the prospect of a new idea? The urge to get started, right away? That’s what solutionism feels like. Solutionism happens when people don’t do due diligence to understand why they’re doing something before they start doing it. The tendency is to jump to solving a problem, before validating that it’s actually a problem. Or to…

Believe me, let it go

It’s easy on social media these days, Facebook especially, to encounter inflammatory content. How often do you read inane things in your news feed? How often do you react, filled with contempt? When you do react, chances are you just perpetuate content that will fall into the hands of yet another person that will be bothered. I just caught myself…

Fighting the urge to dig into the details

When you’re doing high-level reconnaissance–say as part of a learning as you go strategy to know what it is that at some point you need to know–it’s important not to get into the details. That may seem trivial but it’s not. How many times have you found yourself buried in details, when you only needed the big picture? I find…

How to make learning as you go predictable

If you want to know what you need to know, as I mentioned before it’s a good idea to take some time to get a high-level overview of a particular domain. As you’re discovering some of the high-level items that you want to later explore, you should take some time to use generative thinking to find a past situation where…

Knowing what you need to know

Learning as you go is a highly effective technique but you can run into substantial problems. If you never have time to take the time to learn, then if you leverage learning as you go it’s likely that you’ll take shortcuts. This can result in a rather duct tape laden approach, where you’re hacking something together to get the job…

Learning as you go

There are quite a few things in life that make sense to learn as you go, as opposed to learning everything upfront. For example, if you’re learning a new word processing tool like Microsoft Word you could take a class that covers the features of Microsoft Word but It’s very likely that you’re just going to forget about all those…

Technology will never solve weight loss

Smart Plate is yet another company building technological solutions to a problem that technology can’t solve. The menu at McDonald’s has the calorie count and yet we still have a country full of obese people. It’s not knowledge of food composition that’s the problem. Eating well is about motivation, not a lack of technology and not a lack of knowledge.…