We human beings should be famous for doing irrational things predictably. No, I am not joking.
Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, wrote a book about it. The take home message from his TED talk is that the only way to stop making some those mistakes is to be able to challenge our intuitions. The inherent difficulty in doing so cannot be overstated but that is exactly why we make those mistakes time and again without realising.
Most of us avoid doing what works, instead we rely on self-made plans which gives us pseudo-satisfaction of working. Looking at patterns of success, Cal Newport of Study Hacks concludes that
It’s significantly more pleasant to pursue a goal with a plan entirely of our own construction, than to use a plan based on a systematic study of what actually works. The former allows us to pseudo-strive, experiencing the fulfillment of busyness and complex planning while avoiding any of the uncomfortable, deliberate, often harsh difficulties that populate plans of the latter type.
Gladwell’s recommended 10,000 hours will not make people remarkable unless they put in deliberate efforts to become better.
Too often we try to hide ourselves behind big words that don’t mean much. It is unfortunate that we find it very hard to follow the simple advice: Say it as you see it.
Andreas Kluth of the Economist calls all this Orwellian gobbledygook because it was George Orwell who pointed out in his famous essay Politics and the English language that, “The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness”.
Kluth believes the two reasons we do this are:
1. Laziness: Speaking or writing clearly takes enormous effort.
2. Fear or cowardice: If you write clearly you use strong words which can offend somebody, and that is something you will not want to do.
Akshat Rathi 