How many thoughts can arise in a person's mind in a lifetime? Nobel laureate in physics Wilczek gave an answer in his book The Principle of Everything: 1 billion times. How many of the 1 billion flashes of inspiration will be put into action, we will not discuss it for the time being, and today we want to revisit the intermediate link from idea to action: decision-making.
Each of us is constantly faced with decisions large and small every day, some decisions can be decided by intuition and inertia, even if there is a mistake, the result is harmless, but some decisions are crucial and need to be decided carefully. As a complex organism mixed with rationality and sensibility, in the decision-making process, we are inevitably affected by some interfering factors, such as emotional aspects, comparisons, prejudices, experiences and so on. How to improve the correctness of decision-making, the following three kinds of thinking can give some reference answers.
Hun ball thinking
One of the big problems in decision-making is the emotional aspect. Many times we take into account the feelings of others and hesitate when we should act. But there is a category of people who are not affected by emotions at all, act firmly towards their goals, and even look a little muddy. In the early years, Buffett was a prime example. His child was in a car accident and went home to tell him about it, and he didn't lift his head, and he only remembered to get up the next day to see what was going on. The founder of the company he bought, who wanted to keep a small part of the stake as a family memorial, was also ruthlessly rejected by Buffett. There is also the side of the ball, and there is Google founder Larry Page. In 2001, despite the objections of other executives, he announced in front of more than 130 colleagues that he had fired all the project managers without any prior notice.
In order to better understand the sphere of thinking, we must first understand a very interesting mechanism inside the brain. Decades ago, cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga pondered the question: "If our brains had systems that work independently, did that mean that the brains had a unified consciousness?" Through long-term research, Gazzaniga finally discovered that the external information received by the brain is a discontinuous fragment, like a separate picture. So how is coherent consciousness formed? Gazzaniga's research points to a narrative system in the left side of the human brain, which he named the "interpreter."
The "interpreter" will make up the story, and the fragmented information will be composed into a logical story. It's like playing a picture in a row and turning it into a movie. But in the process, in order to make the story seem self-explanatory, it may also falsify the facts and impose non-existent causal connections. Therefore, the unified consciousness in the brain is a script that has been processed by the "interpreter" art. The vast majority of people are unconsciously dominated by this "interpreter." Our consciousness and sensations are actually "illusions" processed by the brain. Because of this, the smarter people tend to be, the more people who feel that they can understand the world, the easier it is to deceive themselves. However, people with a ball-like mindset do not succumb to the script arranged by the "interpreter".
The balls do not deceive themselves, do not care about things, dare to die, have no heart and no lungs. Thanks to these seemingly unreasonable shortcomings, they have a certain "super rationality". It can be said that the hunky ball thinking has the "innate immunity" of the brain. Specifically, "Hun Ball Thinking" includes the following 6 characteristics:
Not defending oneself right: Jobs is a typical example, he is notoriously capricious. At company meetings, Jobs often scolded others for their useless ideas. Even if he denies some ideas, if he later thinks that the idea is really good, he will still adopt it, and will never maintain his authority and correctness.
Don't care about what others say: Buffett, for example, he believes that the most important wealth of his investment career and the most important point of his personal qualities is the internal scorecard, that is, the score he gives himself. The corresponding external scorecard is a score given to you by the outside world. It's not that we don't need evaluation feedback, but we need to figure out which evaluation should be used as a criterion for self-challenge. Buffett believes that it is more important to listen to his own heart than to listen to the outside world.
Not subject to the emotional fluctuations of others: This is not to say that the hun ball children's own emotions do not fluctuate, but that the hun ball children are not easily affected by the emotional fluctuations of others, which is also a quality that good athletes must have. The famous Korean Go player Lee Chang-ho has a nickname called "Stone Buddha", which means that he has no expression when he plays chess. At a competition, the reporter took more than a hundred photos of Lee Chang-ho, washed them out, and when he looked at them, he was all an expression.
Unabashed cruelty and honesty: Extreme honesty is one of the most efficient forms of communication, albeit often cruel. Dalio felt why he wasted his time on these things, so he established a corporate culture of "extreme honesty and transparency" within bridgewater.
Don't empathize with their own encounters: Hun Qiu Er will hardly feel self-pity, which allows them to remain extremely optimistic in the face of difficulties. Elon Musk's SpaceX was relieved by a group of people at the bar after a rocket crash, and although Musk was also worried about his financial situation, he was very optimistic and set a new goal - to relaunch the rocket in 6 months.
Always search for great meaning: This is the biggest difference between a person with a ball of mind and a real ball of arms. As Emerson said, "For a man who is bent on moving toward a goal, the whole world will make way for him." Ashley Vance, the author of "Iron Man of Silicon Valley," once commented on Musk, which I think is a good portrayal of people with a ball of mind. He wrote:
Musk is a sentient and righteous man, he presents joy and sorrow in an epic way, and what he feels most deeply is his mission to change the fate of mankind. As a result, it is difficult for him to be aware of the strong emotions of others, so that his humane side will be covered up, making him appear cold and ruthless, and will not care about the thoughts and needs of individuals. But it is likely that only such people can turn the whimsy of space networks into reality.
Say goodbye to intergenerational trauma and start by understanding mom
In 2014, Elon Musk left a 5-minute sharing at the USC Business School's graduation speech, summarizing his thoughts on work and life into five main points, one of which talked about his decision-making style:
From the perspective of first principles, do not use analogies to argue, but infer through the most essential elements. This way you can tell what you should be doing and what is just following in someone else's footsteps. Of course it's hard, but it's the best way to do it.
This isn't the first time Musk has mentioned in public the framework of thought he highly recommends: first principles. In a previous interview with TED, Musk explained the concept more specifically, saying: "There is a good framework of thinking, that is a physics thing, a bit like first-principle reasoning, first-principles thinking is to look at the world from a physical point of view, and it is very important that we use first-principles thinking instead of comparative thinking to think about problems." In our daily lives, we tend to compare what others have already done or are doing, and we do it. The result of thinking about decisions in this way is that only small iterations can be produced. The first-principles way of thinking is to look at the world from a physical point of view, that is, to peel off the surface of things layer by layer, to see the essence inside, and then to go up from the essence layer by layer. This consumes a lot of brain power. ”
How does first principles play a role in practical decision-making? Taking Musk's vacuum capsule high-speed rail as an example, if you use comparative thinking or empirical thinking to design new train products, most people's ideas are to improve the existing functions to make the power stronger and the fluid mechanics better. However, if the first principles are used to analyze product demand, it is necessary to return to the essential purpose of the means of transport: to transport more goods from point A to point B, which is the purpose of the original manufacture of transportation tools such as trains, and it is not necessary to use traction to achieve upgrades. Under the support of the first principle, Musk proposed to use the model of magnetic levitation and low vacuum to create a vacuum capsule high-speed rail.
Musk also gave an example in the interview: During Tesla's development of electric vehicles, it encountered a problem: the cost of batteries remained high. At that time, the market price of energy storage batteries was $600 per kilowatt-hour, and the market price was very stable, and there would not be much change in the short term. But Musk thinks from a first-principles perspective: What material is the battery pack made of? What is the market price of these battery raw materials? How much does it cost if we buy these raw materials and combine them into batteries? The answer is that it only costs $80 per kWh. From the most essential point of view, study what materials the battery is composed of, and then calculate the price of these raw materials added together, so as to get the lowest price of the battery, through this way of thinking, Musk made the commercialization of electric vehicles possible. The starting point for most people to think about the problem is that the current situation of this matter is an established fact, and I can't change it, but Musk's idea is that if it works on a physical level, then I can do it.
From the perspective of physics to see the world, look at specific decisions, you can start from the essence of things, not bound by past experience, but also avoid excessive analogy with the same kind of things around you, you can see the essence of things through the heavy fog, this is Musk's decision-making logic. Looking at the world through the basic theories of physics, in addition to Musk, there is another scholar who is the Nobel Laureate in Physics that we mentioned at the beginning: Professor Wilczek.
Professor Wilczek wrote in his book "The Principles of Everything": From the middle of the 16th century to the present, in space, human exploration has expanded from the solar system to galaxies, nebulae and the entire universe; from Galileo's ball of several centimeters to elementary particles smaller than 10-15 meters. In terms of time, humans can both describe the evolution of the universe over 13 billion years and track the Higgs particle, which has a lifespan of only 10-22 seconds. Finally, mankind has discovered that the complex world is composed of only a few very simple elementary particles, operating according to a few basic physical laws, and these most basic laws not only explain the laws of the universe, but also reveal or remind us to look at the world and think about the basic laws that everything should follow.