⚒️ Toolbox #7: Jeff Bezos's Decision Razor, Accelerated Thinking and Story Dropboxing

🛠️ Welcome to the Weekly Toolbox. Our most practical resources, tools and strategies so you can level up each week in minutes.

1. How Could I Have Thought of That Faster? | Eliezer Yudkowsky

Yudkowsy is one of the old guards of AI research and the founder of a blog we love called Less Wrong. This is a fascinating exchange of his learning process and how to “think faster”.

This is simply a form of deliberate thinking practice. An After Action Review, if you will, of your own cognitive processes. Upon any idea, decision, solution or Eureka moment, always ask yourself: How could I have gotten there quicker?

Read this for a great scaffold for tuning your cognitive strategies as well.

2. The Simplest Good-Day Formula | James Clear

Many of us have a tendency to overcomplicate, over-plan, over-optimise. This formula is such a great baseline for improving the quality of your day by ensuring you accomplish two day satisfaction pillars before lunch.

Simple habits like this are often best, because simple habits often get done. James Clear knows - he wrote the book on (Atomic) habits.

3. Tools to Fight Your Self-Deception | BrainTools #77

Richard Feynman once said: “The first rule is that you must not fool yourself. But you are the easiest to fool.”

We lie everyday. Research from Dr Bella DePaulo a psychologist at the University of Virginia found that we lie in approximately a fifth of our social exchanges, if they last more than 10 minutes. Whack.

So we need tools to keep our self-deception in check, which we cover in this episode.

• Tool 1: Catch Your Lies

• Tool 2: Lie Diaries

• Tool 3: Prime Anti-Lying

• Tool 4: Coach Your Dissonance

Listen on Apple or Spotify.

🤔 Brain Riddle

A woman shoots her husband. Then she holds him under water for over 5 minutes. Finally, she hangs him. But 5 minutes later they both go out together and enjoy a wonderful dinner together. How can this be?

Find the answer at the bottom of the newsletter!

☕️ Story Dropboxing

Ever feel like you don’t have enough great stories to share?

Stories have transcendent neural impact, allowing us to connect and engage on a deeper level than almost any other form of communication. But often we find ourselves stuck without a good story to share.

Here’s a BrainTool to help you build your mental story bank so you can be story-ready at any moment.

Implementation

Every time you experience a story worth sharing, ‘dropbox’ it:

1. Share the story, to mentally “dropbox” it, with minimum 3 people. Immediately if possible, or at least within the week.

2. Once you’ve shared it, write down the story in a notes doc on your phone

3. Share it again after you’re written it down

By sharing the stories that happen to you, you’re reinforcing the memory, re-encoding it from declarative (time-dependent, decaying) → semantic memory (retrievable any time). Making it much easier to recall.

By writing them down you’re also building a digital story bank that you can source from to make a presentation, give a speech or share a laugh.

‘Great stories happen to people who share them” - Dr Moran Cerf

Further Reading

• Do You Know the Real Power of Your Brain - Dr Moran Cerf

🚪 Decision Reversibility

If you’re human, you likely procrastinate on making decisions. Even if they are the teeny tiniest not-so-important ones. Hello, ordering dinner online. 

Here’s a thinking tool we can borrow from Jeff Bezos, to close the thinking-to-commitment gap. In his 1997 Amazon Shareholder letter, he recounts his decision to start Amazon. 

Each possible future was a shade of the following:

1. If it fails, then I’m rich for the experience. 

2. If it succeeds, I could make a fortune. 

Bezos, of course, understood the difference between reversible and irreversible decisions!

Implementation

1. When faced with any decision, big or small, always ask yourself what type of decision am I making?

2. Then ask: Is it reversible or irreversible? Be guided by your intuition.

   • Reversible decisions are two-way doors. You can go in and out. You can test and experiment. The consequences are low-stakes e.g. choosing what to eat.

   • Irreversible decisions are a one-way door. Once you enter, there’s no going back. Be more deliberate, analytical and data-driven is preferable to respect the high-stakes consequences e.g. choosing where to live.

3. Now you have the ammunition to…decide!

   • If the decision is reversible, your aim is to fail fast. Don’t think in days, but minutes and hours. Get moving and avoid analysis paralysis. You can always pivot.

   • If the decision is irreversible, then get multiple perspectives, seek the data and think through the second-order consequences.

This is the ultimate decision-making hack. It will help you make the most decisions per unit time. And the person who makes the most decisions per unit time, learns the most. They move with velocity, not just speed. Fast, but in the right direction. 

In the word of General George Patton: “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”

Research & Further Reading

• Amazon’s Original 1997 Letter to Shareholders