I love books by geniuses, especially when those geniuses admit to being just as dumb as the rest of us.
The main point of this book is that we all do a lot of thinking we never know about, and that every single one of us is lazier than we know, let alone acknowledge. That’s both impressive and slightly depressing. It’s also inevitable.
According to the author, everyone has two separate systems in their head – one that is excellent at pattern-matching and intuitive judgment and one that actually stops to think. I think we all know that, at some level.
When you’re driving in traffic, you don’t have time to stop and calculate speed, angles, acceleration, deceleration, relative velocities, driver behavior, human nature, curves and dips in the road, and the lovely potholes all too prevalent in our modern roadways. We’d all be roadkill in minutes if we tried. Instead, we are very comfortable allowing our brains to say gas, brake, steer, or middle finger and we just follow along. Okay, maybe that last one is a little more conscious, unless you’re in DC traffic, then it’s automatic.
What we learn in this book, though, is that a lot more of what we consider conscious, well-considered, thoughtful decisions are driven as hard by the intuitive system as any moment in traffic. Our thinking brain is like the CEO, it’s not doing anything it can’t pass off to the rest of the team.
The list of biases, mental gymnastics, and logical fallacies we all ignore every day is exhausting, but not nearly as exhausting as life would be without them. Seriously, I’m tired just thinking about how much work my brain does for me without bothering me about it.
The point is, we can and should know what is going on with our brain, and there are some strategies to make sure we’re making truly conscious decisions about the things that matter. Just don’t expect me to stop offloading what I can when I can.
If I’m the CEO, and I’ve got a subordinate who WANTS to do all the day-to-day work? Sounds good to me. That leaves me more time to read and create. As long as I know how to recognize and break the unconscious patterns when they’re detrimental, I’m all for it.
This is a dense, but readable book, and the contents deserve a much more thorough inspection than I gave it. But in my defense, I was crafting while I listened to it. You know… priorities.
5 distracted but respectful stars
